Complementarity, Catalysts, Compliance The International Criminal Court in Uganda, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law Series

Since its establishment at the turn of the century, a central preoccupation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been to catalyse the pursuit of criminal accountability at the domestic level. Drawing on ten years of research, this book theorizes the ICC's principle of complementarity as a transnational site and adaptive strategy for realizing an array of ambitious governance goals. Through a grounded, inter-disciplinary approach, it illustrates how complementarity came to be framed as a 'catalyst for compliance' and its unexpected effects on the legal frameworks and institutions of three different ICC 'situation countries' in Africa: Uganda, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Linking complementarity's law and practice to contemporary debates in international law and relations, the book unsettles international law's dominant progressive narrative. It urges a critical rethinking of the ICC's politics and a reorientation towards international criminal justice as a project of global legal pluralism.

1. Introduction; Part I. The ICC and Complementarity: Evolutions, Interpretations, Implementation: 2. Tracing an idea, constructing a norm: complementarity as a catalyst; 3. Mirror images? Complementarity in the courtroom; 4. Leveraging the Hague: complementarity and the Office of the Prosecutor; Part II. The ICC in Uganda, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo: 5. Compliance and performance: implementation as domestic politics; 6. Competing, complementing, copying: domestic courts and complementarity; 7. Catalysing opportunity: complementarity and domestic proceedings; 8. Conclusions and recommendations.

Christian M. De Vos is a senior advocacy officer with the Open Society Justice Initiative. He has worked as a human rights advocate, attorney, and researcher for organizations including Amnesty International, the United States Institute of Peace, the War Crimes Research Office, and Leiden University's Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. He previously clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has published in a number of leading academic journals and was a coeditor of the volume Contested Justice: The Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Interventions (with Sara Kendall and Carsten Stahn, 2015). A graduate of American University, Washington College of Law (J.D.) and Leiden University (Ph.D.), De Vos is a member of the New York Bar and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.