Politics and the Institutional Integrity of the ICC, in The Past, Present, and Future of the International Criminal Court (Alexander Heinze & Viviane Dittrich eds., 2021)

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (‘Rome Statute’ and ‘ICC‘) emerged following years of interest from various governments in establishing a permanent court to prosecute perpetrators of international crimes. The treaty that eventually established the ICC was the result of inter-governmental negotiations, which were ultimately successful in large part due to the ‘tribunal fatigue’ of governments concerned by “the financial and political costs of creating ad hoc United Nations (‘UN’) criminal tribunals for the atrocities that burdened so many regions of the world”. A permanent court would “provide greater efficiencies in addressing the investigation and prosecution of atrocity crimes”, but drafting the parameters of the Rome Statute required several years of work by legal experts and diplomats from a majority of the world’s governments.