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CHAPTER ONE GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1.1    Background of the Study The first forty years after the Nuremberg Trial was a period of slow progress in developing international criminal law. There is no doubt that international criminal law has developed as a distinct field of study in recent years. Indeed if international criminal law is defined as the prosecution of individuals for ‘international crimes’ such as war crimes or Crimes Against Humanity then there was no such law for most of the twentieth century. On the eve of the twentieth century attempts to regulate warfare in The Hague Conference of 1899, and again in 1907, were constrained by notions of State sovereignty. As the Nuremberg judges pointed out the following in 1946, ‘The Hague Convention nowhere designates such practices (methods of waging war) as criminal, nor is any sentence prescribed, nor any mention made of a court to try and punish offenders.’ The Nuremberg trials established that all of humanity would be guarded by an

CHAPTER ONE GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1..0.0:INTRODUCTION Elections have become the most acceptable process of changing leadership in any given political system in the present day. The Black’s law dictionary defines election as the process of selecting a person to occupy a position or office, usually a public office. Another definition is the one which defines election as the act of selecting someone or something; the exercise of deliberate choice. Election is the cornerstone of democracy and it is essentially a contest for the votes of adult members of the society by aspirants to political office. It is worthy of note however that the concept of elections is quite recent in the history of man as it can be traced to the emergence of democratic government. Professor W. Phillips in his book, power and choice; an introduction to political science said: 'In the long swing of the history , elections with broad mass participation are rather new. Such elections originated with democratic gover