The International Criminal Court; A Road To Justice Or A Political Highway



Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION3

Background3

Purpose of the study7

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW8

The Historical Background To The ICC8

The Rome Statute And Its Negotiation21

The ICC And International Politics23

Theories Of Value Pluralism31

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY33

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION39

CHAPTER 5:CONCLUSION55

ENDNOTES59

PROPOSAL67

The International Criminal Court; A Road To Justice Or A Political Highway



Chapter 1: Introduction

Background

On 11 April 2002, ten states deposited their instruments of ratification of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the United Nations (UN), taking the number of ratifications to 66 — six more than required. This event triggered the coming into force of the ICC as of 1 July 2002. While it is expected that it will take up to a year for the Court to be fully functional, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, heralded the Court's birth by stating that, 'The long-held dream of the International Criminal Court will now be realized . . . [I]mpunity has been dealt a decisive blow'.

The ICC sets out to hold individuals — not states — accountable for gross violations of human rights by establishing 'a permanent institution (that) shall have the power to exercise its jurisdiction over persons for the most serious crimes of international concern . . . and shall be complementary to national criminal jurisdiction'. The Court has universal jurisdiction to indict, prosecute and punish individuals deemed to have violated, in a serious manner, the human rights of individuals and groups according to an ever growing body of international humanitarian law when the judicial systems of sovereign states have proved incapable or reluctant to do so. As laid out in Article 5 of the Rome Statute, the ICC is granted jurisdiction over four sets of crimes: genocide; crimes against humanity; war crimes, and crimes of aggression (the so-called 'core-crimes').

In effect, the ICC is intended to pursue, prosecute and punish those individuals who have ordered, induced, assisted, abetted or committed crimes which are deemed to be of international 'concern' in that they violate the rights and conscience, not of nation-states or the international system, but of particular victims and humanity as a whole. What follows is: an account of the historical background to the ICC; an overview of the Court's Statute and remit; and a discussion of the Court's international effects and major contemporary problems that it faces, both in theory and in practice.

To the lawyer, the ICC represents the culmination of a long and complex history of conventions, treaties, precedent and practice — such as the Nuremberg and Hague/Yugoslavia tribunals — which has as its foundation the moral and legal concern of defining and protecting certain rights of man which were increasingly considered universal. The heightened concern over the protection of human rights in the twentieth century, and especially since 1945, has added weight to demands for the codification and universalization of individual rights which were previously either attended to in an ad hoc fashion and/or fell foul of public international law and its inherent dichotomy between international justice and the sanctity of state ...