What are the origins of international criminal law?
International criminal law grows directly out of international humanitarian law, the laws of war. It was international humanitarian law that was ostensibly being enforced at Nuremberg and that forms the basis for most of the substantive crimes that are prosecuted in the current international criminal tribunals. There are three other distinct fields of law that have had an influence on current international criminal law—international human rights law, domestic criminal law, and the transitional justice movement. The easiest influence to explain is domestic criminal law. These are criminal courts, so they borrow heavily from domestic criminal legal systems. The outlook of criminal law in most domestic legal systems, particularly in liberal democratic nations, is concerned with the rights of the defendant. Under international human rights law defendants have the right to a presumption of innocence, the right to have their guilt proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and the right to present th
