Crimes against humanity appeared for the first time in a treaty in the 1945 Nuremberg Charter at the end of the Second World War, albeit with a different definition than today. Since the 1990s, crimes against humanity have been codified in different international treaties such as the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1993), the Statute of the International Tribunal for Rwanda(1994) and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998). The Rome Statute provides the most recent and most expansive list of specific criminal acts that may constitute crimes against humanity. 

     Unlike other human rights violations, war crimes do not engage state responsibility but individual criminal responsibility. This means that individuals can be tried and found personally responsible for such crimes as murder, extermination, enslavement/deportation or forcible transfer of population, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, execution against an identifiable group, enforced disappearance of persons, the crime of apartheid, and other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health. Governments around the world often deny that crimes against humanity have occurred on their territory, thus ignoring the suffering of their people. Thousands of desperate victims are still struggling to get long-waited justice, reparation and recognition. 

     TRIAL International, a non-governmental organization, helps victims to get their voice heard by bringing their cases before domestic courts, as well as before regional and international human rights mechanism like the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights.The organization provides free legal support to victims, from the preparation and submission of their case, to the proceedings and the implementation of the decisions on the ground. TRIAL International fights   impunity   by filing criminal and compensation claims against perpetrators of crimes against humanity. These complaints are brought before international bodies, and before national courts thanks to the principle of universal jurisdiction. TRIAL also pushes national justice systems to investigate situations and prosecute the perpetrators of mass atrocities.

     Recently economists looked at the relationship between pupils’ month of birth and their schoolperformance. It was found that among fourth graders, the oldest children scored on math and readingsomewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children. That can beexplained as a “huge effect.” It means that if you take two intellectually    21      fourth graders with birthdaysat opposite ends of the cutoff date, the older student could score in the eightieth percentile,    22    theyounger one could score in the sixty-eighth percentile. That’s the difference between    23    for a giftedprogram or not. The economists said, “We do ability grouping early on in childhood. We have advancedreading groups and advanced math groups. So, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and firstgrade, the teachers are    24    maturity with ability. And they put the old kids in the advanced stream,where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better;and in the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again. The only country we don’tsee this going on is Denmark.” Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences byage have      25   . This is because they have a national policy where they have no ability grouping untilthe age of ten.