Drafting the International Criminal Court Treaty: Two Years to Rome and an Afterword on the Rome Diplomatic Conference

Leadership in Global Institution Building

“…5 However, some US officials have interpreted the Rome Statute as an attempt to constrain their government's power, because the ICC does not require the consent of the Security Council to conduct a prosecution (Cerone 2007;Sewall and Kaysen 2000;Thakur 2006). The US delegation in Rome was particularly concerned with the tactics of Canadian Ambassador Philippe Kirsch and other Minervian actors, who had ensured the adoption of a compromise final text in Rome that did not accord with several key US preferences (Benedetti and Washburn 1999). Canadian and UK officials had, in fact, bent over backwards trying to encourage the US to join the general consensus in support of the Court at the Rome Conference (Axworthy 2003, pp.…”

“…Undoubtedly, one of the major forces driving the ICC's establishment was a large, well-organized, international coalition of civil society actors -the NGO "Coalition for the ICC". 8 The ICC would not have come into being without the CICC (Benedetti and Washburn 1999;Glasius 2006;Struett 2008;Wippman 2004). Their powerful influence was especially remarkable given that many issues involved high security concerns, such as the Court's relationship with the Security Council (Barrow 2003).…”

“…In fact, the institution-building phase of the ICC was quite remarkable for the way that the lines between government and non-government actors were often blurred, with many NGO activists also taking roles within, or on behalf of, governments at certain times, 9 and government officials and intergovernmental organizations sometimes acting as NGOs. 10 Much of the scholarship about the ICC negotiations has focused on the roles of individual leaders in the Rome negotiations (Bassiouni 1998;Benedetti and Washburn 1999;Leonard 2005). The leaders within the CICC and key UN officials, not just government actors, are frequently recognized as major contributors to the "ideational causation" that led to the "overwhelming success of the Rome Conference" (Leonard 2005, pp.…”

Agent permeability, principal delegation and the European Court of Human Rights

“…IOs with high levels of permeability allow third parties to provide information or arguments in the most important decisionmaking fora. A prominent example is the Preparatory Commission to create an International Criminal Court, where NGOs interacted intensively with national delegations in the negotiating process (Benedetti and Washburn 1999).…”

“…By way of illustration, when the UN General Assembly tasked a Preparatory Committee to prepare a draft statute of an International Criminal Court, the Committee allowed extremely wide access to NGOs supporting the Court. These NGOs played a key role in conceptualizing the Court in terms of the demands of justice rather than as a tool for states to employ (Benedetti and Washburn 1999;Fehl 2004).…”