The International Criminal Court on Trial (original) (raw)
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ISIL YEARBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN AND REFUGEE LAW, 2022
International Criminal Court (ICC) has grown to a centre of a “system of global criminal justice” establishing international criminal jurisprudence aptly in a more formal sense. The development of jurisprudence of ICC during the last 20 years since the adoption of the Rome Statute has been particularly rich and manifold within and outside the system created by the Rome Statute.The role of ICC and its decisions in the last twenty years of its ebb and flow of practice, have created a mindset at the international level that no impunity for all victims of crimes. However, the ICC is often criticized for not free from ‘selectivity’ of situations and cases. Therefore, the two-decade of works of ICC offers a glimpse into the legal and political complexities. This paper is a critical analysis of two decades journey of the ICC and its offices which worked on various kinds of situations that existed in different parts of the globe. The main research objective of this work is to analyse its role in the development of international peace and justice through prosecuting the offenders of heinous crimes within its jurisdiction and fostering international criminal law. The work will evaluate the functioning and performance of the ICC and its organs to see how far the objective of the Rome Statute is fulfilled in the last twenty years. It examines major areas of jurisprudence and practice, as well as the importance of the Court in the depolarized global world vis-a-vis emerging challenges between developed and superpower countries. A comprehensive description of this development would, however, by far exceed the bounds of the present article. KEYWORDS: International criminal law, ICC, Impunity, Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), International peace.
This article seeks to acclaim the remarkable work done by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to date, recognizing and lauding its invaluable contribution brought to international criminal justice but also considers the various challenges faced by the ICC to date as well as its embedded flaws. This article is an academic piece of work based on the personal opinions of the author and opinions of academic commentaries. The overarching origin of all challenges can be argued to arise preponderantly from the drafting of the Rome Statute as the ICC has been established and is governed by the Rome Statute. This article provides a methodical analysis of such treaty with suggestions for reform.
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT IN WORLD POLITICS
The article discusses the importance of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a recently established intergovernmental organization to address the most heinous crimes. This organization is fi rst evaluated with respect to its impact on the notion of national sovereignty, upon which the international system has long been based. Then the contribution of global civil society in the creation of the ICC is outlined in order to demonstrate that the global order is gradually departing from being state-centric. And fi nally, the US opposition to the ICC is briefl y examined as that opposition is extremely relevant to the subject, given that the US is regarded as the sole superpower, which is supposed to have a determinative role in the conduct of global politics.
The International Criminal Court
Gordon DiGiacomo and Susan Kang (Eds), The Institutions of Human Rights: Developments and Practices, University of Toronto Press, 2019
International Criminal Court Facing the Peace vs. Justice Dilemma
International Comparative Jurisprudence, 2017
The 'Peace versus justice' debate has been a central theme when analyzing the politics of international criminal justice. The role of the permanent International Criminal Court may be portrayed as an obstacle to peace processes but it may as well facilitate those processes. The present paper, by juxtaposing sometimes diverging views, argues that a more nuanced approach is needed for properly assessing the impact of the ICC. In fact, the Court may play neither role exclusively. Instead, there are different mechanisms enshrined in the Rome Statute, for accommodating the demands of peace and justice. They are addressed within the present study. 1. The problem There exist a variety of possible relationships between peace and justice. When considering the troubled interrelationship, one may start with the famous rule: Fiat iustitia pereat mundus. But the traditional understanding of delivering justice at all costs ("even if the world should perish") refers to the ideal. The spectrum of possible scenarios may be extended from the two values being mutually exclusive to "no peace without justice" formula at the other end of the scale. The aim of the present contribution is to sketch the problems underlying the presented interrelationship from the perspective of international law, and, more precisely, that of international criminal law and to pay particular attention to the International Criminal Court facing the conundrum defined above. In most general terms, the goals of international law (peace and security for collective groups, nations states and peoples) can only be realized through the prosecution of particular individuals (Ohlin, 2009, p. 191). As famously stated by the International Military Tribunal, "Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced" (International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg), 1947, p. 221). The experience of both Nuremberg and Tokyo Military Tribunals is of course quite telling, but when taking it into consideration one has to be aware of its limited value for the present examination. Both Tribunals indeed delivered "victor's justice" in the aftermath of the World War II. Their paradigm, which precluded any need to balance the demands of peace and justice, may thus only partly be applicable within this study. From a slightly different perspective, punishing the individual perpetrators and rehabilitating the individual victims, and thereby avoiding collective guilt and collective myths of victimhood and eliminating the strife for vengeance, all contribute to the so-called pacifying effect of international criminal justice. They altogether strengthen the culture of peaceful settlement of conflicts (Nitsche, 2007, p. 303). Such an approach integrates, rather than counterbalances the values in question. To some extent this is also reflected by the former Deputy ICT Prosecutor when noting that "the ICTY is essentially an instrument of peace: the criminal prosecution of persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law is regarded as being central to the peace process in the
Through a Glass Darkly: The icc, the unsc and the Quest for Justice in International Law
International Criminal Law Review, 2019
Despite the aspirations of the International Criminal Court (icc), it is unlikely to achieve an end to impunity for crimes of concern to the international community without acknowledgement of and due engagement with the politics of international criminal law. A major threat to the legitimacy of the Court is its relationship with the United Nations Security Council (unsc). unsc referrals of conflict situations under Article 13(b) of the Rome Statute remain subject to geo-political considerations. The exercise is thus arbitrary at best, and may render the icc an instrument of political coercion at worst. An apolitical approach to conflicts given this context is almost antithetical to justice and has already given rise to tensions between the Court and some affected member states. Managing the asymmetry created by unsc referrals and rethinking its seemingly unjustified encroachment in the affairs of less influential states should become the priority for the Court.
This paper covers a review of the article written by Damaska 1 which contains a great deal of critical analysis on the desired legal foundation of the International Criminal Court and doings of the court in reality since 2002. Our aim is to try to pay our attention to the real International Criminal Court and to answer the question of what the Court did so far. As will be seen through the paper, the role of the court in restorative justice discipline mentioning the retributive and/or restorative character of this permanent international criminal court will be discussed. It is, of course, not so far away to release the complementarity principle labelled in the Rome Statute. In this regard, the associations between the complementarity and the sovereignty will be explored giving example from reality such as Libya and Syria, and the principle will be also seen as a stabilizer-mechanism and a well-balanced tool between the sovereignty and universal jurisdiction. As a consequence, it can be said that regarding all points posted below, "just being in existence is not enough."
Trials as Messages of Justice: What Should Be Expected of International Criminal Courts
I n January , Fatou Bensouda, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced the opening of the court's tenth and most recent country investigation, into alleged crimes perpetrated in Georgia during the brief Russo-Georgian War. The crimes to be investigated may include murder, destroying enemy property, attacks on a peacekeeping mission , deportation, and ethnic persecution. Bensouda intends to make arrests, put suspects on trial, and, if they are found guilty, have them convicted and punished. Meanwhile, even as Bensouda prepared this newest case, the ICC was still prosecuting a suspect in the court's very first investigation, from , against Dominic Ongwen, a commander of the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army. These two cases can thus serve as bookends to the ICC's short history, illustrating the long arc between initial investigations and eventual trials, and highlighting the complexity and contingency of international criminal justice. In this article we ask what—if anything—is the point of all this effort, and what can and should we expect from international criminal courts? After more than a decade of work, the accomplishments of the International Criminal Court are highly contested. The court has been accused of bias, of spoiling peace negotiations , of hindering successful transitions to democracy, and of being disconnected from the needs of conflict-affected populations. We will not address these controversies here. Instead we focus on a more theoretical question: How can international trial and punishment constitute a suitable response to episodes of mass violence? The Statute of the ICC itself provides several indications. Its Preamble proclaims that " the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished, " that it is " determined to put an end to Ethics & International Affairs, , no. (), pp. –.
Overview and Significance of the International Criminal Court (ICC)
A Brief History of International Criminal Law and International Criminal Court, 2017
Established as an intergovernmental organization, the International Criminal Court (the ICC or "the Court") is specifically designed to deal with the international crimes that are thought to be most severe and serious. It has generally been observed that the commissions of those crimes had gone unpunished, making the impunity of the perpetrators a usual and ordinary practice in international relations. Although the idea that a permanent international criminal court is strongly needed, and therefore, should be created, lingered for a very long time, the realization of that idea has become quite recently. Nation-states, the major and primary actors of the international system, have generally been lenient, if not reluctant, in addressing those kinds of acts. Particularly, concerns over sovereign rights of the states have made them reluctant to get together to discuss the issue up until 1998. Since sovereignty has been the underlying principle in the operation of the international system that is generally believed to be built by sovereign nation-states, states have long refrained from dealing with the issues pertinent to even the gravest crimes in order to show their tribute to the principle of nonintervention. As a consequence, apart from a few examples, human rights issues in