The tribunals held at the end of the Second World War in Nuremberg and Tokyo broke new ground for international justice. Nazi Germany and Japan's leaders were prosecuted in trials that laid bare the war's atrocities and crimes against humanity.

A permanent international court proved impossible to establish until 2002, when the International Criminal Court was created in The Hague in the Netherlands.

"The jurisdiction of the court shall be limited to the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole," its founding statute says.

The following are 13 recent cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide allegations, some of which have been handled by the International Criminal Court and others by different judicial bodies.

Some suspects are still at large.

Syria's President Bashar Assad may be next to be added to this list.

Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wants the Security Council to submit the situation in Syria to the ICC. Pillay says her office has reliable information that the death toll is now "much more" than 4,000, including over 300 children, since the start of the uprising against the Assad regime.

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Charles Taylor leaves after officially handing over the Liberian presidency to his vice-president on Aug. 11, 2003. (Ben Curtis/Associated Press)

Charles Taylor

Former president of Liberia

Status: Convicted

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor was convicted April 26, 2012, by an international tribunal of aiding and abetting rebels who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in neighbouring Sierra Leone's brutal 1991-2002 civil war. Judge Richard Lussick said the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague had unanimously found Taylor criminally responsible for aiding and abetting rebel groups. Taylor is the first African head of state convicted by an international court.

Taylor was arrested in 2006 in Nigeria, where he had been living in exile.

In his trial, which began in earnest in January 2008, he was prosecuted for 11 crimes against humanity, including rape, murder, terror, conscripting child soldiers, and other atrocities. Taylor denied the charges and began his defence in July 2009, claiming in seven months of testimony in his own defence that he was a statesman and peacemaker in West Africa.

Taylor was ultimately convicted on all 11 charges in the indictment. He could face a maximum of life in prison, to be served in Great Britain. He has a May 16, 2012, hearing, and will learn his sentence on May 30.

Taylor's attorney, Courtenay Griffiths, slammed the conviction as based on "tainted and corrupt evidence." He claimed prosecutors paid for some of the evidence. Both the prosecution and the defence are expected to review the special court's ruling to determine if they should launch an appeal.

Background: Liberia's Charles Taylor and the cult of the child soldiers

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Joseph Kony is seen during a meeting with a delegation of 160 officials and lawmakers from northern Uganda and representatives of non-governmental organizations on July 31, 2006. (Associated Press)

Joseph Kony

Leader of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army

Status: At large

Kony and other leaders of the LRA, a guerrilla group that began a violent campaign against the Ugandan government in 1986, have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The rebels have been accused of, among other atrocities, cutting off the tongues and lips of civilians and abducting thousands of children, turning the girls into sex slaves and the boys into child soldiers.

In October, the U.S. sent 100 special forces soldiers to help Uganda track down Kony.

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Former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, in a room at the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, being guarded by UN police, after his arrest April 11. (Reuters)

Laurent Gbagbo

Ivory Coast president from 2000 until a struggle for power following his election defeat in 2010

Status: In custody at The Hague

Laurent Gbagbo was taken into custody by the ICC on Nov. 30, charged with murder, rape and other crimes allegedly committed by his supporters as he clung to power after last year's elections. Prosecutors say about 3,000 people died in violence by both sides after Gbagbo refused to concede defeat.

"Mr. Gbagbo is brought to account for his individual responsibility in the attacks against civilians committed by forces acting on his behalf," prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said in a statement.

He is the first former head of state arrested by the ICC.

• Background: A tale of 2 presidents: The story behind the political drama in Ivory Coast

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Goran Hadzic in a photo from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia case file on the fugitive. (Courtesy of the ICTY)

Goran Hadzic

Leader of autonomous regions carved out by Serbs in Croatia in the early days of the Balkan wars of the 1990s

Status: Arrested on July 20, 2011

Hadzic was the last fugitive wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) until his arrest in the mountainous Fruska Gora region of northern Serbia. He was indicted in 2004 and is accused of ordering, committing and abetting atrocities against Croats and other non-Serbs living in the parts of Croatia that Hadzic and his Serbian allies had proclaimed to be autonomous Serb regions in 1991 and where they had set up a parallel government.

Hadzic's trial is scheduled for 2013.

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Ratko Mladic at a session of the Bosnian Serb parliamentary assembly in Pale, Bosnia, in an undated photo from the 1990s. (Srdjan Ilic/Associated Press)

Ratko Mladic

Former general and leader of the Bosnian Serb forces during the Balkan wars of the 1990s

Status: Arrested on May 26, 2011

Mladic was captured by Serbian authorities in the village of Lazarevo, north of Belgrade, after evading arrest for 16 years. Media reported that he was living in a house owned by a relative, was not in disguise and did not resist arrest.

He was said to be living under the name Milorad Komadic and was believed to have evaded arrest for so long thanks to the help of members of the Serbian army and intelligence who remained loyal to him.

He was indicted in 1995 by the ICTY on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity related to the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, in which 8,000 Muslim Bosnian men were slaughtered by Mladic's forces.

Serbia had offered a $1.58-million reward for information leading to Mladic's capture, and the European Union had made his arrest a key condition of Serbia's application for EU membership.

On Dec. 2, 2011, prosecutors reduced the indictment from 196 to 106 charges in order to speed up the trial.

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Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir speaks during a press conference in Khartoum on Sept. 25, 2006. (Abd Raouf/Associated Press)

Omar al-Bashir

President of Sudan

Status: Charges filed

The International Criminal Court has charged al-Bashir with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, alleging he orchestrated the violence that has devastated the country's Darfur region and left hundreds of thousands dead.

Judges issued a warrant for al-Bashir's arrest in July 2010. The Sudanese government has said it does not recognize the indictment and al-Bashir remains in power.

ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo accuses al-Bashir of keeping 2.5 million refugees from specific ethnic groups in Darfur in camps "under genocide conditions, like a gigantic Auschwitz."

The ICC is seeking six other suspects for alleged crimes committed in Darfur. Prosecutors requested an arrest warrant for Abduraheem Hussein, Sudan's defence minister and former interior minister, on Dec. 2, 2011.

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Moammar Gadhafi prepares for a game of chess in Tripoli. (FIDE/Associated Press)

Moammar Gadhafi

Former Libyan leader

Status: Killed on Oct. 20, 2011

The ICC issued arrest warrants for Gadhafi, as well as his son Saif al-Islam Gadhafi and Abdullah Senussi, then Libyan intelligence chief, in June 2011, in connection with the killings and violence against hundreds of civilians during the uprising to topple his government.

Gadhafi died while in the custody of rebel troops.

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Four senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge indicted by a UN-assisted tribunal. From left to right: Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith. (Heng Sinith/Chor Sokunthea, file/Associated Press)

Khmer Rouge leaders

Status: On trial in Phonm Penh

Khieu Samphan and three other senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge have been formally indicted in Phnom Penh by a UN-assisted tribunal. They are accused of involvement in atrocities committed while their ultra-communist movement ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s. Their trial began in June 2011.

The Khmer Rouge regime — whose leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998 — has been blamed for up to two million deaths in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Samphan was Cambodia's head of state during this era.

Also on trial are Nuon Chea, the group's ideologist, and former foreign minister Ieng Sary (his wife, Ieng Thirith, ex-minister for social affairs, was found incapable of standing trial due to ill health). All are in their 80s.

In November Nuon Chea told the court the Khmer Rouge carried out its policies for the sake of the Cambodian people and to protect the country from invaders.

In another case, Kaing Guek Eav, a former Khmer Rouge chief jailer also known as Comrade Duch, was sentenced in July 2010 to 19 years in prison for overseeing the torture and murder of 16,000 people. Prosecutors have appealed that sentence.

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Jean-Pierre Bemba, left, is seen at the start of pre-trial hearings at the courtroom of the International Criminal Court in The Hague on Jan. 12, 2009. (Associated Press)

Jean-Pierre Bemba

Former vice-president of Democratic Republic of Congo

Status: Trial underway in The Hague

Bemba was detained in Brussels in May 2008 on an International Criminal Court warrant for four charges of war crimes and two charges of crimes against humanity. His trial began in November 2010.

The former official is being held responsible for atrocities committed by men under his command — including rape, murder and pillaging — in the Central African Republic, which borders DRC, in 2002 and 2003. Bemba has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

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This undated photo released by Belgrade's Healthy Life magazine shows Radovan Karadzic with glasses, long white hair and a beard. (Associated Press)

Radovan Karadzic

Former Bosnian Serb leader

Status: Trial underway at The Hague

Karadzic stands accused of 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and other atrocities against non-Serb civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-95 war.

Before his July 2008 arrest, Karadzic had eluded ICTY authorities for almost 13 years, living under a false identity and disguising his looks by growing long white hair and a beard.

His trial before the ICTY in The Hague began in fall 2009 but was delayed until April 2010 after Karadzic decided to represent himself. A judge has warned the proceedings may last until 2014 unless lawyers speed things up.

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Jean Kambanda seized power in Rwanda during the 1994 massacres. (Associated Press)

Jean Kambanda

Former Rwandan leader

Status: Serving life sentence in Mali

Kambanda seized power in Rwanda during the 1994 massacres in which up to one million civilians were killed in a mass frenzy. He originally pled guilty to genocide charges, but retracted his confession and filed an appeal three days after receiving the maximum sentence of life in prison. That appeal was rejected.

Two days before Kambanda's conviction, Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of a small Rwandan town became the first person convicted of genocide under the 1948 UN convention that defined the term.

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Slobodan Milosevic appears before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Feb. 13, 2002. (Paul Vreeker/Associated Press)

Slobodan Milosevic

Former president of Serbia

Status: Died in 2006 in jail cell while on trial in The Hague

Dubbed the "Butcher of the Balkans," Milosevic faced three indictments at the ICTY in connection with atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s. Deposed as president in 2000, he was arrested after a dramatic Belgrade standoff and went on trial in 2002 in The Hague.

The prosecution had wrapped up its case, and the defence was underway when Milosevic died in his jail cell of a heart attack in 2006.

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Saddam Hussein gestures during his trial in Baghdad on Jan. 29, 2006. (Darko Bandic/Pool, Associated Press)

Saddam Hussein

Former Iraqi leader

Status: Executed in December 2006

Hussein was captured in December 2003 by U.S. soldiers, who found the dishevelled former dictator hiding in a muddy pit at a farm near the town of Tikrit.

After Hussein's capture, some international organizations called for him to face an international tribunal.

However, his case went before an Iraqi tribunal, where Hussein faced war crimes charges related to the Dujail massacre of 1982. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.