par excellence (beyond the formal sources) of the whole law of nations (droit des gens), responsible for the advances of the human kind not only at the juridical level but also at the spiritual one. What survives us is only the creation of our spirit, to the effect of elevating the human condition. This is how I conceive the legacy of the dead, from a perspective of human rights. 17. This spiritual dimension - of the universal juridical conscience - has found expression in distinct international instruments of protection of the rights of the human person: pertinent illustrations are found, e.g., in the preambles of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man (1948), of the Convention against Genocide (1948), of the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons (1994), of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), besides the well-known Martens clause (with its evocation to the "laws of humanity" and to the "dictates of the public conscience"), set forth repeatedly in successive instruments of International Humanitarian Law12. 18. It is significant that the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons (1994) warns in its preamble that "the systematic practice of the forced disappearance of persons constitutes a crime against humanity"13. This expression has a juridical content of its own and a strong semantic weight, seeming to conceptualize humanity itself as subject of law. The doctrinal conceptualization of the so-called crimes against humanity, - victimizing in massive scale human beings, in their spirit and in their body, - has its origins, well before the Convention against Genocide of 1948, in customary international law itself, on the basis of fundamental notions of humanity and of the dictates of the public conscience 14. III. The Links of Solidarity between the Dead and the Living. 19. The respect to the memory of the dead in the persons of the living constitutes one of the aspects of human solidarity that links the living to those who have already died. The respect to the mortal remains is also due to the spirit which animated in life the dead person, in connection moreover with the beliefs of the survivors as to the destiny post mortem of the person who died15. It cannot be denied that the death of an individual affects directly the life, as well as the juridical situation, of other individuals, especially his relatives (as illustrated, in the frameword of civil law (droit civil), by the norms of family law and the law of successions). 20. In the face of the anguish generated by the death of a beloved person, the burial rites, with the mortal remains, purport to bring a minimum of consolation to the survivors. Hence the importance of the respect for the mortal remains: their hiding deprives the relatives also of the burial ritual, which fulfils the needs of the unconscious itself and nourishes the hope in the prolongation or permanence of being16 (even though only in the live memory and in the links of affection of the 12 . E.g., Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 (preambles), Geneva Conventions of 1949 on International Humanitarian Law (preambles), Additional Protocol I of 1977 (Article 1) to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Aditional Protocol II (in simplified form, in the preamble, considerandum 4). 13 . Paragraph 6 (emphasis added). 14 . For an account, cf., e.g., S.R. Ratner and J.S. Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 45-77. 15 . B. Py, op. cit. supra n. (8), pp. 94 and 77, and cf. pp. 7, 38, 47, 77 and 123. 16 . L.-V. Thomas, La mort, 4th. corr. ed., Paris, PUF, 1998, pp. 91-93, 107, 113 and 115.