The Complementarity Regime of the International Criminal Court in Practice: Is it Truly Serving the Purpose? Some Lessons from Libya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The interplay between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and domestic jurisdictions under the complementarity regime has unveiled statutory and policy limitations. These loopholes became vivid when the ICC faced new complex situations that were not initially envisaged by the drafters of the Rome Statute. On the practical side, the Libyan situation revealed setbacks and shortages in the policy(ies) adopted by the ICC. The first of these setbacks is the apparent lack of a coherent strategy on positive complementarity as invoked by (some) organs of the Court. The second aspect is the Court's adoption of a restrictive interpretation of the constituencies of the complementarity regime, making it extremely difficult even for some willing and able states to exercise their primary duty to prosecute core international crimes. The unfortunate loose interpretation of ‘unavailability’ that the ICC has developed has led to inaccurate interpretations of the complementarity mechanism in certain situations, such as Libya. Furthermore, the fair trial standards within the admissibility regime should not be exaggerated, but rather invoked to determine whether the state has a bona fide intention to investigate and prosecute these crimes. Contrary to some writers’ interpretation, this is an objective test of intention, not one of relativity or specific result. The ICC practice has shown a patchy approach that lacks a consistent and clear vision of its relation with domestic jurisdictions. While the ICC has not missed every opportunity to hail its commitment to positive complementarity, the reality is that the Court seems keen on understanding its success through conducting more international prosecutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".