The Sort of Justice the ICC Can and Cannot Deliver


Sarah Nouwen is a lecturer in law at the University of Cambridge, Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and fellow of Pembroke College. She is the author of Complementarity in the Line of Fire: The Catalysing Effect of the International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan (Cambridge University Press, 2013)


David Bosco’s Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics is not just fluently written and rich in original interview materials. It also makes an important argument: the relationship between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the world’s most powerful states has been one of mutual accommodation. In Bosco’s terminology, major powers may not have ‘marginalised’ the Court (or, in the case of the United States: it has shifted away from doing so), but they do to some extent ‘control’ the Court. They do so as members of the Security Council, shaping the Court’s docket by referring situations to the Court without providing additional funding, thereby absorbing the Court’s capacity for the situations they consider warranting investigations; through signalling their preferences and dislikes in informal meetings with ICC officials; and by providing information and other forms of assistance in situations where they are happy with ICC involvement, and withholding it where they are not. The ICC, for its part, does not take direct instructions from the major powers, but has internalised their wishes in its decision-making processes, particularly when deciding whether to open an investigation. It has not challenged the ways in which the Security Council has attempted to shape the Court’s jurisdiction, even where resolutions tried to exclude people from the Court’s personal jurisdiction, and it has not opened investigations in situations where the major powers would object. As a result of this mutual accommodation, the major powers have not merely tolerated the Court but, in some specific instances, even actively supported it.

The argument is important even if not surprising. To anyone who has observed the actions of the ICC over the past ten years it seems evident that the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) has opened investigations only where the major powers have given a ‘no-objection’ indication (eight African states), while it has taken no action beyond a ‘preliminary examination’ where the major powers have great interests (for instance, Afghanistan, Colombia, Georgia, and now, Palestine). It also comes as no surprise to scholars participating in conferences during which diplomats representing the major powers (in fact, mostly the US) signal to ICC judges on the front row of the same audience how the ICC should act—posing rhetorical questions that require no answer from the academic panel, but follow-up in practice. It comes as no surprise to attendants of the annual Assembly of States Parties, where the US, not a state party, has a bigger representation than many a state party. And it comes as no surprise to those who frequent diplomatic receptions in The Hague, where ICC officials mingle freely with European and US representatives.

The argument is important because of the way in which Bosco makes it. First, it is common for this argument to be made by observers, only to be contested by Court officials who insist that the current distribution of ICC activities around the world is the result of the pure application of law. Having extensively interviewed ICC officials and major-power representatives, Bosco, however, deploys his interview material in such a way that it is almost as if the officials themselves are making his argument for him. In the interviews, some court officials seem to express a sense of pride in their political savviness and satisfaction with their ability to placate the United States. As Bosco also points out, they often stress, in the same breath, their legal independence as well as their political usefulness. In this sense, the book reads as an inadvertent ‘coming out’ of a court that reveals its political nature to a world that had known all along.

Secondly, Bosco’s book sheds light on the various ways in which this mutual accommodation takes place and shows its nuances. For instance, he distinguishes between the Prosecutor’s great-power sensitive attitude in opening investigations and the bolder approach in selecting cases within those situations. More nuances could be explored — for example, to what extent does his argument apply only to the OTP and to what extent also to the judges? And does his entire argument apply to all nine states that he considers major powers (the P5 + Japan, Germany, Brazil and India)? Has the Court been as deferential to, for instance, Brazil as to the US?

The implications of this important argument are mostly left to the reader to surmise. Bosco seems to end on both a realistic and an optimistic note. Realistic in the sense that he concludes that the Court is more likely to reflect the double standards of existing global governance structures than to alter them. Optimistic in that he argues that other international justice initiatives (among which the post-WWII tribunals and the courts for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda) were similarly constrained, and yet were celebrated and served as inspiration for the ICC. He concludes that it would therefore ‘not be surprising if the world is willing to tolerate an international justice system constrained by major-power interests’.

There is reason to pause here. Were these tribunals truly celebrated, universally? One could argue that it was not their success, but their major shortcoming — selective justice — that served as inspiration for the creation of a permanent international criminal court with potentially global jurisdiction. Many non-major-power states signed up to the ICC precisely because of its promise of equality before the law: this international institution might be able to do what less powerful states could not do individually, namely hold the more powerful states, through their individuals, to account. Hence the insistence of many developing countries that the Court’s jurisdiction included the crime of aggression, a crime characteristically committed by the more powerful vis-à-vis the less powerful. The other side of Bosco’s argument that major powers control an international court is thus that smaller powers, in particular developing countries, have suffered yet another disillusionment in the emancipatory potential of international law (for other examples of international law’s boomeranging against those states taken by its promise of equality, see Sundhya Pahuja’s “Decolonising International Law”).

The implications of Bosco’s cogent argument are thus potentially much grimmer than he suggests, and many could be mentioned. But let’s focus here on two, namely one related to what the Court cannot do and one concerning what type of justice the ICC actually does. The ICC was established as a permanent international criminal court, complementary to national criminal jurisdictions, to investigate and prosecute international crimes within its jurisdiction with a view to addressing impunity. Pursuant to the complementarity principle, the Court is meant to address impunity in those instances where a case is not being, or has not been, genuinely investigated or prosecuted at the domestic level. One of the key causes of impunity at the domestic level is the pervasiveness of patronage systems, namely systems in which governments obtain loyalty from powerful actors in exchange for arms, government positions, cash, security, and indeed, impunity. In such scenarios, the state is unwilling or unable to call perpetrators to account, leading to an absence of genuine proceedings, and thus to admissibility of cases before the ICC. However, as Bosco’s argument suggests, the ICC itself is also embedded in a de facto patronage network: to some extent it accepts impunity with respect to powers on whose cooperation it depends in order to achieve accountability for others. Consequently, it is not just states but sometimes also the Court that is inactive. However, there is no ‘court of final resort’ to back up ‘the court of last resort’. Some types of impunity thus appear beyond the reach of the Rome Statute.

If justice is interpreted to mean criminal accountability, then the fact that some people are shielded from such justice does not mean that others should or would therefore go scot-free, too (see also the ICTY in Čelebići, para. 618). On that view of justice, a Court subjected to major-power political constraints seems better than no Court: every bit of accountability is welcome. However, as soon as one adopts a more holistic conception of justice, the continued selective operations of the Court are more problematic. For instance, if one considers equality before the law as an element of justice, then the current practice may do more harm than good: material inequality among states leads to de facto inequality among individuals. Moreover, by cloaking that inequality in legal procedures and arguing that all the Court does is follow the law, the Court is effectively affirming material inequality among states, and transforming it into a juridically relevant fact, thus justifying a departure from the principle of equality and legitimising and further entrenching inequality (see, more elaborately, here). That inequality does not merely dictate who ends up in the Court’s detention centre and who does not. It also determines who intervenes where in the world under the legitimising cloak of international criminal justice. Bosco shows how an initially anti-ICC US Government favoured the Court’s intervention in northern Uganda because it provided a hook for more western military involvement in Africa. And the ICC bestows such military operations with legitimacy, sometimes even explicitly. For instance, an OTP official has stated:

“We have our shopping list ready of requests for assistance from the American government … The American government first has to lead on one particular issue: the arrest of sought war criminals. … We need … the operational support of countries like the U.S., to the DRC, to Uganda, to the Central African Republic, to assist them in mounting an operation to arrest [LRA leader Joseph Kony]. They have the will – so it’s a totally legitimate operation, politically, legally – but they need this kind of assistance. And the U.S. has to be the leader.”

Thus, as Adam Branch has observed, ‘the doctrine that some justice is better than no justice can end up not only making justice conform unapologetically to power, but also making justice an unaccountable tool of further violence and injustice’.

Another type of justice negatively affected by the practice of selective criminal accountability is that of distributive justice. As Frédéric Mégret has argued, international criminal justice distributes blame. While in a cosmopolitan vision it does so only among bare individuals, it is in practice also seen to distribute stigma among the communities to whom these individuals belong. With its current focus, the ICC distributes all the blame to Africa. In an attempt to justify this focus, Court officials have painted Africa as the heart of darkness. The OTP, for instance, has stated:

“About targeting Africa. There are 14 accused, all of them are Africans. There are more than 5 million African victims displaced, more than 40.000 African victims killed, thousands of African victims raped. Hundreds of thousands of African children transformed into killers and rapists. 100% of the victims are Africans. 100% of the accused are African.”

By conjuring this bleak image, the OTP not only explicitly justifies its Africa focus. It also implicitly exonerates the rest of the world. The fact that all the attention of the world’s only permanent International Criminal Court is usurped by Africa invariably suggests that the world’s worst crimes and worst criminals reside in and stem from that continent. Crimes committed on other continents, and the role of other actors in creating the conditions for African crimes, thus become officially invisible as a result of the ICC’s averted eye. Selective justice as a result of mutual accommodation between the ICC and major powers thus has unjust distributive effects.

In sum, David Bosco’s argument is more important than his book suggests. For its implication is not merely the obvious one that the ICC cannot overcome all power politics—it is also that in its genuine pursuit to do some justice, it can end up doing some injustice, too.