The international community has been skeptical of the International Criminal Court since the court's inception. How will the ICC's first arrests in Uganda affect its progress?

~Editor Jackie Granick

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is still a new addition to the international scene. Having come into force in July 2002 just four years after its guiding statute opened up to the international community for adoption and ratification, the ICC is only now beginning to take on the cases that have been referred to it over the past few years. The ICC issued its first five arrest warrants in Uganda early in October 2005. These warrants make the case against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda the first of the situations referred thus far to the ICC to have progressed beyond the pre-trial chambers in The Hague.

As the first-ever permanent, treaty-based international criminal tribunal, the ICC’s mission is to bring the perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity to justice and deter future crimes. States that have ratified the statute of the ICC (states parties) or the United Nations Security Council can refer situations to the ICC. Preliminary investigations must be conducted in the ICC’s pre-trial chambers before the ICC issues warrants and brings the accused persons to full trial in The Hague. The concept of “complementarity,” which means the ICC should be complementary to, rather than superior to, national justice systems, is central to the ICC’s role as an international body.

Since its creation, the ICC has tried to prove itself to a skeptical world. Although most countries in the world, including the nations of the European Union, have either signed or ratified the treaty, many powerful nations, particularly the United States, remain adamantly opposed to its existence. The United States, feeling threatened by an institution that, in some ways, challenges the sovereignty of individual states, has been working to actively undermine the ICC.

Tribunals like those in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone have been not ICC trials but rather individual tribunals set up on a case-by-case basis by the United Nations. The ICC itself—with a permanent court in The Hague as opposed to remote tribunals—has been gaining ground since 2002. Over the last year and a half, the court has opened up investigations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Sudan, and a referral against the Central African Republic is still pending. The one-hundredth ratification of the ICC treaty also came in October 2005, when Mexico became a states party. The issuing of the arrest warrants for five leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) marks a big step for the ICC toward commencing the crimes-against-humanity trials for which it was made, toward ending impunity for those who commit these crimes.

Critics worry that the arrest warrants in Uganda have come at a bad time and will ruin possibilities for peace in the name of justice. They say trauma inflicted upon so many Ugandans calls for urgent peace negotiations and amnesties in order to achieve peace, not indictments, much like the peace achieved by South African Truth and Reconciliation committees. Supporters of the ICC argue that there can be no peace without justice and there are many provisions built into the statute of the ICC that allow for victim support and peaceful reintegration to take priority over harsh, destabilizing justice.

While the arrest warrants are out, it is not until the leaders of the LRA come into physical custody of the ICC that the first actual trials will begin in The Hague. Only then will the friends and foes of the ICC be truly able to place the International Criminal Court itself on trial.

To learn more about the ICC and the case against the leaders of the LRA, see:

The International Criminal Court

International Justice Tribune

Coalition for the ICC

Human Rights Watch