The book explains the most significant cases and jurisprudence emerging from the 32-year record of the judicial institutions highlighted in the book. It engages the readers with the human stories behind the legal rulings so that the context and drama are properly introduced and understood. We will describe the principles of international law emerging from and being strengthened by the jurisprudence of tribunal judges. These include: the legal authority of the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, and regional organizations like the European Union and the Council of Europe to create ad hoc or hybrid war crimes tribunals; greater precision and context in defining each category and listing of atrocity crimes, including the full range of genocide and torture and when either crime encompasses rape, the range of situations that constitute genocide and crimes against humanity, forced marriage as a crime against humanity, torture as a jus cogens principle, hate speech as persecution, and enslavement; elaborating modalities of individual criminal responsibility about command responsibility, aiding and abetting, and co-perpetration or joint criminal enterprise; developing new principles regulating non-international armed conflicts and the status of non-state groups under international law; establishing clearer intent (mens rea) requirements for crimes against humanity and genocide; applying judicial notice to confirm the obvious reality that atrocity crimes on a massive scale occurred in a particular situation; establishing a broad range of human rights protections and the responsibility of states to ensure their enforcement.

This book tells the story of pathbreaking developments in select cases litigated before the International Court of Justice, five special purpose atrocity crimes tribunals, the International Criminal Court, and the European, Inter-American and African human rights courts, as well as what to anticipate with the newly-created Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. The protection of human rights as an obligation of national governments is reflected in major cases of the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights.

Mark Ellis is Executive Director of the International Bar Association (IBA) and leads the foremost international organization of bar associations, law firms, and individual lawyers. He is a Fellow of King’s College.

Prior to joining the IBA, he spent ten years as the first Executive Director of the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI), a project of the American Bar Association (ABA). Providing technical legal assistance to twenty-eight countries in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union and to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, CEELI remains one of the most extensive international pro bono legal assistance projects ever undertaken by the US legal community.

Ellis served as Legal Advisor to the Kosovo Commission, chaired by Justice Richard J. Goldstone, and was appointed by the OSCE to advise on the creation of Serbia’s War Crimes Tribunal. Dr Ellis worked alongside the ICTY, the Iraqi High Tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and presently with the International Criminal Court.

David J. Scheffer is Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), with a focus on international law and international criminal justice. Scheffer was the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law (2006-2020) and is Director Emeritus of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is Professor of Practice at Arizona State University (Washington offices). He was Vice-President of the American Society of International Law (2020-2022) and held the International Francqui Professorship at KU Leuven in Belgium in 2022. From 2012 to 2018 he was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Expert on UN Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials, and he was the Tom A. Bernstein Genocide Prevention Fellow working with the Ferencz International Justice Initiative at the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (2019-2021).

During the second term of the Clinton Administration (1997-2001), Scheffer was the first ever U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues and led the U.S. delegation to the UN talks establishing the International Criminal Court. He negotiated the creation of five war crimes tribunals: the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and the International Criminal Court.  

Scheffer and Ellis co-authored The UN Charter: Five Pillars for Humankind (Springer 2025).

king Group (1998-2001).