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This thesis focuses on the relationship between China and the International Criminal Court (hereinafter ‘ICC’ or ‘the Court’). China has long been supporting the establishment of a permanent international criminal court. It actively participated in every stage of the negotiating process leading up to the adoption of the Rome Statue but chose to cast a negative vote at the end of the Rome Conference in 1998. There were several reasons stated by the Chinese delegation at that time for not joining the ICC, which were all framed in legal terms. However, there have been significant developments both in the Rome Statute itself and in practice since these Chinese objections were first articulated. The ICC has now functioned as an international adjudicative body for more than ten years. Some of the issues of concern to China have been, in one way or another, addressed through the jurisprudence of the ICC during its existence, and also through the practice of the Security Council in relation to the ICC. More significantly, all the amendments adopted at the Kampala Review Conference in 2010, in particular the crime of aggression amendment, directly or indirectly addressed China’s pre-existing concerns towards the Rome Statute. In addition, some of the Chinese reservations over the core crimes under the ICC’s jurisdiction relate to fields of customary law that have undergone rapid developments in the past two decades. This thesis takes China’s concerns both individually and as a whole to examine them from the legal perspective in light of all the above-mentioned developments. It argues that those specific objections are not as robust as they first appeared in the 1990s, and should no longer be regarded as a significant impediment to China’s accession to the Rome Statute. The ICC is part of a broader landscape of international courts and tribunals. This thesis therefore also examines the substance of the specific concerns of China towards the ICC in light of China’s engagement with international judicial bodies, and some of the traditional concerns that have had an impact on that engagement. Traditionally the Chinese government shunned participation in international adjudication, adhering to diplomatic negotiations for the settlement of whatever disputes it was embroiled in. However, since the 1990s, during and even after the ICC negotiations, there has been an increasingly greater Chinese engagement with international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies, with the exception of the UN human rights treaty bodies. The work undertaken in this thesis investigates the ways in which China has characterised the ICC as a human rights court of the traditional kind. This thesis argues that the ICC is distinct from UN human rights treaty bodies, and that China’s progressively wider engagement with international judicial bodies should not be hindered by a miscalculation of putting the ICC in a ‘human rights box’. This thesis concludes that the significant developments in both the specific ICC context and in the wider context (of China’s engagement with international judicial bodies) point to a need for the Chinese authorities to reassess and reconsider its position towards the ICC. Were the Chinese authorities to make a re-evaluation and decide to move towards full participation in the ICC, it would reinforce certain values of importance to China.

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Magister Legum - LLM / South Africa

Yes

No description available.

The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has taken steps to define and develop its prosecution policies. Review of these policies reveals that the OTP prefers to act on referrals of situations by states and the Security Council, rather than to employ its proprio motu investigatory powers. While the OTP has effectively defined the threshold for the gravity of the crimes that it will prosecute, a number of other discretionary criteria that inform the OTP's exercise of jurisdiction remain undefined. Additionally, the OTP's acceptance of state 'waivers of complementarity' moves in the direction of establishing a quasi-exclusive jurisdiction for the OTP. This thesis will critically evaluate these policies, and propose a recasting of the OTP's prosecution strategy towards the promotion of domestic war crimes prosecutions. It posits that the ICC OTP can act as a catalyst for domestic war crimes prosecutions, by serving in an advisory and support role. The OTP thus has the opportunity to breathe life into the complementarity regime and advance the global struggle against impunity.

This thesis examines article 69(7) of the Rome Statute, which creates an exclusionary rule for improperly obtained evidence at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ultimately, the thesis proposes how the ICC should interpret its exclusionary rule. The thesis discusses the theory underlying exclusionary rules, the evidence law and remedial law contexts within which exclusionary rules operate, and numerous comparative examples of exclusionary doctrine from within national criminal justice systems. Finally, some unique aspects of international criminal procedure are described in order to demonstrate how an international exclusionary rule might need to differ from a domestic rule, and previous jurisprudence relating to exclusionary rules at other international criminal tribunals is surveyed. The thesis ends by articulating what a basic test for exclusion at the ICC should look like, and examines how such a rule would operate in respect of all of the different exclusionary doctrines discussed earlier in the thesis.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Magister Legum - LLM / This research paper will examine whether the ICC should de lege ferenda be accorded jurisdiction in respect of the crime of corruption. Through this approach, the paper will contribute to the existing literature on corruption that argues in favour of an elevation of corruption to a crime under international law and, in addition, will proffer a specialised mechanism for addressing the problem.