Justice for all? : explaining the International Criminal Court's situation selection
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[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Since its formation in 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened investigations in nine countries and preliminary examinations in a further twelve countries throughout Asia, South America, the Middle East and Africa. The fact that only weak states have been the target of ICC action has led to criticisms that the ICC is biased in its situation selection, especially in regards to situations within Africa. There is an expectation that the Court should punish the worst offenders for crimes against humanity, but critics argue the Court overlooks situations which occur in wealthy states or states with strong allies to focus on weak states. Is the Court neutral in its selection of situations to examine and possibly bring to trial, or are there systematic biases guiding ICC situation selection? In this dissertation, I use a series of statistical analyses to identify the factors that predict the likelihood that a situation will be targeted by the Court. I find that the Court is not biased against weak states. Rather, weak states are more likely to join the Court, leading to a pre-ponderance of power in the states targeted by the ICC. However, the Court is biased against African nations, focusing on situations in African countries while overlooking similar levels of abuse in other nations. I also conduct a review of African human rights courts to determine if any existing African court could take over the role of the ICC to investigate human rights abuses which occur in African states but conclude that no existing court has the jurisdiction to handle the types of cases the ICC was designed to prosecute.
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