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The International Criminal Court's Provisional Authority to Coerce

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2012

Antonio Franceschet
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Extract

The United Nations ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had primacy over national judicial agents for crimes committed in these countries during the most notorious civil wars and genocide of the 1990s. The UN Charter granted the Security Council the right to establish a tribunal for Yugoslavia in the context of ongoing civil war and against the will of recalcitrant national agents. The Council used that same right to punish individuals responsible for a genocide that it failed earlier to prevent in Rwanda. In both cases the Council delegated a portion of its coercive title to independent tribunal agents, thereby overriding the default locus of punishment in the world order: sovereign states.

Type
Roundtable: The Political Ethics of the International Criminal Court
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 93 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

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References

NOTES

1 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Preamble.

2 Ibid., art. 17.

3 Hazan, Pierre, Justice in a Time of War: The True Story Behind the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

4 Schabas, William A., An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 190–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Schabas, William A., “Complementarity in Practice: Some Uncomplimentary Thoughts,” Criminal Law Forum 19, no. 1 (October 2007), pp. 5–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Schabas, An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, p. 167.

7 See, e.g., Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, especially arts. 13 and 14.

8 Branch, Adam, “Uganda's Civil War and the Politics of ICC Intervention,” Ethics & International Affairs 21, no. 2 (2007), pp. 179–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 BBC News, “Uganda LRA Rebels Reject Amnesty,” July 7, 2006; news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5157220.stm.

10 Not surprisingly, there have been mixed views about the priority of peace and justice in Uganda. See Allen, Tim, Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord's Resistance Army (London: Zed Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

11 Michael Onyiego, “Legal Challenges Threaten to Undermine ICC Investigation in Kenya,” Voice of America, October 4, 2010; www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/Legal-Challenges-Threaten-to-Undermine-ICC-Investigation-in-Kenya-104287214.html (accessed April 14, 2011).

12 “Dim Prospects: The International Criminal Court Loses Credibility and Co-operation in Africa,” Economist, February 17, 2011.

13 The Kenyan government could not make the case that a deferral was a matter of international peace and security. As Max Du Plessis and Chris Gevers argue, Kenyan officials conflate the principle of complementarity “and the realpolitik exception in Article 16 [of the Rome Statute] that allows international peace and security to temporarily suspend the pursuit of justice.” Max Du Plessis and Chris Gevers, “Kenya's ICC Deferral Request and the Proposed Amendment to Article 16 of the Rome Statute,” EJIL: Talk! February 19, 2011.

14 Ripstein, Arthur, Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy, 1st ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 55.

17 Kant, Immanuel, “Metaphysics of Morals,” in Kleingeld, Pauline, ed., Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 111Google Scholar.

18 Kant, Immanuel, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kleingeld, , ed., Toward Perpetual Peace, p. 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Ibid.; and Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” p. 142.

20 Flikschuh, Katrin, “Kant's Sovereignty Dilemma: A Contemporary Analysis,” Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 4 (December 1, 2010), pp. 469–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 On the notion of transitional justice as a bridging of old and new constitutional and political orders, see Teitel, Ruti G., Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

23 Thakur, Ramesh, “Perks of the Warring States,” Japan Times Online, March 27, 2009Google Scholar; search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20090327rt.html; and Branch, Adam, “International Justice, Local Injustice,” Dissent 51, no. 1 (2004), pp. 22–27Google Scholar.