Building the International Criminal Court

In Building the International Criminal Court, Schiff analyzes the International Criminal Court's creation, innovations, dynamics, and operational challenges.

Benjamin N. Schiff (Author)

9780521694728, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 5 May 2008

322 pages
23.1 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.45 kg

"[A] work of great significance and an essential tool for understanding the ICC."
International Law and Politics, Beatrice Lindstrom

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is the first and only standing international court capable of prosecuting humanity's worst crimes: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It faces huge obstacles. It has no police force; it pursues investigations in areas of tremendous turmoil, conflict, and death; it is charged both with trying suspects and with aiding their victims; and it seeks to combine divergent legal traditions in an entirely new international legal mechanism. International law advocates sought to establish a standing international criminal court for more than 150 years. Other, temporary, single-purpose criminal tribunals, truth commissions, and special courts have come and gone, but the ICC is the only permanent inheritor of the Nuremberg legacy. In Building the International Criminal Court, Oberlin College Professor of Politics Ben Schiff analyzes the International Criminal Court, melding historical perspective, international relations theories, and observers' insights to explain the Court's origins, creation, innovations, dynamics, and operational challenges.

Introduction
1. River of justice
2. Learning from the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals
3. The statute - justice v. sovereignty
4. Building the court
5. NGOs - advocates, assets, critics, and goads
6. ICC-state relations
7. The first 'situations'
Conclusions: the politics of the International Criminal Court
Websites for further and ongoing information
Bibliography and sources
Index.

Subject Areas: International humanitarian law [LBBS], International human rights law [LBBR], Human rights [JPVH], Comparative politics [JPB]