These were the words addressed by the chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson to the International Military Tribunal at the opening of the trial of the major war criminals on 21 November 1945 in Nuremberg. Those words remind us that it is the task of every international criminal tribunal to uphold fundamental principles of criminal justice in order to preserve the integrity of the system of international criminal justice and not to sacrifice these principles to obey a “cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war”.2 When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) took up its work in the 1990s, it was faced with the problem that the development of international criminal law had virtually stood still since the post-World War II criminal convictions. Indeed, by setting up the ICTY, the UN Security Council (SC) ended a 60-year period of drought in which no international tribunal existed that could enforce international criminal law. Only occasionally were domestic cases held that reminded us that international criminal law even existed.