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Self-Referring to the International Criminal Court: A Continuation of War by Other Means

Part of: TWAIL Perspectives on ICL, IHL, and Intervention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Parvathi Menon
Parvathi Menon*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute of Procedure Luxembourg
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Weak sub-Saharan African states use international law and its institutions to legitimate their actions and delegitimate their internal enemies. In this essay, I argue that during internal armed conflicts, African states use international criminal law to redefine the conflict as international and thereby rebrand domestic political opponents as international criminals/enemies who are a threat to the entire community. This in turn sets the stage for invoking belligerent privileges under international humanitarian law (IHL).

Type
Symposium on TWAIL Perspectives on ICL, IHL, and Intervention
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 109 , 2015 , pp. 260 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2015

References

1 ICC, Press Release, President of Uganda refers situation concerning the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to the ICC (2004).

2 ICC, Press Release, Prosecutor receives referral of the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2004).

3 ICC, Press Release, Prosecutor receives referral concerning Central African Republic (2005).

4 Présidence de la République de Côte d’Ivoire, Letter to the President of the International Criminal Court (Dec. 14, 2010).

5 ICC, Press Release, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on the Malian State referral of the situation in Mali since January 2012 (2012).

6 Government of Mali, Referral Letter (2012).

7 ICC, Press Release, ICC Prosecutor opens investigation into war crimes in Mali: “The legal requirements have been met. We will investigate” (2013).

8 OTP, Situation in Mali: Article 53(1) Report (2013).

9 Nouwen, Sarah M. H. & Werner, Wouter G., Doing Justice to the Political: The International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan, 21 Eur. J. Int’l. L. 941, 951-953 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Id. at 950.

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13 SC Res. 2085 (Dec. 20, 2012).

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15 International Crisis Group, Northern Uganda: Understanding and Solving the Conflict 2 (2004).

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17 AFP, CAR: African peacekeepers to treat ‘anti-balaka’ as enemies, Africa Rev., Mar. 26, 2014.

18 Prosecutor v. Krnojelac, Case No. IT-97-25-T, Judgment, para. 54 (Int’l Crim. Trib. For the Former Yugoslavia Mar. 15, 2002).

19 Prosecutor v. Akayesu, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgment (Sep. 2, 1998).

20 Prosecutor v. Lubanga, ICC-01/04-01/06, Judgment (Mar. 14, 2012).

21 See Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter (2011), Gender Trouble (1991), Excitable Speech (1997) and her article Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporar y Scene of Utterance, 23 Critical Inquiry 350 (1997)Google Scholar.

22 See, e.g., Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2004); Chimni, B.S., The Past, Present and Future of International Law: A Critical Third World Approach, 8 Melb. J. Int’l L. 499 (2007)Google Scholar.

23 See Mahmood Mamdani, Darfur, ICC and the New Humanitarian Order: How the ICC’s “Responsibility to Protect” Is Being Turned into an Assertion of Neo-Colonial Domination, Pambazuka News, Sep. 17, 2008.

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25 Robinson, Darryl, The Controversies over Territorial State Referrals and Reflections on ICL Discourse, 9 J. Int’l Crim. Just. 355 (2011)Google Scholar.

26 Akhavan, Payam, Self-referrals before the International Criminal Court: Are States the Villains or the Victims of Atrocities? 21 Crim. L. F. 103 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.