EJIL: Talk!

Blog of the European Journal of International Law

Articles posted by Kai Ambos

ICC OTP Report on the Situation in Colombia – A critical analysis

Published on February 1, 2013 Author: Kai Ambos

Professor Kai Ambos is Chair of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Comparative Law and International Criminal Law at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany and Judge at the Provincial Court (Landgericht) of Lower Saxony in Göttingen

Preliminary Remarks

On 14 November 2012 the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) published the “Interim Report” on the “Situation in Colombia”. The Report is exceptional for the fact that the OPP usually does not submit such kind of country report at this (preliminary) stage of the proceedings; instead, the Office’s activities are reported in its Annual Report on Preliminary Examination Activities. The reason why this is different in this case is “the high level of public interest” in the Colombian situation. In fact, the very existence of the Report demonstrates the seriousness with which the Office continues to monitor the situation in Colombia.

Despite all its shortcomings, the Report still deserves praise in that it constitutes a unique effort to subsume the complex Colombian situation under the legal regime of the Rome Statute. In fact, the OTP offers the first “official” and impartial account of the Colombian violence in ICL terms and this constitutes an advance in itself, not least with regard to the domestic discussion in Colombia. More concretely speaking, however, the Report offers a mixed picture. While some issues are treated adequately, contributing significantly to an accurate assessment of the Colombian situation, especially with regard to the topic of the “false positives”, the treatment of other aspects leaves more questions than answers. In this sense, the Report makes it difficult to determine with some precision the further course of the OTP’s evaluation of the Colombian situation. Indeed, the Report does not provide for clear standards that could serve as a framework for current and possibly future peace negotiations. Perhaps the question of an “alternative punishment” is the most important one effectively left open by the Report. Clearly, the report reflects the complexities of the Colombian situation which make it so difficult to come to a balanced and satisfactory judgment with a view to possible intervention by the ICC. It may well be argued that this situation demonstrates more than any other the importance of cooperation and mutual learning between local and international criminal justice.

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Filed under: International Criminal Court

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Diplomatic Asylum for Julian Assange?

Published on September 11, 2012 Author: Kai Ambos

Professor Kai Ambos is Chair of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Comparative Law and International Criminal Law at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany (since May 2003) and Judge at the Provincial Court (Landgericht) of Lower Saxony in Göttingen

Julian Assange’s medal-worthy self-staging as a militant for worldwide freedom of opinion has diverted attention away from the fact that the dispute over his extradition has nothing to do with Wikileaks, but rather with the enforcement of a European arrest warrant from November 2010. In this arrest warrant Assange is charged with rape, sexual harassment and unlawful coercion against two Swedish women in Sweden. According to the fundamental principle of mutual recognition as basis of the European arrest warrant, such a warrant is to be enforced by the executing member state (in this case Great Britain) without any further ado. The fact that Assange was however able to go through three tiers of the English judicial system – with the proceedings leading up to the Supreme Court Decision of 30 May 2012 lasting one and a half years – can be explained, among other things, by the fact that the implementation of the European arrest warrant within the member states varies greatly.

Against this background – exhaustion of the local legal remedies – Assange’s escape into the Ecuadorian embassy on 19 June 2012 is to be seen as the continuation of his fight with political means. Hence, it is not very surprising that in the detailed explanation given by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (on 16 August 2012 ) for the granting of diplomatic asylum no mention is made of the actual accusations against Assange (see Comunicado No. 042). Instead, President Rafael Correa on 18 August 2012 in his state-owned TV program declared that the conduct Assange is accused of was not even punishable in Latin America (see Enlace Ciudadano No. 285). If this were to be true (which is fortunately not the case, see Art. 505 et seq. of Ecuador’s own Criminal Code), it would catapult the continent back to the unbridled machismo era. In any case, Ecuador granted Assange diplomatic asylum because it considered that there was an imminent threat of him being further deported to the United States where he would be politically persecuted and cruelly treated (see Comunicado No. 042).

However, Ecuador’s decision to grant diplomatic asylum to Julian Assange is flawed as a matter of law. Nonetheless, its embassy in London remains inviolable. The Ecuadorian argument does not stand up in the light of sober legal analysis as it misreads the fundamental structure of (European) law of extradition and it employs a legal concept – “diplomatic asylum” -that is not universally recognized in international law (see this EJIL:Talk! post ). An automatic further extradition to a third state is neither possible in general extradition law nor in the European arrest warrant system. Read the rest of this entry…