In my previous post, I defended the right of the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) to review the OTP's assessment of whether there were, to quote Art. 53(1)(c) of the Rome Statute, "substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice." In this post, I want to explain why I think the PTC got that review completely,...
Dov Jacobs has a typically excellent post at Spreading the Jam on the PTC's decision to reject the Afghanistan investigation. I agree with nearly all of it, but I do take issue with this comment: First of all, and perhaps most importantly, the exercise that the Pre-Trial Chamber did is most likely ultra vires. Indeed, Article 53(1)(c) is very clear that...
I will write a longer post tonight criticising the PTC's understanding of the "interests of justice," but I thought I'd start by cutting to the legal chase: can the OTP appeal the PTC's decision to reject its request to investigate the situation in Afghanistan? As I read the Rome Statute, I don't think so. Here is the text of the relevant...
[Kingsley Abbott is the International Commission of Jurists' Senior Legal Adviser for Global Redress and Accountability & Saman Zia-Zarifi is the Secretary General of the International Commission of Jurists. This is the second part of a two-part post. Part I can be found here.] Some important questions In the previous installment we raised some of the arguments in favor of creating...
[Kingsley Abbott is the International Commission of Jurists' Senior Legal Adviser for Global Redress and Accountability & Saman Zia-Zarifi is the Secretary General of the International Commission of Jurists. This is the first part of a two-part post.] Introduction The International Independent Investigative Mechanism for Syria and the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar are recent examples of States responding to situations where...
Let me start this post with a short story, currently making headlines in my home country. In 2004, Swiss mining giant Xstrata won a public tender to develop one of the most ambitious mining projects in Peru’s history. “Las Bambas”, as the site was called, was supposed to be a model of sustainable development and human rights, featuring a new...
Well, that was predictable. The Ntaganda defence has filed two motions relating to the news that the ICC's judges have permitted Judge Ozaki to simultaneously serve as a judge in the case and as Japan's ambassador to Estonia. The first, directed to the Presidency, is styled "Request for Disclosure Concerning the Decision of the Plenary of Judges on the Judicial Independence...
[Kruthi Venkatesh is a lawyer practising in Mumbai, India.] In recent years, there has been a lot of debate on investor accountability for human rights abuses, especially in relation to cross-border trade and investment agreements. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UN Guiding Principles”) has been a guiding force for this discourse. With increase in foreign investments in...
Luke Moffett is a senior law lecturer at Queen's University Belfast and Principal Investigator on the "Reparations, Responsibility and Victimhood in Transitional Societies” project. Following the award of the Nobel Peace prize to Dr Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad in December 2018, there is a substantial effort to capitalise on the publicity by pressing for an ‘International Reparation Initiative’ for victims of...
[Emma Irving is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Law, Leiden University and Nicholas Ortiz is a Research and Teaching Associate at the Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum on International Humanitarian Law.] On 18 March 2019, the UN Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (‘CoI’) published its detailed findings of its...
Last week, the excellent lawyers at The Guernica Group, led by my friend Toby Cadman, filed an Article 15 communication with the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) arguing that the ICC should open an investigation into the deportation of civilians from Syria to Jordan. The communication itself is not public, so what we know of TGG's legal argument comes from their...
In a recent post at EJIL: Talk! on the India/Pakistan crisis, Mary Ellen O'Connell references a book chapter in which she suggests that Israel's 1976 raid on Entebbe was the first situation in which a state invoked the "unwilling or unable" doctrine as a jus ad bellum justification for self-defense: Christian Tams, Dire Tladi, and I will soon publish, Self-Defence Against Non-State...