Inter-National Justice for Them or Global Justice for Us?: The U.S. as a Supranational Justice Donor

U.S. policy concerning international justice, particularly at the ICC, involves case-by-case support when such support is in U.S. national interests. This policy signals that the U.S. considers itself a supranational justice donor rather than a member of a global justice community committed to enforcing shared values. This approach to international criminal justice both inhibits global justice efforts and undermines the U.S. claim to global moral leadership. The next U.S. administration should assert full membership in the global justice community by joining the ICC and providing unequivocal support for all efforts to address serious international crimes

Choosing to Prosecute: Expressive Selection at the International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court (ICC), an institution in its infancy, has had occasion to make only a relatively small number of decisions about which defendants and which crimes to prosecute. But virtually every choice it has made has been attacked: the first defendant, Thomas Lubanga, was not senior enough and the crimes with which he was charged-war crimes involving the use of child soldiers-were not serious enough; the Court should have investigated British soldiers for war crimes committed in Iraq; the ICC should not be prosecuting only rebel perpetrators in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo; the Court\u27s focus on situations in Africa is inappropriate; the Court has focused insufficient attention on gender crimes; and so on. Much of the debate about such selection decisions centers on whether the ICC, and particularly its prosecutor, are improperly motivated by political considerations. Critics charge that selection decisions are inappropriately political, while the Court\u27s current prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, counters that his decisions are apolitical-that he is simply implementing the law enunciated in the ICC\u27s statute. Most recently, some authors have suggested that the prosecutor\u27s role is inevitably political and should be acknowledged as such. The participants in this debate rarely define what they mean by political, nor will this Article attempt such definition. Instead, this Article seeks to reframe the debate about the ICC\u27s selection decisions by shifting from the current focus on the boundaries between legal and political criteria to a constructive dialogue about the most appropriate goals and priorities for the Court. The ICC\u27s core selectivity problem is that the Court lacks sufficiently clear goals and priorities to justify its decisions. States created the ICC to adjudicate the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole, but they gave it a budget that enables only a handful of prosecutions per year. Persons charged with implementing the Court\u27s broad mandate-its prosecutor and judges-must thus select a few cases from among thousands. Yet the international community has provided the Court virtually no guidance about what goals it should seek to achieve through the cases it selects, beyond the vague mandate to strive to end impunity for the most serious crimes

The International Criminal Court’s Gravity Jurisprudence at Ten

This Essay analyzes the Court’s early jurisprudence interpreting the gravity threshold for admissibility. It argues that the threshold, while useful in garnering support for ratification of the Rome Statute, now seems destined to play a minor role in determining the ICC’s reach. While there are multiple possible explanations for this development, an important doctrinal cause identified in the jurisprudence is that the gravity threshold for admissibility is in tension with the Rome Statute’s provisions regarding jurisdiction. At least with regard to the admissibility of cases, the judges have concluded that interpreting the gravity threshold to exclude certain types of defendants or crimes from the Court’s reach would amount to an impermissible revision of the Court’s jurisdiction. To avoid this outcome, the judges have developed a flexible multi-factor approach to the gravity threshold that enables them to justify admitting virtually any case within the Court’s jurisdiction. The Essay concludes by arguing that, in light of the tension between admissibility and jurisdiction, the judges are right to relegate the gravity threshold to a minor role in determining the cases the Court adjudicates. To the extent the judges seek to limit the ICC’s reach, they should do so by interpreting the Court’s jurisdictional provisions directly rather than through the back door of admissibility

Inter-National Justice for Them or Global Justice for Us?: The U.S. as a Supranational Justice Donor

U.S. policy concerning international justice, particularly at the ICC, involves case-by-case support when such support is in U.S. national interests. This policy signals that the U.S. considers itself a supranational justice donor rather than a member of a global justice community committed to enforcing shared values. This approach to international criminal justice both inhibits global justice efforts and undermines the U.S. claim to global moral leadership. The next U.S. administration should assert full membership in the global justice community by joining the ICC and providing unequivocal support for all efforts to address serious international crimes

Complaint

On June 11, 2020, President Donald J. Trump issued Executive Order 13,928, Blocking Property of Certain Persons Associated With the International Criminal Court, threatening severe sanctions, monetary penalties, and imprisonment on persons who assist the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Executive Order exceeds its legal authority, impermissibly prohibits speech, and fails to provide notice as to who it covers and what for what activities. Those impacted by the Executive Order include U.S. persons, including U.S. entities, as well as foreign persons and foreign entities. The Open Society Justice Initiative and four law professors, all of whom have engaged extensively with the ICC, brought this case seeking a declaration from the U.S. federal court that the Executive Order and its implementing Regulations violate the U.S. Constitution and statutory law. The lawsuit also seeks an order enjoining the Trump Administration from enforcing the Order

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Choosing to Prosecute: Expressive Selection at the International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court (ICC), an institution in its infancy, has had occasion to make only a relatively small number of decisions about which defendants and which crimes to prosecute. But virtually every choice it has made has been attacked: the first defendant, Thomas Lubanga, was not senior enough and the crimes with which he was charged-war crimes involving the use of child soldiers-were not serious enough; the Court should have investigated British soldiers for war crimes committed in Iraq; the ICC should not be prosecuting only rebel perpetrators in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo; the Court\u27s focus on situations in Africa is inappropriate; the Court has focused insufficient attention on gender crimes; and so on. Much of the debate about such selection decisions centers on whether the ICC, and particularly its prosecutor, are improperly motivated by political considerations. Critics charge that selection decisions are inappropriately political, while the Court\u27s current prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, counters that his decisions are apolitical-that he is simply implementing the law enunciated in the ICC\u27s statute. Most recently, some authors have suggested that the prosecutor\u27s role is inevitably political and should be acknowledged as such. The participants in this debate rarely define what they mean by political, nor will this Article attempt such definition. Instead, this Article seeks to reframe the debate about the ICC\u27s selection decisions by shifting from the current focus on the boundaries between legal and political criteria to a constructive dialogue about the most appropriate goals and priorities for the Court. The ICC\u27s core selectivity problem is that the Court lacks sufficiently clear goals and priorities to justify its decisions. States created the ICC to adjudicate the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole, but they gave it a budget that enables only a handful of prosecutions per year. Persons charged with implementing the Court\u27s broad mandate-its prosecutor and judges-must thus select a few cases from among thousands. Yet the international community has provided the Court virtually no guidance about what goals it should seek to achieve through the cases it selects, beyond the vague mandate to strive to end impunity for the most serious crimes