The United Nations was not directly involved in the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals. While the founders of the United Nations were meeting in San Francisco, in June 1945, another conference was underway in London, leading to the establishment of the International Military Tribunal. Nor was there any United Nations participation in the subsequent proceedings organised by the occupation forces, or in the corresponding international court established in Tokyo. Not that the United Nations was ever hostile to the idea of international criminal justice. At the first session of the General Assembly, which was held in the weeks following the Nuremberg judgment, a resolution was adopted affirming the principles established in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal. For a few years, the United Nations encouraged the development of an international criminal court through a treaty, a measure called for in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In 1954, it suspended work on the project for more than three decades. The United Nations always viewed the role of an international criminal court as standing outside the organisation as such, rather than as an organ within its own structure, as is the case with the International Court of Justice.

Then, within a few weeks, in early 1993, as war raged in Europe for the first time since 1945, a proposal that the Security Council create an ad hoc international criminal tribunal gained inexorable momentum.