Regionalisation of the International Criminal Court

One of the basic justifications for establishing a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) is the understanding that in case of gross human rights violations not only the affected peoples but rather humanity itself is the victim of these crimes. This notion requires that atrocities on this scale must be addressed by a truly international rather than regional criminal law defining the elements of the commission of these crimes and setting a universal standard of procedure. Acknowledging the practical disadvantages of a centralised court in The Hague this paper highlights the dangers that regionalisation means for the development of a corpus of international criminal law proper. Many of the weaknesses of the Rome Statute are based on the fact that the negotiating States needed to find compromises reflecting all major law families as well as encouraging enough signatories to accept the court's jurisdiction. Thus, many of the most sensitive questions are not yet solved and are unlikely to be clarified in sufficient detail by the Review Conference. Although the Rome Statute allows for only very limited judicial discretion these problems will need to be rectified by judicial decision making on a case to case basis. The author argues that the establishment of regional criminal courts will undermine the development of a fully fledged body of international criminal law by diverting cases from the ICC, developing different families of multinational law and furthermore fragmentising case development in this area of law. The ICC needs to develop a justice system that accommodates the needs of regions rather than regionalisation weakening the young court and thereby international criminal law in general