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30 Jun

The ICC’s case in support of the genocide charge is taking a beating, as this Washington Post article details. The problem might be Moreno-Ocampo’s erratic leadership, or it could be the ICC as a whole has too many brilliant ambitious lawyers with not nearly enough to do. So they are quietly undermining Moreno-Ocampo by resigning or by writing articles critical of him. In any event, it is hard to imagine the amount of damage that the ICC will sustain if it eventually has to withdraw the genocide charges against Sudan....
30.06.09 | |

19 Mar

course, the Court’s lack of effect on preventing the use of child soldiers in the DRC and bringing other wanted perpetrators to justice is, in large part, the result of a lack of interest and cooperation – both from the DRC and the international community. After all, Ntaganda isn’t running amok in the DRC because of the Court. But the ICC isn’t entirely blameless either. The ICC apparently did nothing to ensure that there was a screening of the Lubanga verdict in key urban centers. This was especially frustrating to...
19.03.12 | |

24 Feb

Reprieve, the excellent British human-rights organisation, has submitted a communication to the ICC asking it to investigate NATO personnel involved in CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Here is Reprieve’s press release: Drone victims are today lodging a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing NATO member states of war crimes over their role in facilitating the US’s covert drone programme in Pakistan. It has been revealed in recent months that the UK, Germany, Australia, and other NATO partners support US drone strikes through intelligence-sharing. Because all these countries are...
24.02.14 | |

26 Aug

and only 29 percent thought the ICC was the proper institution for any trials. The latest noises emerging from the peace negotiations suggests that government and rebel leaders will set up a special national court for war crimes and, at the same time, seek a withdrawal of ICC arrest warrants. This seems like a promising route, but will the ICC withdraw its warrants? It would depend on the nature of the national court set up, but it will be tough for an ICC prosecutor to say no in such circumstances....
26.08.07 | |

07 Aug

As I discuss in the podcast, Palestine has two roads to a potential ICC investigation of Operation Protective Edge: (1) accept the Court’s jurisdiction on an ad hoc basis retroactive to 29 November 2012, the date of UNGA Res. 69/17; or (2) ratify the Rome Statute and then file an ad hoc declaration retroactive to 29 November 2012. Although both roads would give the ICC jurisdiction over the situation in Gaza, there is actually a critical procedural difference between them — assuming that the OTP wanted to investigate (which I...
07.08.14 | |

18 Jan

ICC would be withdrawn if Israel were to freeze settlement construction, and added that the Palestinian Authority had conveyed to Israel an official message to that effect, through Jordan and Egypt. Unfortunately, the Rome Statute does not allow Palestine to pursue this kind of bargaining strategy. To begin with, now that Palestine has submitted an Article 12(3) declaration and ratified the Rome Statute, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has no say in what, if anything, the OTP decides to investigate. If the OTP wants to investigate only Hamas’s rocket attacks, it...
18.01.15 | |

22 Aug

the normative desirability of prosecuting [perpetrators of crimes against humanity]” (par 27). From a broader perspective, the international prohibition of torture, like other international crimes, is a value-driven norm that exists for the purpose of punishing torturers as hostis humani generis wherever they may have committed the act of torture and through such punishment, to entrench the values for which the prohibition exists. Torture as a crime against humanity is criminalised under South Africa’s ICC Act. The SALC-judgment affirms the ICC Act as part of the supranational framework of criminal...
22.08.13 | |

28 Apr

Whoops, spoke too soon about the WSJ‘s anti-ICC editorial. It does indeed contain a lie — and its a doozy: What’s more, no amount of reform of the founding treaty will change the ICC’s inherent flaw. The ICC is a child of the doctrine of “universal jurisdiction,” which holds that courts can adjudicate crimes committed anywhere in the world. As anyone who has spent five minutes reading the Rome Statue knows, the Court is based on two forms of jurisdiction: territorial and active-nationality. Both of which the U.S. uses and...
28.04.10 | |

14 Aug

ICC involvement in South Ossetia would thus represent a considerable shift in policy toward the Court, perhaps opening the door to eventual ratification of the Rome Statute — which would be a very good thing, both for Russia and for the ICC. We will see what happens. Human Rights Watch has already publicly claimed that Russia is deliberately exaggerating the number of civilian casualties in South Ossetia. If that’s true, Russia’s ICC claims may prove to be all talk and no action. UPDATE: You can’t trust the media to get...
14.08.08 | |

04 Mar

As readers no doubt know, Fatou Bensouda announced yesterday that the OTP is opening a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine. Doing so was a foregone conclusion, given the Pre-Trial Chamber’s recent decision that the ICC has jurisdiction over crimes committed in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Regardless, even if the bulk of the work will fall to her successor, Karim Khan, Bensouda deserves credit for not being cowed by Israel’s ridiculous allegations of anti-semitism or by the US’s indefensible sanctions against her, which the Biden administration...
04.03.21 | |

29 May

attempt to find a solution for the looming conflict and...transferred the question of Palestine to the United Nations." The future of Palestine's fate was then placed "into the hands of a Special Committee for Palestine, UNSCOP, none of whose members turned out to have any prior experience in solving conflicts or knew much about Palestine's history." It was UNSCOP that "recommended to the UN General Assembly to partition Palestine into two states, bound together federation-like by economic unity. It further recommended that the City of Jerusalem would be established as...
29.05.07 | |

08 Jun

...that the US government had officially recognized the State of Palestine in 1932: "The contention of the plaintiff that Palestine, while under the League of Nations mandate, was not a foreign state within the meaning of the statute is wholly without merit. . . . Furthermore, it is not for the judiciary, but for the political branches of the Government to determine that Palestine at that time was a foreign state. This the Executive branch of the Government did in 1932 with respect to the operation of the most favored...
08.06.15 | |