A/HRC/30/42 C. Legal reforms 45. The incorporation of international legal obligations should at least cover the following basic issues: the typification of relevant crimes; statutes of limitations and retroactivity questions; and the introduction of reforms leading to de-incentivizing violations, including regarding anti-terrorism legislation. 1. Criminal types, statutes of limitation and retroactivity issues 46. The focus here is placed on the inclusion of measures that enable judicial and non-judicial remedies for redressing gross human rights violations and serious international humanitarian law violations. 47. The incorporation of criminal types (offences) on the basis of international law has the advantage not only of accurately reflecting international obligations, but also of solving two problems that have increasingly become an excuse for inaction in the face of systematic or widespread violations, namely, prescription and retroactivity issues. 48. Common crimes in domestic jurisdictions are generally accompanied by prescription regimes. The reasons to make “atrocity crimes” imprescriptible are, first, that atrocity crimes raise particular investigatory and prosecutorial cha llenges that usually cannot be met on the same schedule as common crimes; and second, that imprescriptibility helps signal that such crimes constitute an affront to humanity, communicating that, in theory, neither space nor time will provide escape from responsibility. 49. The Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, 25 which also covers crimes of genocide and those associated with apartheid, states that the relevant crimes are imprescriptible “irrespective of the date of their commission”. International jurisprudence has frequently reiterated that the Convention does not create new rights or obligations, but that it is declarative in nature, and that the principle of imprescriptibility of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide is a matter of jus cogens. 26 50. This helps to address claims regarding the retroactive application of criminal law or violations of the principle of legality, in particular, of the principle that no one should be punished for an act that was not proscribed by a law in force at the time of commission. 27 Jurisprudence from various courts shows the ways in which different countries have confronted some of these challenges. Some countries have carried out judicial processes for gross human rights violations using criminal types current in their penal codes at the time of their commission, but, judging the offences to be crimes against humanity in accordance with jus cogens, they have attributed to those violations some of the characteristics and consequences of international crimes, such 25 26 27 12 General assembly resolution 2391 (XXIII), 1968. See, for example, The Prosecutor v. Klaus Barbie (Supreme Court, France); Kolk and Kislyiy v. Estonia (European Court of Human Rights); Priebke, and Arancibia Clavel (Supreme Court, Argentina); Molco (Supreme Court, Chile); Barrios Altos, and Gelman (Inter-American Court of Human Rights). See Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 11 (2); International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, art. 15; Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, art. 7; American Convention on Human Rights, art. 9.