Internationally Recognized Human Rights Before the International Criminal Court

The sources of applicable law constitute a nuclear aspect of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) judicial system since they define its working tools and their usage method. Such sources, enshrined in article 21 of the Rome Statute (RS), comprise a hierarchy of internal and external sources, the jurisprudence of the ICC, and internationally recognized human rights. The purpose of this essay is to study several of the questions raised by internationally recognized human rights as a source of law applicable by the icc from basic concepts such as "what should be understood by `internationally recognized' human rights?" and "which are those rights?" to the most complex problems, derived from the nature of these rights as the apex of the normative hierarchy of the ICC, and the legitimacy of the latter to protect them in case of conflict with the RS. To do this, the reference considered were the principal doctrinal and jurisprudential contributions that have tried to answer the content, scope, and implications of the role that internationally recognized human rights play before the ICC.