Description
Across the course of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, international and national courts have repeatedly flirted with the notion of some notion of a collaborative international/national approach to justice – to quote ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, that the organisation should be a 'hub at the centre of our collective accountability efforts', rather than 'the apex of the international criminal justice movement'.
This paper seeks to explain these phenomena – from their success as ambitious programmes of judicial assistance, drawing together the best of both worlds – to their failures as paternalistic, 'international-knows-best’ approaches. In doing so, it identifies not only the dysfunctional and successful elements of such initiatives, but also the context that these occurred in – how these arenas of accountability were opened, how they were justified, and how they influenced each other. It finds that while 'positive complementarity' (and similar) projects have been common across history, they have had relatively little influence on each other. Even the ICC's own commitment to the concept has been stop-start and inconsistent. The paper investigates why this is the case – why international and legal institutions repeatedly converge around positive complementarity approaches, and why these disparate genealogies often find dead ends, and thorny legal and political dilemmas.
