In the Court’s Shadow

Abstract

AbstractAgainst the backdrop of the (positive) complementarity turn, this chapter examines trends in the field of international criminal justice and offers lessons to guide the design of future international criminal tribunals. It analyses the turn from ‘coercive’ and ‘top-down’ intervention to ‘cooperative’ and ‘bottom-up’ rule-of-law strategies and the phenomenon of ‘unintended diversionary complementarity’, where states nominally appropriate international norms but systematic crimes committed by incumbent government actors go unpunished. After identifying three intervening factors in tribunal–state relations—temporal constraints, intrastate politics, and prosecutorial leadership—the chapter turns to reforms that can be implemented at the International Criminal Court to avoid complementarity’s authoritarian shadow and enhance the enforcement of international criminal law in an increasingly illiberal political climate.