The Court also faces major challenges in carrying out its mandate. Without a police, it relies on States to cooperate on arrests, and that cooperation has been insufficient. Arrest warrants are still pending for 14 people. ICC member states have also been reluctant to make the necessary budget increases, even as the court`s workload has increased. Under President Donald Trump`s administration, the U.S. government has said it will not cooperate with the ICC and has threatened retaliation against ICC employees and member countries if the court investigates U.S. or allied citizens. Then-National Security Advisor John Bolton first announced this approach in September 2018. Two weeks later, President Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly and said that “the United States will not provide any support or recognition to the International Criminal Court. As for America, the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy and no authority.

On September 10, 2018, John R. Bolton, in his first major speech as U.S. National Security Advisor, reiterated that the ICC lacks a separation of powers, that it “exercises jurisdiction over crimes that have controversial and ambiguous definitions,” and that it has failed to “deter and punish atrocities.” The ICC, Bolton said, is “superfluous” because “domestic judicial systems already require U.S. citizens to uphold the highest legal and ethical standards.” He added that the US would do everything “to protect our citizens” if the ICC tried to prosecute US soldiers for alleged mistreatment of prisoners in Afghanistan. In that case, ICC judges and prosecutors would be barred from entering the United States, their funds would be sanctioned in the United States, and the United States would “prosecute them in the U.S. criminal justice system. We will do the same for any company or state that supports an ICC investigation of Americans,” Bolton said. He also criticized Palestinian efforts to bring Israel before the ICC over allegations of human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. [292] f) The involvement of domestic and foreign courts has, to some extent, removed the specter of genocide and other massive crimes from our milieu.[55] Trinidad and Tobago requested a UN commission in 1989 to investigate the establishment of a permanent tribunal.

In the following years, these efforts were particularly popular in Europe and Africa. As Michelle Gavin of the CFR points out, African countries make up the largest bloc of ICC members. The European Union is also a strong supporter of the Court of Justice; it adopted a binding policy [PDF] in support of the ICC in 2011. The Court has jurisdiction over four categories of crimes under international law: After World War II, the Allied Powers established two ad hoc tribunals to prosecute Axis leaders accused of war crimes. The International Military Tribunal, sitting at Nuremberg, persecuted German leaders, while the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo prosecuted Japanese leaders. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly recognized for the first time the need for a permanent international tribunal to deal with atrocities committed after the Second World War. [4] At the request of the General Assembly, the International Law Commission (ILC) drafted two statutes until the early 1950s, but these were put on hold during the Cold War. this made the creation of an International Criminal Court politically unrealistic. [5] The court may open an investigation into possible criminal offences in one of three ways: a member country may refer a situation on its own territory to the court; the UN Security Council can refer a situation; Or the prosecutor can open investigations against an ex officio member of a member state or “on his own initiative”.

The court may investigate persons from third countries if the alleged offences were committed on the territory of a Member State, if the third country recognises the jurisdiction of the court or with the authorisation of the Security Council. Burundi withdrew from the ICC in October 2017 and the Philippines` withdrawal declaration entered into force in March 2019. An attempt by the Kenyan government – at a time when its president and vice president were on trial – to carry out a massive withdrawal of African states from the treaty failed. The refusal of a non-party State to cooperate, or perhaps even to take steps to actively thwart an investigation, initiated by an international tribunal established by a multilateral treaty that the State has not ratified, does not necessarily involve the question of judicial independence. This can reasonably be characterized as the exercise of legitimate sovereign authority to resist and counter institutional encroachments – perceived or real, depending on one`s perspective. Benjamin B. Ferencz, an investigator into post-World War II Nazi war crimes and the U.S. military`s chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trial, became a strong advocate for the establishment of the international rule of law and an international criminal court. In his first book, Defining International Aggression: The Search for World Peace, published in 1975, he advocated the creation of such a tribunal. [6] A second great supporter was Robert Kurt Woetzel, who was co-editor of Towards a Sustainable International Criminal Court in 1970 and founded the Foundation for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court in 1971.

In the ongoing discussion of the “relationship” between non-member states and the ICC, the distinction between “impartial trials” and the more dependent “international judicial institution” should remain clear. The domestic political opposition, which increases and decreases with the political climate and which the United States has expressed at the ICC since the final days of the Rome Conference in 1998, is directed more against a degree of institutional independence perceived to exceed the court`s mandate than against the judicial independence associated with a particular ongoing criminal case. This possible conceptual limitation is based on the principle of legality or nullum crimen sine lege (“no crime without law”). The effects of the principle of legality will be mitigated if only the “essential offences” referred to in Article 5 are taken into account. Since most of the provisions of article 5 of the Rome Statute are normal in nature, jurisdiction ratione materiae is not a concern of any State or international tribunal to prosecute such offences (for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, I consider that certain provisions of articles 8 and 8bis exclude all provisions from this list of common offences).