10 Oct UCLA Law Forum on the ICC – Prevention Discussion Topic
UCLA Law School’s Sanela Daniela Jenkins Human Rights Project has a special joint online forum with the ICC office of the prosecutor, which is currently running commentary on the question of prevention, and how the ICC can maximize its crime prevention impact. It features contributions from a variety of experts from a variety of perspectives – Tomer Broude, Bill Burke-White, Richard Goldstone, David Scheffer, and me. The initiative is run by UCLA professor Richard Steinberg.
The forum can be found here. Readers are invited to post comments, and forum contributors are also invited to respond and undertake a discussion. The contributions on this crucial question are relatively short, readable essays, and should be of interest to the general public, students at the undergraduate and graduate level, journalists, public policy specialists and others. Congratulations to Professor Steinberg for pulling it together, and I am certainly honored to take part.
Very interesting forum and what a line-up! If the ICC is going to “maximize its crime prevention impact” it needs to better assess the political nature of its work and the political effects of its investigations and arrest warrants. I simply can’t see how you can abstract a crime from its political context and hope to prevent it from occurring or from similar crimes being perpetrated. I think that the ICC has learned a lot in this regard – the dramatic and impressive expansion in outreach mechanisms being symptomatic of this. But I really believe it should institutionalize political assessment of its work as part of its work. I certainly know there would be many people willing to take part!
I noted in my response to the prompt that much of the work of the ICC needs to center on building legitimacy – perhaps that can be done via complementarity, perhaps not. But the point is that much of the strength of the court will come from deft management of the political dimension.