Complementarity in Crisis: Uganda, Alternative Justice, and the International Criminal Court

In this Article, I take up a focused analysis of the Uganda prosecutions, considering both the interpretive dilemmas facing the Court and the efforts of Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to address them. Part I provides a summary of events leading to the LRA arrest warrants and the recent peace negotiations. Part II turns to the text of the Rome Statute, with a focus on Article 19's framework for complementary jurisdiction and the Article 53 dictate that “interests of justice” may trump the admissibility of investigations and cases that otherwise meet all relevant statutory criteria. Although the ICC is structured to give deference to domestic proceedings, application of these provisions to the Ugandan peace process reveals deep uncertainties regarding the ICC's core relationship to domestic governance. Part III explores how these uncertainties upset standard rationales for the Court's creation and looks to Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo's response to the Ugandan peace process, focusing both on the failure of existing prosecutorial guidelines to address the situation adequately and on the possibility of relying on various other actors to resolve the Ugandan dilemma. In the Conclusion, I consider different conceptions of the Court that emerge from my discussion. I conclude that the Ugandan peace process reveals the Court to be a promising but unstable institution, one whose legitimacy may ironically depend on help from external stakeholders, including the very political actor-- the UN Security Council--whose importance the Rome Statute was designed, in part, to diminish.