April 2017

Taking Complementarity Seriously: Why is the International Criminal Court Not Investigating Government Crimes in Congo?

[Patryk I. Labuda is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a Teaching Assistant at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. He is currently on exchange at Harvard Law School.] The International Criminal Court (ICC) faces many problems. Some of them are well known, for instance its inadequate budget, accusations of anti-African bias, and withdrawals from the Rome Statute. But there is a far more insidious cancer that is eating away at the Court’s legitimacy: complementarity. As with so many other developments at the ICC, it is the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that foreshadows some of the Court’s long-term dilemmas, many of which received too little attention in Rome. This post explores how the Prosecutor’s confused approach to complementarity undermines the Court’s mission in the DRC and, potentially, in other situation countries going forward. The ICC and Congo To hear Fatou Bensouda tell it, the ICC’s intervention in the DRC is something of a success story. The Court’s track record there seems positive, especially when contrasted with other ICC situations: Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga have been tried and convicted, and Bosco Ntaganda is currently on trial. Another Congolese, Jean-Pierre Bemba, is the Court’s only high-profile convict to date, even if his conviction formally stems from the situation in the Central African Republic. Thus, with the possible exception of Mathieu Ngudjolo’s acquittal in 2012, Congo is usually portrayed as a beacon of hope for an otherwise beleaguered institution struggling to gain legitimacy in Africa. But is this narrative of success compelling? A cloud of suspicion has hung over the ICC’s activities in the DRC ever since Joseph Kabila ‘invited’ the first Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, to launch an investigation in 2004. Kabila’s ‘self-referral’ succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: lacking a strategy for a country the size of Western Europe, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) initiated sporadic prosecutions which targeted only Kabila’s rivals, including Bemba who had almost defeated him in the 2006 presidential election. In stark contrast, the Congolese government’s crimes received no scrutiny in The Hague. Thirteen years after Kabila’s invitation, the ICC’s neglect of government crimes is coming home to roost. The DRC is in the news for all the wrong reasons. Kabila’s refusal to relinquish power, despite being constitutionally required to do so, has stoked mass violence on several occasions, leaving dozens dead in the streets of Kinshasa and other cities. After a series of damning reports (see here and here), last month the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights formally requested a commission of inquiry to examine ‘recurrent reports of grave violations’. Most importantly from the ICC’s perspective, these reports show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the violence is part of a governmental strategy to keep Kabila in power at all costs. The pattern is familiar: each time the political opposition organizes protests, state agents – police and military – resort to deadly force. Yet despite thousands of cumulative deaths, reports of dozens of mass graves, and even graphic videos of summary executions by government troops, the ICC has been virtually absent from the debate about accountability. Why, despite such overwhelming evidence of state criminality, has the ICC not investigated Kabila and his supporters?

The Legality Surrounding the US Strikes in Syria

[Nancy Simons is a Belgian lawyer and serves on the International Bar Association’s Drones Task Force. Her professional background lies in international law generally. She has worked at a number of international non-governmental organisations and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.] It has been almost two weeks since the United States (US) initiated several missile strikes on a Syrian...

Why It Doesn’t Seem to Matter that the Syria Strikes Violated International Law

Over at Vox, I have published an essay fleshing out the thoughts I first published here on the legality of the recent U.S. cruise missile attacks on Syria and the international reaction to it. President Donald Trump’s surprising decision to launch a cruise missile strike on Syria was sharply criticized by Russia as a “flagrant violation of international law.” While it might be...

In Defense of Humanitarian Intervention

[Jennifer Trahan is Associate Clinical Professor, at The Center for Global Affairs, NYU-SPS, and Chair of the American Branch of the International Law Association’s International Criminal Court Committee. The views expressed are those of the author.] Postings on Opinio Juris seem fairly squarely against the legality of the U.S. missile strike last week into Syria. Let me join Jens David Ohlin (blogging...

War by Any Other Name? It’s Still War

[Gabor Rona  is a Visiting Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Armed Conflict Project at Cardozo Law School. Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights, Cardozo School of Law.] “It’s not war. We haven’t gone to war against Syria.” These are the quoted words of former legal advisor of the U.S....