Search: palestine icc
15 Aug The Waters Were Already Muddy: A Rebuttal to Victor Kattan
Steven Kay QC is Head of Chambers at 9 Bedford Row. Joshua Kern is a barrister at 9 Bedford Row). On 3 July 2019, we submitted a communication to the Office of the Prosecutor (“OTP”) of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) (summarised here) which argued that Palestine’s objective legal status as a non-State entity, as well as Palestine’s indeterminate sovereign territorial claim, operate as barriers to the exercise of ICC jurisdiction in potential cases. On 9 August, Victor Kattan responded on these pages (here and here) by suggesting that our communication constitutes...
29 Jul Symposium on Unbroken Bond: Tracing the Ties Between African and Palestinian Anti-Colonial Struggles – Race as a Tool of Oppression: Settler Colonialism in Africa and Palestine Through the Lens of Black Radical Thought
the context of Palestine, this discourse portrays Palestinians as backward, uncivilised, and therefore undeserving of self-determination. The Israeli state’s policies and land confiscation, settlement construction and restriction of Palestinian movement are often justified through a discourse of security and civilisation that is deeply rooted in racial othering. As Davis points out, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is one of the most blatant cases of state commitment to apartheid and racism. The Zionist project in Palestine has employed Orientalist discourse and intersectional oppression in several key ways. Zionist narratives often portray...
24 May An Overview of the Principle of Complementarity
12 Republican senators sent to the Prosecutor, threatening to sanction him, other ICC employees, and their families if he proceeded to apply for arrest warrants: The ICC is also prohibited by its charter from proceeding in any case unless the relevant government is unwilling or unable to police themselves. You yourself have said that “Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders and a robust system intended to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law.” By issuing warrants, you would be calling into question the legitimacy of Israel’s laws, legal system, and...
21 Apr ICC Sanctions Symposium: How Africa Denied Fatou Bensouda and Phakiso Mochochoko
short hand for the ICC’s Afghanistan and Palestine situations. On 2 September, 2020, then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, exercised this power to designate Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda and Phakiso Mochochoko, head of the ICC’s Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Co-operation Division (JCCD), making them ineligible for entry clearance into the United States. The designation also froze any assets they may have had in the country and barred them from holding any assets in the US currency. The Trump administration equally threatened similar sanctions on anyone who had any contact or collaboration with...12 Sep Brazil’s Rise to Power must not Forget its History: On Rui Barbosa and the ICC
of the ICC until then – which is of course an absurd lie, considering the primacy that ICC policy played in his first government. Of course, it is highly unlikely that Brazilian democratic institutions, including the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the Office of the Prosecutor, would stay silent on the occasion of Putin’s visit. They already haven’t in the past. When the ICC requested Brazil’s cooperation in bringing Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, to justice, Brazil’s Supreme Court issued a 19-page dispatch detailing Brazil’s obligations and challenges with regard...
31 Mar Justice in Extreme Cases Symposium: An Invitation to Think about the Way We Think in International Criminal Justice
...of the incriminating evidence (p. 53). Indeed, there are indications of this trend in ICC jurisprudence, which support Robinson’s proposition. One example is the narrow construction of the mental element of criminal liability, or mens rea, in ICC judgments. Article 30(2)(b) of the Rome Statute defines as an intentional conduct one in which the perpetrator has been ‘aware’ that the crime ‘will occur in the ordinary course of events’. In practice, many ICC pre-trial, trial and appeals chambers have interpreted these words in a very restrictive sense – to require...
16 Sep Prosecuting Denial of Right of Return of Georgian IDPs under the Rome Statute
...on the ground of “destination requirement”: while deportation involves displacement across national borders, a forcible transfer is committed within the national borders (Rohingya Decision, para. 57). The Possibility to Prosecute Denial of Right of Return of Georgian IDPs by the ICC On 27 January 2016, ICC authorized the Prosecutor to open proprio motu investigation in the Situation in Georgia in relation to alleged CaH and war crimes committed in and around Tskhinvali Region in the context of Russian-Georgian international armed conflict of 2008. One of the alleged crimes on which the ICC’s...04 Aug The International Criminal Court at 14
Justice Minister Sidiki Kaba. The Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon also attended, along with former ICC Presidents and Judges. In his remarks, the Secretary General said that the inauguration was a “milestone in global efforts to promote and uphold human rights and the rule of law”. The ASP President said that this was a “day of hope for all victims of mass crimes in the world”. President Fernandez announced that the Court was “here to stay”. But setting the rhetoric aside, how does the ICC’s report card...
29 May Affective Justice Symposium: An Anthropology of International Criminal Justice Across Multiple Scales–A Response to Commentaries
...are interpreted differently by various actors. I continue to oppose narrow technocratic analyses of international law in relation to these Africa-ICC debates precisely because this approach inherently erases both voices of resistance (regardless of the actors) and, more seriously, alternate possibilities for innovation. Affective Justice explains that the ICC, ICTY, and ICTR have statutory provisions that reject head-of-state immunity. However, in domestic courts, as opposed to international ones, personal immunity remains firmly established as a matter of international law. The larger debate in ICC-Africa circuits is around how functional immunity...
05 Aug Complementarity, Catalysts, Compliance Symposium: Two Problems of Positive Complementarity in the Context of the DRC
the author’s preference for the so-called positive complementarity. It should be remembered in this regard that the principle of the complementarity of the ICC lends itself to two different logics. The first is negative complementarity. It translates into an antagonistic view of the relationship between the ICC and national courts. Article 17 of the Rome Statute aims to organize this relationship to avoid conflicts of jurisdiction between the ICC and national courts in prosecuting crimes under the Rome Statute. The second logic is that of positive complementarity, the legal basis...