Sovereignty and Justice: Balancing the Principle of Complementarity between International and Domestic War Crimes Tribunals

Mark S. Ellis

Apr 2014 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Ebook

325

Pages

Eligible

About this ebook

The drafters of the ICC’s founding document, the Rome Statute, foresaw what would become the main challenge to the Court’s legitimacy: that it could violate national sovereignty. To address this concern, the drafters added the principle of complementarity to the ICC’s jurisdiction, in that the Court’s province merely complements the exercise of jurisdiction by the domestic courts of the Statute’s member states. The ICC honours the authority of those states to conduct their own trials.

However, if the principle of complementarity is to be applied, states must ensure that their own judicial systems and trials are consistent with international standards of independence and fairness.

In addition, for complementarity to work, the ICC must be willing to actively support, embrace, and implement the principle. If the Court holds on too tightly to a self-aggrandising view of its role in promoting international justice, then it will lose all credibility in the eyes of nation states.

Finally, the international community, in calling on states to address war crimes committed within their borders, must provide the financial, technical, and professional resources that many struggling states need in this endeavour. This book sets forth several innovative recommendations to fulfil these goals so as to make future domestic war crimes courts work more effectively.

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About the author

Mark S. Ellis is Executive Director of the International Bar Association (IBA), the foremost international organization of bar associations, law firms and individual lawyers in the world. Dr Ellis has published extensively in the area of international law, and his op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, and The Times. Dr Ellis served as Legal Advisor to the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, and was appointed by the OSCE to advise on the creation of Serbia’s War Crimes Court and acted as legal advisor to the defense team at the Cambodian War Crimes Court (ECCC). He was actively involved with the Iraqi High Tribunal, and is a member of the Disciplinary Advisory Panel to the Defense Counsel for the ICTY and ICTR. Twice a Fulbright Scholar at the Ekonomski Institute in Zagreb, Croatia, he earned his J.D. and B.S. (Economics) degrees from Florida State University and his PhD in Law from King’s College, London. He serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of National Security Law and Policy and The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law.

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