Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 52 (2020)
Crime as Cognitive Constraint
The first treaty would, inter alia, create the court and establish
its jurisdiction in the territory of states parties... The Rome
Statute provides a useful example. It established the ICC;
delimited its relationship with the United Nations; set out, inter
alia, its jurisdiction; defined the crimes it would adjudicate;
adopted as law certain general principles of criminal law;
determined the composition and administration of the court;
outlined pretrial, trial, and appellate procedures; laid out an
international cooperation and judicial assistance scheme,
enforcement procedures, and obligations; and set out financing
provisions.
The second treaty… would be an enforcement treaty along the
lines of the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of
Foreign Arbitral Awards, known as the New York Convention.
Recognition and enforcement are the lynchpins of binding dispute
resolution, and, as noted throughout, the difficulty plaintiffs
encounter in obtaining enforceable judgments is the motivating
problem behind the proposal to set up an ICCJ. 298
The ICCJ Statute is intended for host states where the injury
usually occurs, while the ICCJ enforcement treaty is meant to attract
home states of transnational corporations. 299 However, corporate
involvement in Rome Statute crimes may complicate this two-tiered
membership system. The ICCJ, even if deriving its normative content
from Rome Statute crimes, must be carefully designed so as not to be
bound by ICC legal rulings and findings of fact. Suppose the ICCJ were
to adjudicate a case involving a US company involved in a Rome
Statute crime in Myanmar, where both the US and Myanmar are not
state-parties to the Rome Statute. If the ICCJ Statute were designed
to track the work of the ICC, this would effectively render the work of
the ICC consequential for parties whose home states are not state
parties to the Rome Statute. Thus, an independent legal determination
of the ICCJ seems called for, in the same way that the ICJ is not bound
by legal determinations of international criminal tribunals on questions
of general international law. 300
For Steinitz, the complementarity principle in the Rome Statute
should not apply as an admissibility threshold to the ICCJ because
298. Id.
299. See Id. at 10.
300. See, e.g., Application of the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment on the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia
and Montenegro), Judgment, 2007 I.C.J. Reports 43, ¶ 402-405 (Feb. 26)
(ruling that the ICJ is not bound by the ICTY’s decision as the issue
relates to resolving questions of general international law).
195