The Unbroken Chain - How the Jackson Principles Are Woven into the ECHR and the CRC, and Why No System Can Ignore Them

This paper traces the unbroken chain of individual accountability from the Nuremberg Tribunal (1945-1946) through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998). It demonstrates that the Jackson principle - that crimes against international law are committed by persons, not abstract entities, and that no individual may hide behind the apparatus of the state - is structurally embedded in every major post-war human rights instrument. The chain is not decorative but architectural: each instrument was built upon its predecessor, and to deny any single link is to deny them all. Any system that shields its agents behind institutional authority stands in direct contradiction to the promise made at Nuremberg to the victims of the Second World War.