ABSTRACT
International criminal justice Legislation to deal with crimes against humanity is often international in nature. In fact, criminal justice everywhere is increasingly affected by international law. While human rights can be traced back to the medieval English Magna Carta, the United Nations Charter of Human Rights formulated soon after World War II certainly was a turning point. It led to the setting up of a commission to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the 1990's a pressing need for so-called war-crimes tribunals was identified after almost 50 years of stagnation in the furtherance of international criminal law. The Tokyo Charter was drafted in Potsdam, near Berlin, in July 1945. It set out the constitution, jurisdiction and functions of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, or, in short, the Tokyo Tribunal. Both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) came into existence.
