Search: Complementarity SAIF GADDAFI
07 Apr The Growing Imperative to Recognize and Codify Gender Apartheid: Demonstrating the Need and Responding to Critics (Part II)
...Similarly, Professor Bennoune has noted that “the persecution approach fails to adequately implicate the institutionalized and ideological nature of the abuses in question or reflect on the responsibilities of other international actors to respond appropriately.” This argument also fails to recognize the complementarity between gender apartheid and gender persecution. Indeed, the crimes of apartheid and persecution already co-exist in the Rome Statute and, more broadly, in international law. The Taliban’s institutionalized regime of systematic gender-based oppression is similar to the South African apartheid regime, where racial discrimination and the doctrine...
21 Apr ICC Sanctions Symposium: The Unprecedented Attack Against the ICC Prosecutor–The Pitfalls of Being a National of a ‘Less-Powerful’ State
[Satang Nabaneh is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, and the Founder and Executive Director of Law Hub Gambia. She currently pursues research interests including international human rights law and monitoring mechanisms, democratization in Africa, and Gambian constitutional law.] On September 2, 2020, the Trump administration announced that the United States had designated the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and the head of the Office of the Prosecutor’s Jurisdiction, Complementarity, and Cooperation Division (JCCD), Phakiso Mochochoko, for sanctions. These...
09 May Why Does the United States Continue to Oppose International Courts?
...investigate individual suspects and seek indictments against them as long as they fall under the subject matter jurisdiction defined by the Rome Statute. The ICC’s process is characterized by deferential complementarity. Its primary duty is to ensure that national court systems are given sufficient opportunity to “investigate and prosecute individuals suspected of committing atrocity crimes referred to the Court” (p. 75). The ICC takes initiative only after national courts are unwilling or unable to carry out proper investigations or prosecutions. After all, “the long-term objective is to strengthen the capabilities...14 Oct Guest Post: Do All Roads Lead to Rome? Why Ukraine Resorts to Declarations Rather than Ratification of the Rome Statute
...regarding the repercussions of the ad hoc declarations in particular and ratification as a whole. For example, concerns over the new declaration being in breach of Article 5 of the Minsk II agreement which provides pardon and amnesty to those involved in the conflict in the Donbass region. However, under international law such amnesty has consistently been interpreted as excluding international crimes and gross human rights violations. Therefore, if Ukrainian courts are unable or unwilling to investigate and prosecute such crimes, the ICC’s complementarity principle can be activated, as it...09 Apr LJIL Symposium: A Consideration of ‘On the Functions of International Courts: An Appraisal in Light of Their Burgeoning Public Authority’
...democratic rights. In this light, it is worth looking at the rise of international adjudication in the post-Cold-War world along with the increasing attention to the problem of weak and failed states. The decisions of international adjudicators in the international criminal law and human rights law areas often respond directly to political and legal institutional failures or gaps at the level of the state. The authority of international adjudicators thus may be seen as relative to that of other institutions. This is explicitly contemplated by the conception of “complementarity” that...21 Feb US Troops in Iraq: Likely out of Reach of the ICC
...deployment described in Res. 1546 and the letters from the US and Iraqi representatives accompanying that resolution (including the statement in the US letter that the MNF operate in a framework “in which the contributing states have responsibility for exercising jurisdiction over their personnel”) meet the requirement of Art. 16 and preclude ICC jurisdiction. Finally, Art. 17 of the ICC statute requires “complementarity.” That means if a local or national investigation or prosecution of the conduct at issue is taking place, the Court is prohibited from exercising its jurisdiction. The...
30 Jun Language Matters: The Role of the Presumption of Innocence in Seeking Justice During the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
...meaning of ‘public authority’. Not surprisingly those who are directly involved in the prosecution are included – judges, prosecutors, police, and investigators. However, public authorities are not limited to those who have a direct connection with the criminal case. For example, a member of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation Division was considered a public authority. In national jurisdictions public authorities include people who are legislators and those employed by the government. In international jurisdictions the term can extend to employees of the relevant international court,...18 Mar The United States Continues its Attacks against the International Criminal Court
...a repudiation of multilateral engagement and a repudiation of the rule of law. Specifically, Secretary Pompeo’s statements were not accompanied by any commitment to investigate and/or prosecute the crimes alleged to have been committed by U.S. nationals (members of the U.S. armed forced and members of the CIA) in Afghanistan—even though some of the crimes have been well-documented by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Notably, the U.S.-ICC showdown could be avoided if the United States prosecuted these cases itself. Under the ICC’s complementarity regime, any state that...
15 Mar SCSL Symposium: A Legal Legacy that Opens the Way to Justice in Challenging Places and Times–Part I
...the atrocities are committed on the territory of ICC member states, the hybrid approach can be viewed as a form of “complementarity” that avoids taking the situation to The Hague but does not rely on exclusively national trials. It can be a better alternative than a single global court in The Hague that is expensive, distant and easy for local leaders to demonize, and national courts where it can be very hard to properly try powerful actors, particularly if these courts were dysfunctional before the violence and were further disabled...
22 Apr ICC Sanctions Symposium: Between the Institutional and the Intellectual: The ICC-US ‘Sanctions’ Communications and the Irony of Critique
[Rashmi Dharia is a doctoral candidate at Sciences Po Law School, Paris.] As of 2nd April 2021, the Biden administration rescinded the sanctions that had been imposed by Executive Order 13928 of 11th June 2020 and its follow-up on 2nd September 2020 on ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and the Head of the Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Co-operation Division Mr Phakiso Mochochoko. The US-ICC relationship looks all set to ‘go back’ from manifest and active hostility to garden variety tropes of ‘constructive engagement’ – a story that, despite its baggage, can be...