L’humanité comme sujet du droit international: nouvelles réfléctions

Humankind as such has emerged as a subject of International Law, coexisting with other subjects without replacing them. The principle of humanity permeates the whole corpus juris of International Law. This has been acknowledged in the case-law of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, singling out the feeling of humaneness, evidenced even when humanity itself is victimized by international crimes. On their part, the Inter-American and European Courts of Human Rights have asserted in their case-law the fundamental principles of the dignity of the human person and of the inalienability of the rights inherent to her. When one comes to the expansion of international legal personality, one bears in mind humankind, encompassing all the members of the human species as a whole, comprising, in a temporal dimension, present as well as future generations. Humankind has already been marking presence in the more lucid international legal doctrine, in the ambit of the new jus gentiumof our times.