T his is the home of the International Court of Justice. The style is Gothic, but the period is all wrong, so this building is known as "Mock-Gothic" architecture. It was built with money donated by American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie after the first international peace conference (The Hague Peace Conference) was held in 1899. That conference was organized by Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Carnegie saw the need for a formal home for an international justice system, and put up £1,000,000.00 to have it built. Technically, it is not part of any country in the same way that an embassy is considered foreign soil. In this case, The Netherlands donated the soil for the building. The other 25 member nations also donated items -- wood from one country, stone from another, glass from a third, etc... -- in order to make this a symbolic international project. When the doors opened in 1913 it was occupied by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which was replaced in 1922 by the now-defunct Permanent Court of International Justice created by the League of Nations, which evolved into the United Nations. On April 18, 1946 the first session of the International Court of Justice was held. The court acts as the judicial branch of the United Nations and settles disputes between its member countries. It is also the setting, although rarely, of war crimes trials.
