A new readiness to question the traditional protections of “sovereignty” has also emerged in the context of international criminal law. Just as proponents of humanitarian intervention have been urging that political boundaries should become permeable to military force in cases of state failure or state–induced atrocity, so too a movement in international criminal law, in the past six decades, has sought to hold individuals who commit atrocities accountable to the world. “In the past six decades” is a misleading phrase if it suggests slow though steady progress, for that is not what happened at all. The (effective) origins of the movement may be traced, clearly, to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials at the end of the Second World War, when the victorious allies tried and punished individual political and military leaders. But after that no perceptible progress was made – during the whole period of the Cold War – until, in the 1990s, the United Nations Security Council established international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, and the drive to establish a standing International Criminal Court made unprecedentedly rapid headway. While that Court's future remains clouded, given the refusal of major powers to sign on to it, and given too, unresolved issues about the interface between law and politics, surely it is beyond doubt that it has a future, of some kind.