EJIL: The Podcast! Episode 4 – Court Between a Rock and a Hard Place

For quite some time, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was criticised for focusing exclusively on Africa, as opposed to investigating situations in which powerful western states are heavily involved or have strong interests. In the first part of this episode, Kamari Clarke, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles and author of the recent book Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback, joins Marko Milanovic, Sarah Nouwen, Philippa Webb and me to discuss whether the ICC is able to deal with structural injustice. We discuss this against the background of the question whether black lives matter before the ICC.

More recently, and possibly in response to the criticism that the ICC was too focused on Africa, the Prosecutor has made moves towards investigating situations potentially involving a number of bigger powers, including the US, the UK, Israel and Russia. The second part of the podcast discusses some of the political and legal challenges that have arisen when the Court goes after nationals of states not party to its Statute. In particular, the group discusses the legality, under general international law and the ICC Statute, of recent US sanctions against the Court in response to the investigation into the situation in Afghanistan. The episode concludes with a discussion of whether the ICC is able to determine the territorial boundaries of Palestine, as part of the Prosecutor’s request for a ruling on the Court’s jurisdiction in the Palestine situation, a matter that I examine in a previous post on the blog.

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For detailed analysis of the US sanctions against the ICC, see the series organized by the Just Security blog. See also these posts here and here on our blog.