Part 5 Investigation and Prosecution: Enquête Et Poursuites, Art.60 Initial proceedings before the Court/Procédure initiale devant la cour

Author(s):  
Schabas William A

This chapter comments on Article 60 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article 60 governs the initial appearance of the suspect before the Court. It mainly concerns the issue of interim release once the suspect is in the Court's custody. The title of article 60, ‘Initial proceedings before the Court’, is only partially accurate because a great deal of judicial activity occurs between the issuance of an arrest warrant or a summons to appear, governed by article 58, the arrest in the custodial State pursuant to article 59, and the confirmation hearing held in accordance with article 61. This process typically takes about a year. With some exceptions, the suspect will spend this period in the Court's Detention Unit in The Hague.

Author(s):  
Schabas William A

This chapter comments on Article 59 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article 59 requires that the custodial State ‘act expeditiously in the surrender of persons subject to an arrest warrant issued by the Court’. By exhaustively listing the issues which the custodial State shall examine, article 59 also safeguards the competence and decisions of the Court, most notably by preventing national authorities from examining the validity of the warrant of arrest. Unlike most provisions of the Rome Statute, article 59 is likely to be read, interpreted, and applied by national judges. Combined with national implementing legislation, they will put into effect the obligations of arrest, the verification of the conditions under which it was carried out, and the granting of interim release. The role of the Pre-Trial Chamber ‘with respect to proceedings under article 59 of the Statute is limited to verifying that the basic safeguards envisaged by national law have been made available to the arrested person’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-109
Author(s):  
Angela Mudukuti

In 2009, the International Criminal Court (ICC) stepped into uncharted waters as it issued its first arrest warrant for a sitting head of state, then President of Sudan Omar Al-Bashir. Following the UN Security Council's referral of the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan to the ICC, Al-Bashir was charged by the Court with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and in 2010, he was also charged with genocide. As a consequence, all of the states parties to the Rome Statute had a duty to arrest Al-Bashir. Several states have nonetheless failed to arrest him during country visits, allowing Al-Bashir to evade the ICC. This has given rise to a number of cases before the ICC Chambers, including this Appeals Chamber judgment regarding the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.


2005 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Peter Kaul

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was officially opened in The Hague on March 11, 2003, in a special ceremony attended by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan. Less than four years after the historic breakthrough by the Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries in Rome on July 17, 1998, the Statute of the ICC had entered into force on July 1, 2002. The required number of sixty ratifications, which is laid down in Article 126, paragraph 1 of the Rome Statute, was reached much faster than for other comparable multilateral treaties and faster than had been expected by the global public. Secretary-General Annan attracted widespread attention when he observed that July 1, 2002, was a decisive landmark in breaking with the cynical worldview of people like Joseph Stalin, who is alleged to have remarked that while “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-93
Author(s):  
Patrick Kimani

The development of international criminal law in the last seven decades has seen a gradual erosion of the integrity of immunities for heads of states. The journey from Nuremberg to The Hague has resulted in a permanent international criminal court. Article 27(2) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (the Rome Statute) disregards immunities as an effective bar to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Heads of states have been stripped of their ‘invisibility cloak’ from international criminal prosecutions. The Rome Statute places its reliance on the situation state’s authorities to cooperate with the ICC in its investigation and prosecution of crimes. A special tension is noticeable in circumstances where an incumbent head of state is accused at ICC while his or her state is placed under the general cooperation obligation. This tension is clearly manifest in the two criminal processes against Uhuru Kenyatta and Al Bashir. Bearing in mind the significant political muscle a sitting head of state wields in their state, it is quite likely that their state’s authorities will be very reluctant to discharge their cooperation obligations. The prosecution of sitting heads of states remains a challenge. Is it time to rethink the structure of the ICC or the implementation of the Statute?


Author(s):  
Geert-Jan Alexander Knoops

In 2017 the International Criminal Court saw a number of significant developments in its handling of complex substantive issues. In the Ntaganda and the Gbagbo and Blé Goudé cases, the court delivered noteworthy decisions on procedural and substantive issues. In the Al Mahdi case, a Reparations Order was issued, confirming certain principles established in the Lubanga case. In the Bemba et al. contempt case, a sentencing decision was handed down by the Court, which addressed novel issues involving the interpretation of Article 76 of the Rome Statute. Moreover, an arrest warrant was issued against Mr. Al-Werfalli in the situation of Libya, which almost entirely relied upon social media evidence, demonstrating a rising trend in the use of digital evidence. Additionally, the Prosecution expanded its investigations, and requested to initiate investigations in Afghanistan and in Burundi. At the same time the ICC jurisdiction was expanded to include the crime of aggression.


Author(s):  
Schabas William A

This chapter comments on Article 62 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article 62 establishes the seat of the Court as the place of the trial. International courts have a ‘seat’. It is where they ‘sit’. Article 3, entitled ‘Seat of the Court’, specifies that the seat ‘shall be established at The Hague in the Netherlands’. It does not state clearly that the Court is to sit, as a general rule, in The Hague, but this is implied by paragraph 3 of article 3. Article 62 seems somewhat redundant and even confusing. Taken literally, its placement in Part 6 of the Statute (‘The Trial’) might be taken to indicate, a contrario, that other proceedings, both pre- and post-trial, must be held in The Hague at the seat of the Court. But that seems to be an absurd result.


Author(s):  
Schabas William A

This chapter comments on Article 3 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article consists of three paragraphs. Article 3(1) establishes The Hague as the seat of the Court. Paragraph (1) is mandatory, and does not allow for the seat of the Court to be located elsewhere, absent an amendment of the Statute. The Statute also specifies that the Netherlands is the ‘host State’. Article 3(2) requires that there be a Headquarters Agreement between the Court and the host State. Article 3(3) states that The Court may sit elsewhere, whenever it considers it desirable, ‘as provided in the Statute’.


Author(s):  
Schabas William A

This chapter comments on Article 63 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article 63 establishes the right of the accused to be present at trial. For some pre-trial proceedings it is either implicit or explicit that the accused will not be present. This is the case, for example, in the hearing before the Pre-Trial Chamber on a decision by the Prosecutor not to proceed, the taking of evidence in the case of a ‘unique investigative opportunity’, and the issuance of an arrest warrant or summons. A right to be present is specifically provided for some pre-trial proceedings, such as the confirmation hearing. However, the Pre-Trial Chamber is also authorized to hold a confirmation hearing in the absence of the defendant.


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