comment No. 29 on derogations from the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights during a state of emergency.223 International criminal law International criminal law is also relevant to human rights and counter-terrorism.224 The emergence of international criminal law can be seen as a melding of principles of human rights law and the laws of war, or international humanitarian law, with some specific sources of its own, including from national law. By applying a serious criminal sanction on the individual, international criminal law targets the civilian or military leaders who ignore their states’ international legal obligations, including in relation to both laws of war and norms of international human rights law, such as the prohibitions on torture or genocide. International criminal law may also cover officials who use their power to abuse individuals. The development of international human rights law has played a key role in the emergence of international criminal law, in that human rights treaties place an obligation on states to suppress violations and provide a remedy to victims. In many cases this will mean an obligation to prosecute those responsible for acts at the national level, for example in relation to torture, hostage-taking and genocide. It also has led to the establishment — by the United Nations Security Council — of ad hoc international criminal tribunals to address criminal acts occurring in the territory of the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. In many respects, the substantive norms of international criminal law have now been “codified” in the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was adopted in 1998.225 The ICC Statute establishes a permanent international court, which has criminal jurisdiction over four categories of crimes: • • • • genocide; crimes against humanity; war crimes; and the crime of aggression.226 223 Report of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Chairperson-Rapporteur: Leïla Zerroügui, doc. E/ CN.4/2004/3, 15 December 2003, para. 60. 224 The notion of international criminal law, as it is now understood, developed from the war crimes tribunals after the Second World War and particularly the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. This was adopted as binding international law by resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1946. The Nuremburg Charter established definitively the personal criminal responsibility of both military and political leaders for violations of the laws of war and for gross abuses designated as crimes against humanity. The grave breaches provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions further defined those acts which attracted personal criminal liability. 225 The Rome Statute was adopted on July 1998 at the United Nations Diplomatic Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court. It is available at http://www.un.org/law/icc/index.html. 226 The definition of the latter has not been agreed and therefore as yet, the crime of aggression under the ICC has not entered into force. Countering Terrorism, Protecting Human Rights 91