7 Therefore, whenever it goes beyond its natural limits in order to penetrate, in the name of totalitarian claims, into the sanctuary of the conscience, it endeavours to violate this latter by monstrous means of psychological poisoning, of organized lies and of terror.(...)" 25. 20. More than four decades later, at the end of the eighties, Giuseppe Sperduti did not hesitate to affirm, in an emphatic criticism to legal positivism, that - "(...) la doctrine positiviste n'a pas été en mesure d'élaborer une conception du droit international aboutissant à l'existence d'un véritable ordre juridique (...). Il faut voir dans la conscience commune des peuples, ou conscience universelle, la source des normes suprêmes du droit international" 26. 21. References of the kind, nowadays surely susceptible of a larger and deeper conceptual development, are not limited to the doctrinal level; they also appear in international treaties. The Convention against Genocide of 1948, e.g., refers, in its preamble, to the "spirit" of the United Nations. Half a century later, the preamble of the Statute of Rome of 1998 of the International Criminal Court bears witness of the fact that, throughout the XXth century, - "(...) millions of children, women and men have been victims of unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity" (second considerandum). And, at regional level, the preamble of the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons of 1994, to quote another example, refers to the "conscience of the hemisphere" (third considerandum). 22. A clause of major importance deserves to be singled out: the so-called Martens clause, which has more than a century of historical trajectory. Originally presented by the Delegate of Russia, Friedrich von Martens, to the I Peace Conference of The Hague (1899), it was inserted into the preambles of the II Hague Convention of 1899 (par. 9) and the IV Hague Convention of 1907 (par. 8), both pertaining to the laws and customs of land warfare. Its purpose - according to the wise premonition of the Russian jurist and diplomat - was to extend juridically the protection to civilians and to combatants in all situations, even though not contemplated by the conventional norms; with that aim, the Martens clause invoked "the principles of the law of nations (droit des gens)" derived from "the usages established", as well as "the laws of humanity" and "the dictates (exigences) of public conscience". 23. Subsequently, the Martens clause was to appear again in the provision, concerning denunciation, common to the four Geneva Conventions of International Humanitarian Law of 1949 (Article 63/62/142/158), as well as in the Additional Protocol I (of 1977) to those Conventions (Article 1(2)), - to quote some of the main Conventions on International Humanitarian Law. The Martens clause is thus endowed, for more than a century, of continuing validity, since, however advanced the codification of the humanitarian norms might be, such codification can hardly be considered as truly complete. 25 . 26 Ibid., pp. 81-82. . G. Sperduti, "La souveraineté, le droit international et la sauvegarde des droits de la personne", in International Law at a Time of Perplexity - Essays in Honour of Shabtai Rosenne (ed. Y. Dinstein), Dordrecht, Nijhoff, 1989, p. 884, and cf. p. 880.