Complaints To The International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court's founding treaty, the Rome Statute, provides that individuals or organizations may submit information on crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court. These submissions are referred to as "communications" or complaints to the International Criminal Court.
As of end September 2010, the Office of the Prosecutor had received 8,874 communications about alleged crimes. After initial review, 4,002 of these communications were dismissed as “manifestly outside the jurisdiction of the Court”. As of March 2011, the ICC has launched investigations into seven situations in Africa: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Darfur, Sudan, Kenya, Libya, and Cote d'Ivoire. Several other situations have been subject to "intensive analysis", including Afghanistan, Chad, Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, the Gaza Strip, Georgia.
Some of the communications received by the Prosecutor alleged that crimes had been committed on the territory of states parties to the Court, or by nationals of states parties: in such cases, the Court may automatically exercise jurisdiction. Other communications concerned conduct outside the jurisdiction of states parties: in these cases, the Court can only act if it has received a referral by the United Nations Security Council or a declaration by the relevant state allowing the Court to exercise jurisdiction.
Communications from individuals and organisations should not be confused with referrals from states parties or the United Nations Security Council.
Read more about Complaints To The International Criminal Court: Procedure, Complaints Received
Famous quotes containing the words complaints, criminal and/or court:
“A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man’s door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The city is recruited from the country. In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town day before yesterday, that is city and court today.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)