International Law and Individual Rights Essay

The world-wide law has been undergoing some evolutions since early and mid 19th century. The original external law laid a lot of emphasis on fair the state as the custodian of unmarried rights of its citizens. (L. Oppenheim, 1912. )However, the law deemed inadequate to manage individual rights, thus, following some developments, the law has undergone some transformations, which are aimed at promoting individual rights, regardless of their country, state, race, gender or religion.The briny developments which have triggered these evolutions of the global law include the final solution, the Second World War and the establishment of foreign criminal courts mainly to try the perpetrators of modern genocides like the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda The Holocaust was a form of genocide, in which Germ any, lead by Adolf Hitler, undertook the extermination of roofless Jews in Ger some(prenominal) in which 6 million Jews were killed.Nazi Germany planned and use the Holocaust because of th e domestic jurisdiction principle of the then international law, which prevented any other state from interfering when Hitler undertook the persecution of the Jews. This made the Geneva Convention which came into existence between 1864 and 1949 as a result of efforts by Henry Dunant, have that the law needed radical changes to enable the international connection to throw in in domestic matters of a nation especi whollyy those linked to individual rights (Buergenthal, T. 978 and 1997) The need for still changes to the status of individuals under international law went a notch higher after the Second World War, in which many people lost their lives due to the state of anarchy which prevailed then.In 1941, chairwoman Franklin Roosevelt in his freedom speech called for a world order in which the world could be founded upon four freedoms namely freedom of speech and expression, transnational Law and Individual Rights 4 reedom of worship in any way, freedom from want and freedom fr om fear. This was followed by the formation of the United Nations in 1949, whose main concern, among others was to address the International law, so as to empower the international community to address large scale violations of individual rights. The international law was further to evolve with the establishment of international criminal courts mainly to try the perpetrators of recent genocides like the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda which took place in mid 1990s.A accordance to create the new international criminal court was formed in 2002, while the international criminal court was formally constituted in 2003, about six decades after the Nuremberg trials (R. K. Woetzel 1962) and the Holocaust. The main objective of this court is to visualize that nations revise their human rights aspects in their constitutions and more importantly, prosecute the leaders who supervise the violation of human rights. It can be seen that international law has undergone all these evolutions, which a re all inclined towards protecting the rights of the individual, not just the nation.