Category Archives: Access to justice

Responding to the International Criminal Court’s Preliminary Examination Report released on 5 December 2018, Amnesty International calls on the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) to launch an investigation into crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Nigeria during the conflict with Boko Haram.

Biraj Patnaik, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for South Asia considers the progress of the recently established Office on Missing Persons towards advancing truth, justice and reparation for missing and disappeared persons and their families in Sri Lanka.

Legal Adviser Jonathan O’Donohue, with the important contributions of International Criminal Justice Clinic students Andy Kuoch and Stuart Dixon, examines the majority of the Pre-Trial Chamber’s ruling on jurisdiction, considers the Prosecutor’s decision to proceed with the preliminary examination and emphasises the need for further international justice efforts to address impunity in Myanmar.

In this final piece in our series commenting on the Bemba Appeals Judgment. Amnesty’s International Justice Team reflects on victims’ experience of this and other cases and argues that the focus must change from defining justice for victims solely as outcomes of cases towards improving their experience of the justice process as a whole.

In this second opinion piece on the Bemba Appeals Judgment, Amnesty’s International Justice Team considers the majority’s finding that the conviction exceeded the scope of the charges confirmed pre-trial and its implications for future prosecutions of sexual and gender-based crimes.

With this article, Amnesty’s International Justice Team introduce its series of opinion pieces examining key issues arising from the Bemba Appeals Judgment. This first piece outlines some general reflections on the Judgment and reactions to it.  In particular, it emphasises the need for the ICC to look beyond the controversies of the Appeal Judgment in order to identify the lessons learned. 

On June 27th 2018, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ (‘OPCW’) Conference of States Parties held a ‘Special Session’ which established an ‘Attribution Mechanism’ at the OPCW. The two-day Special Session showed – in microcosm – a number of trends in international criminal justice. In particular, the increasingly ‘outside-of-the-box’ thinking which is required to push forward international criminal justice efforts, especially in light of UN Security Council (‘UNSC’) ‘deadlock’, and the issue of how bodies which are not typically established to play a role in international criminal justice efforts are being mandated to do so.

Syria: Joint NGO Statement for United Nations General Assembly Informal Debate on the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria

Matt Cannock, Head of Office of Amnesty International’s Centre for International Justice, comments on the Philippines’ withdrawal from the ICC and its consequences for victims of international crimes committed in the country.

Amnesty International’s press release following news that the prosecutor of the ICC will open a preliminary examination into the “war on drugs” in the Philippines.