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I don’t know quite what to make of this story from the AP of July 3, 2009: African leaders approve anti-ICC move By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU – 9 hours ago SIRTE, Libya (AP) — African leaders have approved a contentious decision to denounce the International Criminal Court and refuse to extradite Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir. The final decision by the African Union heads of state summit says AU members “shall not cooperate … in the arrest and transfer of the President of Sudan to the ICC.” The story adds that...

[Dr. Gurgen Petrossian, LL.M. is a lecturer at the Friedrich-Alexander Erlangen-Nürnberg University and Chairman of German-Armenian Lawyers’ Association] Introduction On 29 December 2022, the Republic of Armenia’s government took a significant step by announcing its decision to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and initiate the process of ratifying the Rome Statute. This move underscores Armenia’s strong commitment to international criminal justice. The decision followed extensive negotiations and discussions among various stakeholders within Armenia, emphasizing the ICC’s importance. Already during the second Nagorno-Karabakh War, informal discussions had...

...reflects TWAIL understandings “that reforms of law and politics would not liberate post-colonial states in the absence of changes in the international economic order” [at 141 – 142 here].  In keeping with both TWAIL generally and Nouwen and Werner specifically, Schwöbel-Patel’s worry about the enhanced jurisdiction of the ICC also reflects a concern about the erasure of alternative possibilities. Building the portfolio of matters over which the ICC can claim authority will only serve to deepen the hegemonic dimensions of the global justice project, operating to exclude other forms and...

crimes, including enslavement (article 7(1)(c)), persecution (article 7(1)(h)), outrages on personal dignity (articles 8(2)(b)(xxi) and 8(2)(c)(ii)), torture (articles 7(1)(f), 8(2)(a)(ii) and 8(2)(c)(i)) and other inhumane acts (article 7(1)(k)), and even the residual category of ‘other forms of sexual violence’ (articles 7(1)(g), 8(2)(b)(xxii) and 8(2)(e)(vi)).  Prosecuting Reproductive Violence at the ICC Prior to Ongwen, reproductive crimes have been mentioned but not charged in a series of ICC cases. During the trial against Thomas Lubanga, founder and leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a...

the heads of two of the 30 organizations that have publicly urged states to stand by a transparent and merit-based election process, we think states and ICC supporters alike should take the Committee’s work seriously, and ensure that the hearings next week are the first step in a genuine and constructive effort at consensus-building by states parties. Why is this so important? For one, the selection process to date has been the most transparent and rigorous in the ICC’s history, with a number of improvements over previous elections. For instance,...

...in Ukraine.  Although Ukraine has accepted the ICC’s jurisdiction with respect to crimes in its territory since 2014, the ICC cannot prosecute the crime of aggression because Russia is not a party to the ICC Statute and its Aggression Amendment, and Russia will veto any effort by the Security Council to refer the crime of aggression relating to Ukraine to the ICC.  The ICC does have jurisdiction over the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed in Ukraine since 2014 because Ukraine lodged a declaration accepting the...

...to the ICC has comprised a complex assemblage of practices including demands for specific deferrals and amendments to the Rome Statute, threats of withdrawal from the ICC and the push for an African Court with criminal – and crucially: expanded criminal jurisdiction in lieu of the ICC. Clarke offers an intriguing, multi-modal ethnography of transnational assemblages of justice-as-law at multiple scales, approached through a practice theory of embodied affects, emotional regimes and technocratic forms of knowledge, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. Highlighting the sentimentalized expressions and nonverbal cues reflecting the...

...claims of self-defence and protection. It carries associations with WWI (‘supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’), WWII, Nuremberg and Tokyo. Both notions refer to moral extremes. They are loaded with historical baggage, related to their precedents. The Kampala amendments to the ICC Statute gave a contemporary framing to the crime of aggression by shifting the focus from the notion of war of aggression to the wider concept of acts of aggression. However, the semantics used show the limitations of criminal labels: Both notions polarize and easily...

staggering: A 2017 ICC Staff Union report on ‘ICC Staff Feedback on Harassment, Bullying, Discrimination and Abuse of Power’, provided the result of a survey taken by 128 ICC staff members in which 48.4% of respondents said that they had been victims of one of the listed behaviours (discrimination, (sexual) harassment, abuse of authority, or misconduct). Equally concerning was the fact that only 18.7% of those who had stated having been victims of these behaviours said that they reported them. Reasons given for deciding not to report included: lack of...

of its staff. Such was the narrative of crisis around the Court that, in April 2019 – soon after the ICC judges rejected the Prosecution’s request to open investigations in Afghanistan due to a lack of state cooperation – four former presidents of the ICC Assembly of States Parties (ASP) called for an independent expert assessment of the entire functioning of the Court. While much of the evidence I present in Distant Justice now resonates with the zeitgeist around the ICC – having gone against the grain for most of...

Article 17 of the ICC Statute requires the Court to determine whether “the case” is being investigated or prosecuted (Article 17(1)(a)) or has been investigated (Article 17(1)(b)). To determine whether a national proceeding concerns the same “case”, ICC jurisprudence asks whether it concerns the same person and “substantially the same conduct”. Kevin, like other scholars in recent literature, argues that the same-conduct test is too stringent. The concern is that same-conduct test “privileges the ICC instead of states” because it requires national authorities to investigate the specific conduct that the...

...to the types of crimes delineated in the Rome Statute. Which brings one to the broader purpose of the Rome Statute – to establish a court, yes, but also surely to widen the prohibition of the crimes as described in the statute. So while the ICC is focused on ‘positive complementarity’, the wider context – the ability to prosecute international crimes in more national jurisdictions – is one that should make the ICC Prosecutor’s job more focused. Also, while positive complementarity is usually vis-à-vis state parties (or referrals), it is...