ABSTRACT
The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998 can be seen as the latest development in enforcing human rights, closely related to the third stage of the norm life cycle in which norms that have cascaded have become increasingly institutionalized. States’ sovereign right to exercise national juris diction over the most serious human rights abuses is challenged in favour of creating an international mechanism charged with enforcing universal justice norms. The primary focus of a number of states during the ICC’s creation process was on attempts to preserve state sovereignty as far as possible. This was refl ected in disagreements about the scope of the Court’s jurisdiction, its relationship to the UN, and the powers given to the Court’s prosecutor. Most of these issues can be linked back to matters discussed in preceding chapters, such as questions of universal jurisdiction and state immunity arising in the Pinochet and Yerodia cases and multilateral enforcement of universal values through international courts like the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
