Author: asbower

Today’s plenary sessions were dedicated to initial discussions of the proposed amendments, with the crime of aggression unsurprisingly taking up the vast majority of the time (approximately 5 hours to the 1 hour set aside for discussion of Art’s 8 and 124 combined). Today can be understood as a “temperature-taking” day, with delegations providing statements of their positions or more generalized references to principles or values they wished to invoke as guiding the final negotiations. All also found ample time to congratulate the chair, Price Zeid of Jordan, for his stewardship.

At this point a number of potential points of contention remain to be resolved, principally concerning how the Court will gain jurisdiction over the crime (the so called “filters”) and how any provision will take effect. Debates have circled around whether the UN Security Council would be entrusted as the sole body capable of determining an act of aggression had occurred (the filter), and whether the alleged aggressor state must first accept the consent to the Court’s authority for a case to go ahead. Four main options for combining these two features have emerged, which can be classified from least to most “robust”: UN Security Council as the only filter and aggressor must consent; UNSC filter and no aggressor state consent; UNSC + alternative filters (General Assembly, International Court of Justice, or authority within the Court itself) and aggressor state consent; and finally, alternative (and especially internal ICC) filters and no aggressor state consent.

Further muddying the waters is the question of when and how any accepted amendment would enter into force, and a significant division remains concerning two differing interpretations of how this might go ahead. If all this appears convoluted and confusing it is because, well, it is. Today the delegations of Brazil, Argentina, and Switzerland proposed a sort of hybrid solution which presents a number of interesting and perplexing challenges.  As it’s late on a Friday eve here, I will leave this for now, but we’ll get a more substantive post on this topic up soon, and will be following–and reporting on–developments closely next week.

By Asad Kiyani

The Review Conference will debate a number of proposed amendments to the Rome Statute.  One that will not be discussed – at least as a formal amendment – is the proposal tabled by South Africa to alter the provisions of Article 16 of the Statute.  As noted in a previous post, this proposal is rooted in the African Union’s response to the indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

What is Article 16?

Article 16 is the deferral provision of the Rome Statute. It permits the UN Security Council to suspend any investigations or proceedings for a period of 12 months by passing a resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.  After the one-year has passed, the deferral may be renewed (and renewed repeatedly) for a further 12 months.

The stocktaking sessions continue today, with various formal panels and side-events on complementarity and cooperation.

The morning plenary session addressed complementarity, which frames the relationship between the ICC and national jurisdictions and when a particular case may be admissible before the Court. The Rome Statute establishes that the ICC is complementary, rather than superior, to state legal processes; this diverges from the practice of the ad hoc tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, in which the international court took prominence over national courts. In short, the Rome Statute–as per Article 17–states that the Court shall defer to national processes “unless the State is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution”. What this means in practice has been the subject of an extensive debate among scholars and practitioners, and this process has continued here at the Review Conference. There are at least two core issues bound-up in this discussion: how does a state demonstrate its ability and willingness; and relatedly, who makes the final determination in assessing admissibility?

With the plenary sessions (where national delegations delivered their official statements) now completed, attention has turned to the so-called stocktaking sessions.  These 3-hour panel discussions will address four topics: the relationship of the Court to victims and affected communities, and peace and justice are on the agenda today.  Tomorrow will see sessions on complementarity and cooperation.  These offer a different format from the more static set-piece speeches of Monday and Tuesday.  The panels are composed of a mix of legal experts and practitioners, with a variety of geographic regions and issues represented.   A set of parallel civil society stocktaking sessions with academics and non-governmental experts round out this experience.

In many respects, these panels resemble those of an academic conference: each panelist is given a defined period of time (here approximately five minutes) to make a statement, with a question period afterward.  Having observed three sessions, I wonder whether–and how–these panels contribute to the goals of promoting understanding and improvement of the Court’s operations.

Internet access here at the conference venue has been extremely patchy.  Unfortunately, bandwidth limitations seem to have increased today, and this has greatly impacted our ability to post to this blog.  Here’s hoping that the technical challenges will improve.  In the meantime, bear with us.

In addition to the longer blog posts, we will endeavour to provide some real-time coverage of happenings at the Rev Con via Twitter.  A sidebar on the left-hand side of the blog will contain scrolling updates, but you can follow a wide array of commentators through the #ICC and #RevCon tags.

We will also be tweeting our own short impressions at www.twitter.com/asbower and www.twitter.com/cjtenove.

And away we go…

Today is Day 1 of the Review Conference.  The morning session will consist of the official opening of the conference, so there will be much pomp and circumstance as national delegates are welcomed with speeches from the current President of the ICC Assembly of States Parties, ICC Chief Prosecutor, UN Secretary General, the past UN Sec. Gen. Kofi Annan, and President of Uganda.  The afternoon session will see the first round of statements from national delegations; this will continue tomorrow in both the morning and afternoon sessions.  There will also be a number of side-events hosted by non-governmental organizations which will run concurrently with the official plenary sessions.  So, much to digest.

As I write this, the stars of the morning session are taking their seats at the dais, so it looks as if we’re about to get underway.  More from us today and each day as the conference develops.

How should we understand the purpose of the International Criminal Court? The Rome Statute is a dense and intricate document, as it incorporates an extensive set of principles and procedural rules drawn from international humanitarian, criminal, and human rights law. As such, identifying the ICC’s core functions and contributions can be difficult.

Notwithstanding this complexity, it is possible to identify a set of features that form the basis of the ICC legal regime. Understanding the “meaning” of the International Criminal Court requires attention to both its underlying norms, and the particular configuration of rules designed to achieve these ends. Here I present a brief schema of the primary features of the ICC regime. This is an imperfect exercise, as norms and rules are ideal types which are often difficult to distinguish in practice – so suggestions on other ways to conceptualise the ICC are most welcome!