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7 - Complementarity as global governance

from PART III - Analytical dimensions of complementarity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2014

By
Christoph Burchard
Edited by
Carsten Stahn  and
Mohamed M. El Zeidy
Carsten Stahn
Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
Mohamed M. El Zeidy
Affiliation:
International Criminal Court
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Summary

The traditional understanding of the International Criminal Court's complementarity regime ‘contemplate[s] an institution that may never be employed’. In this contribution, I submit that this understanding misses important theoretical as well as practical facets of complementarity. To arrive at this conclusion, I will analyse the complementarity principle from the point of view of global governance theory. This will reveal that, unlike an ordinary court of (criminal) law, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not only called upon to prosecute international crimes and thus target international criminals; rather, the ICC in general and the complementarity principle in particular, are part of a more comprehensive, multilevelled, polycentric and actor-open enforcement regime of international criminal law. This enforcement regime results from aggregate and complex interactions in networks of state and non-state actors across all geopolitical levels, which can be, but do not necessarily have to be ordered hierarchically. Complementarity as global governance rationalizes the all-too-often irrational division of labour, material resources, information and expertise between these centres of activity; what is more, complementarity as global governance aligns the various actors operating in and between these centres of activity towards a common goal: to end impunity by solving the various deficiencies in the polycentric and multilevelled international atrocities regime. This polycentric setting requires also that third states are taken into the complementarity equation, and that they are to cooperate (be it vertically or via international institutions or horizontally with each other) in all stages of the effectuation of international criminal justice (e.g. by way of ‘anticipated legal assistance’). In reading complementarity as global governance, I suggest rethinking the teleology of the complementarity principle, the pertinent regulatory contexts, the relevant actors and their functions and ambits in order to comprehend more fully the current and future challenges to international criminal justice.

Type
Chapter
Information
The International Criminal Court and Complementarity
From Theory to Practice
 , pp. 167 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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