Currently there is a considerable need for scientific research regarding the legal nature of crimes against humanity and the analysis of the grounds and prerequisites for introducing the prohibition of this type of criminal acts at the level of international law and court procedure. The research into this problematics in terms of international legal science and international court procedure becomes increasingly important, particularly, given the continuing unavailability of a special legal document with a focus on this type of illegal acts, the well-established scientific opinions about the need for introducing the prohibition of this type of crimes at the level of the international Convention, and the current efforts of the UN Commission for International Law aimed at drafting it. Crimes against humanity belong to the category of the “barbaric acts” meant to be prevented by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted as long as 70 years ago, this year it’s being its anniversary to be celebrated by the entire civilized world in December. For the sake of understanding “the spirit” of this document appropriately, the problematics of these criminal offenses may not be left uninvestigated. This is what the proposed article attempts at. The purpose of the article is to study the construction of crimes against humanity legalized in international documents, as well as the measures of legal liability for commission thereof. The author traces the changes in the official interpretation of relevant concepts stemming from specific historical events, starting from the statutory documents of the Nuremberg Tribunal and ending with the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The author analyzes the legal position of the ECHR, which in several of its judgments gave more details and a further rationale for a range of aspects inherent in the interpretation of the concept of crimes against humanity and liability for commission thereof. In particular, the ECHR notes that national courts may prosecute for these criminal offences on the basis of international law, regardless of whether such a liability for the crime is prescribed by national criminal law. The article also provides statistical data on the facts of sentencing by international tribunals (including the international criminal court) of particular individuals for crimes against humanity. Special attention is focused on the historical contribution made by the British Professor Hersch Lauterpacht (a former student of the Lviv University and the first scientific drafter of the mentioned type of criminal offenses) to this issue. Today, the most in-depth description of these crimes is contained in the Statute of the International Criminal Court, as well as in the draft Convention on the Prohibition of Crimes against Humanity prepared by the UN Commission for International Law. One of the main points of the study is a comparative table of the construction of crimes against humanity by H. Lauterpacht as against the provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Based on the analysis, the author concludes that, in fact, the Rome Statute applies the original construction for defining crimes against humanity, since in the statutory documents of the Nuremberg Tribunal 5 crime types can be seen among the 11 ones specified in the Statute, this being about 45%. If we recall that the crimes against humanity in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal were formulated by Professor H. Lauterpacht, it becomes obvious that almost all of his provisions on this issue remain relevant to this day. The study is based on socio-deterministic and anthropo-social methodological approaches. The foundation for the selection and use of conceptual approaches and research methods is underlain by dialectics as a general paradigm of any scientific research.