Complementarity: Contest or Collaboration? - FICHL

Complementarity and the Exercise of Universal Jurisdiction for
Core International Crimes
10 March 2010, resulting in over 50 indictments and arrest warrants (of
which over 85% since 2000 alone) with 30 persons convicted (in 20 cases
in 11 countries) and five acquittals (including one after an appeal).
The Netherlands has become the main centre of international criminal
justice, both internationally and domestically. Internationally, both the
ICC and the ICTY are located in The Hague 92 while the SLSC conducts
its most high profile case, that of Charles Taylor, in that city as well. 93 As
well, the Netherlands almost became the first country to have a case transferred
from the ICTR as part of its completion strategy. 94
On the domestic side, the activities of the Dutch government have
been equally impressive in that six persons have been convicted for international
crimes since 2001, although this effort has stalled somewhat most
recently as a result of two acquittals in 2007 (although one of these was
AgainstHumanity/default.asp, while three years earlier the European Union decided to
establish an European network of contact points in respect of persons responsible for
genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, which meets on a regular basis,
see the Official Journal of the European Communities L167/1 of 26/6/2002 and
L118/2 of 14/5/2003 (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/JOIndex.do). As well, the ICC has
started to convene meetings with some of the specialized war crimes units in order to
develop an efficient co-operation model between national states and the ICC based on
the complementarity principle enshrined in article 17 of its Statute. On the nongovernmental
side, the International Association of Prosecutors (IAP) established in
2009 a Specialist War Crimes Forum (http://www.iap-association.org/ressources/
14AC_Conference_Outcome.pdf) while the International Bar Association had formed
a War Crimes Committee a year earlier
(http://www.ibanet.org/PPID/Constituent/War_Crimes_Committee/Default.aspx).
91 In most cases the international crimes considered in this section are war crimes and
genocide although in some instances crimes against humanity were charged as well as
torture, as defined by the 1984 Torture Convention.
92 In addition, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has also been established in the Netherlands
as of 1 March 2009, see http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/lebanon/trib
unal/; see, regarding this tribunal, various contributors in JICJ, 2007, vol. 5, 1061-
1174 and Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL), 2008, vol. 21, no. 2, as well as
the Handbook on the Special Tribunal for Lebanon by the International Centre for
Transitional Justice (ICTJ), http://www.ictj.org/images/cont ent/9/1/914.pdf.
93 See http://www.sc-sl.org/Taylor.html.
94 ICTR-2005-86-R11bis, 13 April 2007; however, this person was never transferred
from to the ICTR as a result of the judgments in the Mpambara case (see below as
well as the Report on the Completion Strategy of the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda, 21 November 2007, paragraph 16).
FICHL Publication Series No. 7 (2010) – page 46