Given the nature of the negotiations, it is not surprising that concerns over sovereignty have formed the dominant narrative explaining states’ reluctance to accede to the Rome Statute. But as always in international politics, matters are not so simple. There are other concerns at play. Individuals in democratic states with strong accountability institutions might have a de facto risk of prosecution of zero, since the Rome Statute mandates deference to domestic judicial systems when they present a legitimate alternative to ICC proceedings. In addition, states with close, friendly relationships to the permanent five veto-wielding members of the UNSC might be shielded by the UNSC’s ability to defer investigations under Article 16 of the Rome Statute. Wealthy Western democracies don’t have much to lose by signing the Rome Statute.

Among unaccountable autocracies and poor democracies with weak domestic accountability institutions, however, the benefits of ratification4 are less clear. These states, many of which are located in Africa, don’t generally have close ties to the UNSC permanent members of the sort that would protect them under Article 16, and their domestic judicial systems are unlikely to inspire an allowance of complementarity. The creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) put the continent on notice that the international community was willing extend its project of justice to Africa. African states with poor domestic accountability mechanisms are low-hanging fruit for a new court looking to establish its legitimacy. So why should African states have ratified the Rome Statute in the first place? Several considerations likely pushed states one way or another. Poorer states might have seen the Rome Statute as a key to unlock greater flows of official development assistance (ODA), even while intellectuals and governmental advisers in the Global South might have seen the ICC’s mandate as an extension of the West’s neocolonial projects. NGOs might have pushed states one way or another in order to further their agendas. On the most individual level, leaders alleged to have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide likely had a pressing problem with the Rome Statute: the risk that they themselves would be prosecuted.

This comment argues that some states engaged in a simpler rational choice analysis regarding ratification: whether ratification would marginalize domestic political competitors and benefit the sitting government. Internal politics, just as much as international power dynamics, provide an important framework for understanding whether and why a state ratified the Rome Statute. After all, no state government’s views are monolithic except in the most unaccountable of autocracies. (Most of these states—for example, Libya in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and North Korea—aren’t signatories to the Statute, at any rate.) Each state dealt with different internal issues. For states without a de facto guarantee of immunity from the ICC’s grasp, ratifying the Rome Statute was an extraordinarily grave act. This comment uses the framework of domestic politics to understand the decision to ratify the Rome Statute in states whose nationals have been indicted by the ICC—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Kenya, the Republic of Uganda, and the Republic of Côte D’Ivoire. (The ICC has indicted the nationals of two other states, the State of Libya and the Republic of Sudan, but these states are not States Parties to the Rome Statute.) Although several theories have been proposed to understand why any state would accede to the ICC, they do not provide a full answer to the question of why states whose nationals have been indicted accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC in the first place. These states, unique among States Parties, have actually been subjected to ICC investigations, so analyzing their motives for ratification is less theoretical or predictive, and more tangible and salient, than a general analysis of why merely any state would accede to the ICC. With the ICC being accused by several observers of having a bias toward Africa—all eight of the court’s investigations are located in Africa—it is important to understand why states with open investigations decided to welcome the ICC to its borders at all.

II. Theories

Several commentators have attempted to answer the question of why any state would agree to accede to the ICC at all. Some approach the question using rational choice analyses, looking at the benefits and drawbacks of ratification from the perspective of sitting leaders, and others see Rome Statute ratification as the extension of newly emerging norms in the international system. Arguments that focus on norm promulgation either generalize based on idealized scenarios or ignore real decision-making processes that went into ratifying not just the Rome Statute but any international treaty that involved the cession of elements of sovereignty to an international body. This comment argues in favor of a rational choice analysis, and the three theories that are presented below are based off of rational choice analyses as well.

A. Credible Commitments Theory

Beth Simmons and Allison Danner proposed a theory of accession based on the idea of “credible commitments”, arguing that leaders of so-called unaccountable autocracies—autocracies with weak or nonexistent domestic accountability institutions—will use ICC accession to rationally tie their hands in order to strengthen their bargaining chips when negotiating with opponents for the end of internal conflicts.5 In other words, unaccountable autocrats see Rome Statute ratification as a way to signal their genuine commitment to ending a conflict: with legitimate third-party intervention an overhanging possibility, the autocrat is (in theory) pushed toward reaching a faster and more palatable solution. Ratification is a grave act, since it opens up not only a leader’s opponents to prosecution, but also the leaders themselves. It is a formal commitment made to the international community as well as an informal, expectation-raising commitment made to a state’s domestic population. The authors write:

Governments may therefore have motives to end the cycle of civil violence, but they may have no way to make a promise to do so that any opposition group or even the general public will believe will last longer than the next security threat....The ICC offers a solution by raising the government’s expected ex post costs of reneging.6

Applying a credible commitments theory, Simmons and Danner predict that the Rome Statute will see its highest accession rates among highly accountable democracies and violent, unaccountable autocracies. Their empirical analysis largely bears their theory out: violent autocracies are more than three times more likely to ratify the Rome Statute than nonviolent autocracies, and peaceful democracies—for which the risk of ICC investigation is effectively nil, whether due to their relatively better human rights records or due to strategic relationships—and unaccountable autocracies have similarly high rates of ratification.

But taken into context, the predictions made by credible commitments theory do not neatly match the situations currently in front of the ICC. Libya and Sudan, two recently violent unaccountable autocracies, have not ratified the Rome Statute, despite the prediction and evidence that states of their type would be more likely to ratify. The authors’ results predict that a democratic country that has experienced violence within the five years prior to ratification is significantly less likely to pursue ratification than other types of states, but Uganda, Kenya, and Côte D’Ivoire have all accepted the jurisdiction of the Court despite having had violent conflicts within five years of ratification. Simmons and Danner’s work sheds light on actual statistical correlations, but it is a poor predictor of ratification patterns among states that have actually undergone ICC investigations.

B. Cynical Commitments

Credible commitments are contrasted with cynical commitments, through which a state ostensibly makes an overture toward international norm but has no intention of supporting compliance.7 A state’s mere signature of a treaty like the Rome Statute is vulnerable to accusations of cynical commitments: signing the Rome Statute entails no legal obligations and is often merely an empty signaling tool. Sudan, for example, signed the Rome Statute but later expressed no intention of ratifying it after its sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, was indicted. The United States signed the Rome Statute on the last possible day in order to remain party to the negotiations, and reneged on its signature just two years afterward under a president more hostile to international institutions.

Ratifying the Rome Statute, on the other hand, is less likely to be a cynical move, especially for African states. Human rights treaties, unlike the Rome Statute, can fall prey to cynical commitments: they bind a state to broad commitments to millions of people in aggregate—so the task of gathering evidence for violations on a significant scale is difficult—and the enforcement mechanisms for such treaties are weaker than the ICC’s. Human rights treaties are thus often co-opted as signaling tools rather than genuine expressions of norm adherence.8 In contrast, a treaty creating a criminal court has more bite. The International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda put wartime offenders on notice that the international community was indeed willing to create courts with meaningful prosecutorial power in the wake of war crimes.

For a court looking to establish its legitimacy, pursuing situations in African States Parties would have presented an easy choice. African states are less likely to have strong domestic accountability mechanisms of the kind that could support a claim of complementarity, unlike, for example, some Asian countries or South American countries.9 African states are less likely to have close relationships with the P5 states, so Article 16 deferrals are not an option, unlike, for example, European and other Western states. African states are less likely to possess the sort of strategic power to evade an investigation. African states would have thus been least likely to view ratifying the Rome Statute as an opening for cynical commitments, unless they were acting deliberately out of line with their interests. Cynical commitments can easily be applied to signatures: 18 states have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute; many of these states, such as Sudan, Russia, Iran, and Zimbabwe, are perennially criticized by human rights observers. But a cynical commitment theory likely does not apply to ratification patterns.

C. Political Opponents Theory

Simmons and Danner, in their piece about credible commitments, suggest an alternate explanation for ratification in some states: that leaders ratify the Rome Statute in order to marginalize political opponents.10 Barry Hashimoto elaborated on the theory by engaging in a series of statistical analyses of the political impact of ratification on sitting leaders’ tenures, writing:

In many states, political rivals aspire to take leaders’ jobs and undermine their campaigns to expand executive power, secessionists weaken the state’s hold on territory, terrorists reveal the state’s inability to protect its subjects, and organized criminals appropriate tax revenue and compromise the state’s authority....Since 1998, leaders have been able to accept the court’s jurisdiction, trading off self-exposure to prosecution against the court’s ability to marginalize those threats.11

The crux of Hashimoto’s analysis rests on the political stability granted to leaders upon ratification. His empirical study revealed that ruling under the ICC’s jurisdiction makes leaders 1.4% less likely to lose office and 2.7% less likely to face an armed civil conflict in any quarter.12

The theory on which Hashimoto’s study is based is interesting, but the results are unconvincing. The data reflect over 100 countries, all with different political characteristics and different ways in which ICC accession would affect their leadership and their state. More important, this statistical analysis is correlative, not predictive. Sitting leaders, who did not have Hashimoto’s study before them when deciding whether to ratify the Rome Statute, are unlikely to have engaged in the sort of probabilistic analysis that the study reflects. For an autocrat, staying in office—and avoiding ICC prosecution—is far too important a goal to leave it to statistical chance. Even if sitting leaders did engage in such an analysis of chance, the percentage of seat stability accrued by ratification—1.4%—is far too small an increase on which to base a grave decision like ratification.

A statistical analysis does not get an observer much closer in understanding why states would ratify the Rome Statute because these effects of ratification are so small and diffuse. A more productive approach would be to take the idea that states accept the ICC’s jurisdiction in order to marginalize political opponents and apply it to a qualitative analysis of the ratification status of states that have undergone ICC investigation. Although the statistics do not bear the theory out, this comment engages with Hashimoto’s general idea on a more specific level—that some African states accept the ICC’s jurisdiction in order to marginalize political opponents.

D. Other theories

There are other well-represented theories explaining ratification using a rational choice analysis as well, which are not dealt with in detail here. Michael Struett, for example, argues that NGOs played an outsized role in influencing states to accede to the ICC.13 Jay Goodliffe and colleagues argue that states ratify or reject the Rome Statute in order to curry favor with influential states in their geopolitical networks.14 It is possible that some states acceded to the ICC in order to unlock access to greater flows of official development assistance (ODA). Finally, Robert Pape argues that states join the Assembly of States Parties in order to balance against the soft power of the United States.15 A longer comment would be able to treat these theories in succession regarding how they relate to the eight states under ICC investigation.

III. Application

Table 1. Rome Statute timelines for states with open ICC investigations.16

State	Signed	Accepted Jurisd.	Ratified	Entry into Force
CAR	Dec. 12, 1999		Oct. 3, 2001	July 1, 2002
Côte D’Ivoire	Nov. 30, 1998	Oct. 1, 2003	Feb. 15, 2013	May 1, 2013
DRC	Sept. 8, 2000		Apr. 11, 2002	July 1, 2002
Kenya	Aug. 11, 1999		Mar. 15, 2005	June 1, 2005
Libya
Mali	July 15, 1998		Aug. 16, 2000	July 1, 2002
Sudan	Sept. 8, 2000
Uganda	Mar. 17, 1999		June 14, 2002	Sept. 1, 2002

Figure 1. Map showing Rome Statute ratification status.17

Dark Green: Signed and ratified. Orange: Signed only. Gray: Neither. Light Green: Côte D’Ivoire.

The choice for six of these eight states to accept the ICC’s jurisdiction is troublesome to understand, given the sovereignty costs and potential individual costs of accession.18 Complicating matters is the lack of records about legislative or executive debate regarding ratification in these states. However, when understood in the light of the nature of each state’s domestic politics at the time of ratification, a more coherent picture emerges of Côte D’Ivoire, the DRC, Kenya, and Uganda. This comment will focus on these four states. The ICC has not yet issued any indictments for Mali, so an analysis of that state’s ratification process is not presented here. Jean-Pierre Bemba, who was indicted by the ICC for crimes committed in the Central African Republic, is included in the analysis of why the DRC (of which he is a national) ratified the Rome Statute because he is a leader of a Congolese opposition group. Libya and Sudan have not ratified the Rome Statute. Sudan’s decision to not ratify the Statute reflects its reaction to the indictment of its sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir.

The analyses below link the decision to accept the ICC’s jurisdiction (whether by ratification or via Article 12(3)) to the domestic politics of each state at the time of Rome Statute accession. In doing so, this comment aims to draw the conclusion that the ability to marginalize internal political opponents via Rome Statute accession motivated the decision to accede. By understanding these states’ decision to accede in the context of opponent marginalization, the question of why the states ratified shifts from a focus on the international power dynamics implicated by the Rome Statute to the domestic benefits gained by accession.

A. Côte D’Ivoire

Côte D’Ivoire notified the ICC of its intention to accept the jurisdiction of the Court in April 18, 2003. The declaration, which was made by the government of Laurent Gbagbo, fell under the scope of Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute, which allows states not party to the Statute to accept the exercise of jurisdiction of the Court. The Ivorian government notified the ICC that they were willing to cooperate with the ICC in connection with crimes committed since September 19, 2002.19

That date represents the beginning of the First Ivorian Civil War, a conflict between the Gbagbo-led government and a rebel group, the Forces Nouvelles de Côte D’Ivoire (FNCI).20 The war was set off by many different catalysts, but a major source of conflict stemmed from the elections of 2000: immediately before the elections, the government passed a law excluding non-natural-born Ivorians from running in the presidential race. This excluded Alassane Ouattara, a naturalized but foreign-born candidate from the northern part of the country. Gbagbo won. The actual conflict began in September 2002, and seriously destabilized the country for five years. The government, assisted by French-led UN forces, secured peace agreements with FNCI in 2007. The process of disarmament began in late 2007. The last peace agreement signed between Gbagbo and FNCI sought for elections to be held in June 2008. Elections were not held until 2010. Gbagbo was challenged by opposition candidate Ouattara, who won the election. Gbagbo is alleged to have organized systematic attacks against Ivorians, mainly Ouattara supporters. Gbagbo was indicted by the ICC on November 23, 2011 on four counts of crimes against humanity. His wife, Simone Gbagbo, was indicted on February 29, 2012 on four counts of crimes against humanity.

The accepting of jurisdiction by Côte D’Ivoire in 2003 points persuasively to the use of the ICC as a tool to marginalize political opponents. The declaration specifically singles out September 19, 2002, the day the civil war began, as the date from which international crimes should be monitored. Although the ICC began its investigation of the situation proprio motu after the declaration, no indictments came out of that situation. But the context in which the declaration was made is clear: the government was dealing with a rapidly escalating civil war and the imminent loss of the northern part of the country to the FNCI. Côte D’Ivoire had been one of the first states to sign the Rome Statute, but the period between signing the Statute and accepting the ICC’s jurisdiction had been a time of extraordinary domestic turbulence. Gbagbo won the 2000 election against the country’s prior military ruler, Robert Guéi, but it took protests to remove Guéi from power. Gbagbo succeeded, but the government had earned the ire of Ouattara supporters. During this time, Côte D’Ivoire did not act on its Rome Statute signature. It was three years into Gbagbo’s term, but only eight months into the civil war, for the government to see it as politically expedient to accede to the ICC’s jurisdiction.

The political opponents theory works for Côte D’Ivoire on two levels: first as a tool for the Gbagbo government against the Ouattara-aligned FNCI, and second as a tool for the Ouattara government against Gbagbo. Eight years after the government first accepted the ICC’s jurisdiction, the same Article 12(3) declaration was used to indict Laurent and Simone Gbagbo. The government led by Alassane Ouattara affirmed its 2003 acceptance of the ICC’s jurisdiction on December 14, 2010, ten days after Gbagbo had been removed from office. The government drew particular notice to crimes committed since March 2004.21 March 2004 marked the withdrawal of opposition groups from the “government of national reconciliation” and a heightening of hostilities. A UN report from May 2004 implicated government officials in the ensuing violence. By drawing attention to these particular dates, Ouattara’s government was focusing the ICC’s attention on the actions of Gbagbo, now a political opponent to Ouattara, the sitting leader. In 2010 and 2011, Ouattara issued letters in support of the investigation.22 The context in which Ouattara’s government declared its support for the ICC is clear—encouraging the prosecution of a political enemy.

On February 15, 2013, the government ratified the Rome Statute. According to press releases, “a number of legal and constitutional hurdles delayed the process” of ratification.23 Because the Statute was ratified after it had already entered into force, the scope of the ratification would normally be prospective24—but since Côte D’Ivoire had entered a 12(3) declaration already, the temporal jurisdiction of the ICC was extended back to 2002.

B. Uganda

The nature of Uganda’s domestic political situation at the time of ratification also suggests that the Ugandan government used Rome Statute ratification as a tool to marginalize the Lord’s Resistance Army, a group of domestic insurgents. Uganda ratified the Rome Statute on June 14, 2002, just one month before the Statute entered into force. One year later, Uganda referred the situation concerning the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an insurgent group, on December 16, 2003.25 Uganda was the second country to refer a situation within its borders to the ICC, after the DRC.

The root causes of the conflict with the LRA are complex, and the violence stretches back to 1987. The conflict flared in March 2002 when the Ugandan military launched a large offensive against the LRA in South Sudan in order to eliminate what the Ugandan government saw as a massive military and political liability and embarrassment for the country. After the Spring 2002 offensive, termed “Operation Iron Fist”, the Ugandan government believed it had eliminated the LRA threat.26 It was during this interbellum that Uganda ratified the Rome Statute. LRA counteroffensives began shortly afterward, in August 2002, and continued for several years at high levels of intensity.

The referral instrument submitted to the Office of the Prosecutor focuses exclusively on alleged crimes committed by the LRA, which is to be expected given that the government is submitting the instrument.27 However, sitting Ugandan leaders had also been implicated in possible crimes during the LRA conflict, including the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni. Human rights groups had alleged that Museveni was complicit in large-scale human rights violations in northern Uganda and the DRC.28 Museveni had also previously been criticized for invading and occupying the DRC during the Second Congo War: the International Court of Justice had found that Uganda was responsible for human rights violations during the Second Congo War and had ordered Museveni’s government to pay reparations to victims.29 With this record in mind and considering the risks inherent for a sitting leader who ratifies the Rome Statute, it is possible that Museveni used the self-referral of the LRA situation as a way to shield himself and other leaders from ICC prosecution and marginalize the threat posed by the LRA. By acceding to the ICC, Museveni would have received another tool with which to approach the conflict—LRA leaders would be at risk of ICC prosecution in addition to military attacks. As for the timing of ratification, ratifying the Rome Statute after Operation Iron First would have been a natural course of action for a government that believed it had fatally struck the LRA for the last time. Uganda’s military objectives did not pan out, but Museveni’s apparent strategy seems to have worked. The self-referral yielded the ICC’s first indictments: Joseph Kony, Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo, Dominic Ongwen, and Vincent Otti, all indicted on July 8, 2005. All of these men were or are leaders of the LRA. The ICC hasn’t issued any further indictments since then.

C. The Democratic Republic of the Congo

Seven Congolese nationals have been indicted by the ICC: Thomas Lubanga, Bosco Ntaganda, Germain Katanga, Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, Callixte Mbarushimana, Sylvestre Mudacumura, and Jean-Pierre Bemba. Bemba was indicted for crimes committed in the Central African Republic, but prior to his arrest he was a prominent opposition politician in the DRC, so he is included in this analysis. Lubanga was convicted of three counts of war crimes, and Ngudjolo Chui was acquitted in 2012 after being charged with four counts of crimes against humanity and nine counts of war crimes. Three of these indictees, Ngudjolo Chui, Lubanga, and Katanga, were indicted for their involvement in the Ituri Conflict between 1999 and 2007.30 Three other indictees, Ntaganda, Mbarushimana, and Mudacumura, were indicted for their involvement in the continuing conflict in the Kivu region of eastern DRC. Bemba was indicted for crimes committed in the Central African Republic, but he was involved in associated conflicts in eastern Congo during the Second Congo War as the head of the insurgent group Mouvement pour la Liberation du Congo.

The DRC government led by Joseph Kabila ratified the Rome Statute on April 11, 2002, squarely in the middle of the Ituri Conflict and toward the end of the Second Congo War, which formally ended in July 2003. The DRC government was engaged with rebel groups on several fronts and was failing to keep control of its territory. That the government chose to divert its attention to ratifying the Rome Statute during this time likely demonstrates that the decision to ratify was linked to the ongoing conflicts. The government formally referred the situation to the Office of the Prosecutor on April 19, 2004, and the OTP initiated the investigation soon afterward.31 The timing of the ratification and referral fit neatly into the political opponents model: the DRC pursued ratification at a time when challenges from rebel groups were at their height, during one large war and one particularly heightened regional conflict. All seven of the Congolese nationals indicted by the court are political opponents of the government.

D. Kenya

Kenya’s situation does not fit neatly into the political opponents model. The Kenyan government ratified the Rome Statute much later than the other states: March 15, 2005, six years after it had signed the Statute. Records from National Assembly debates suggest that the delay was due to domestic legal and logistical hurdles, rather than any signs of noncommitment to the ICC.32 The situation in Kenya that the OTP pursued proprio motu revolved around the spate of post-election violence in 2007 and 2008, during which the government, led by Mwai Kibaki, dealt with a popular uprising after Kibaki was declared winner of the presidential election over opposition candidate Raila Odinga. The problem with applying the political opponents model is that there was no conflict in Kenya at the time of ratification, in 2005. Kenya’s government did not have a stellar human rights and freedom record, but it was ranked higher by democracy observers under Kibaki than under his predecessor, Daniel arap Moi. Unless Kibaki’s government contemplated in 2005 that there would be unrest at the time of the next elections in 2007, the government likely could not have ratified the Rome Statute with that consideration in mind. Further research is needed to more fully understand Kenya’s ratification.

IV. Conclusion

In approaching the question of whether the ICC has an unfair bias toward Africa, it is important to attempt to understand why the states whose nationals have been indicted decided to ratify the Rome Statute at all. Because the Rome Statute entails such a high sovereignty commitment and puts sitting leaders at risk of prosecution—especially in states with poor domestic accountability mechanisms—it is puzzling to attempt to understand why many states would ever ratify the Statute. However, when accepting the court’s jurisdiction is reframed as a means by which sitting leaders can marginalize political opponents and regain domestic stability, as was likely the case in Côte D’Ivoire, Uganda, and DRC, we can attempt to more clearly understand the decision to accede.

Endnotes — (click the footnote reference number, or ↩ symbol, to return to location in text).

1. 1.

   Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Adopted by the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, July 17 1998, UN Doc. A/CONF.183/9 [hereinafter Rome Statute]. ↩

2. 2.

   See, e.g., Corrina Heyder, The U.N. Security Council’s Referral of the Crimes in Darfur to the International Criminal Court in Light of U.S. Opposition to the Court: Implications for the International Criminal Court’s Functions and Status, 24 Berkeley J. Int’l L. 650, 661 (2006), available online. ↩

3. 3.

   For a complete list of states’ ratification status, see Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, United Nations Treaty Collection, available online (last visited March 7, 2013) [hereinafter Rome Statute Ratification Status List]. ↩

4. 4.

   “Ratification” is used interchangeably with “accepting jurisdiction” and “accession” in this comment. Five states under ICC investigation had ratified the Rome Statute at the time that the investigations were initiated: CAR, DRC, Kenya, Mali, and Uganda. Côte D’Ivoire accepted the jurisdiction of the court without ratifying the Rome Statute in 2003. It ratified in February 2013 and the ratification will enter into force in May 2013. Sudan has signed the Rome Statute but has not ratified it, and Libya has neither signed nor ratified it. Both Sudan and Libya were brought under the court’s jurisdiction using an Article 13(b) UN Security Council referral. ↩

5. 5.

   Beth Simmons & Allison Danner, Credible Commitments and the International Criminal Court, 64 Int’l Org. 225 (2010). Working paper 2009available online. Page numbers refer to this version. ↩

6. 6.

   Id. at 13. ↩

7. 7.

   Wade M. Cole, Hard and Soft Commitments to Human Rights Treaties, 1966-2000, 24 Sociological Forum 563, 567-69 (2009). ↩

8. 8.

   Id. ↩

9. 9.

   Simmons & Danner, supra note 5 at 10, 15. ↩

10. 10.

    Id. at 23. ↩

11. 11.

    Barry M. Hashimoto, Why Do Leaders Accept the International Criminal Court’s Jurisdiction? Theory and Evidence, unpublished manuscript, at 9 (September 3, 2012), available online. ↩

12. 12.

    Id. at 3. ↩

13. 13.

    Michael Struett, The Politics of Constructing the International Criminal Court: NGOs, Discourse, and Agency (2008). ↩

14. 14.

    Jay Goodliffe et al., Dependence Networks and the International Criminal Court, 56 Int’l Studies Q. 131 (2012), available online. ↩

15. 15.

    Robert A. Pape, Soft Balancing Against the United States, 30 Int’l Sec. 7 (2005), available online. ↩

16. 16.

    Rome Statute Ratification Status List, supra note 1. ↩

17. 17.

    This map is based off of the information provided by Rome Statute Ratification Status List, supra note 1. It is available online. ↩

18. 18.

    In this comment, “ratification” is sometimes used interchangeably with “accession” and “accepting jurisdiction”. There is an important distinction to be made between the terms, however. Côte D’Ivoire ratified the Rome Statute in February 2013, but the proprio motu investigation begun in 2011 was started via Côte D’Ivoire’s accepting the court’s jurisdiction in 2003 for crimes committed during the First Ivorian Civil War, which started in September 2002. ↩

19. 19.

    See Letter from Alassane Ouattara, President, Côte d’Ivoire, to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Prosecutor, International Criminal Court (December 14, 2010), available online. This letter references the 2003 declaration. ↩

20. 20.

    See, e.g., Côte d’Ivoire: Chaotic conflict deepens as government troops fight to recover lost territory in Ivory Coast, allAfrica.com, available online (December 3, 2002). ↩

21. 21.

    Press Release, ICC, Côte d’Ivoire ratifies the Rome Statute, ICC-ASP-20130218-PR873, February 18, 2013, available online . ↩

22. 22.

    Id. ↩

23. 23.

    Id. ↩

24. 24.

    Rome Statute, Article 11(2). ↩

25. 25.

    Referral of the Situation Concerning the Lord’s Resistance Army, Submitted by the Republic of Uganda, December 16, 2003, available online, [hereinafter Lord’s Resistance Army]. ↩

26. 26.

    Update on the Implementation of the Recommendations Made by The UN Secretary-General’s Representative on Internally Displaced Persons Following His Visit to Uganda, Refugee Law Project, at VIII, (2nd Ed., October 2006) available online. ↩

27. 27.

    Lord’s Resistance Army, supra note 25. ↩

28. 28.

    George Murumba, Indict Museveni for War Crimes—Says Lawyer, Uganda Correspondent, April 30, 2012, available online. ↩

29. 29.

    Press Release, Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Uganda), I.C.J., No.2005/26, December 19, 2005, available online. ↩

30. 30.

    Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the case of The Prosecutor v. Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, Warrant of Arrest, ICC-01/04-02/07 (July 6, 2007), available online; Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the case of The Prosecutor v. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, Warrant of Arrest, ICC-01/04-01/06, February 10, 2006, available online; Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the case of The Prosecutor v. Germain Katanga, Warrant of Arrest, ICC-01/04-01/07, July 2, 2007, available online. See also Background Note LRA—Lubanga, ICC (last visited March 26, 2013) available online. ↩

31. 31.

    The Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Int’l Bar Assoc. Hum. Rts. Inst., (last visited March 26, 2013) available online. ↩

32. 32.

    Kenya National Assembly Official Record (Hansard) 3094 (November 14, 2001) available online. ↩