On 1 December 2016, Gambians will go to the polls to elect a president with the likely scenario being the incumbent, President Yahya Jammeh will be re-elected for a fifth time. Twenty-two years ago, Jammeh was a young army officer when he took power in a military coup. He was then elected in 1996, and…
The Victims’ Rights Working Group (VRWG) is an informal network of national and international civil society groups and experts created in 1997 under the auspices of the NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC). Its membership includes international as well as local NGOs and experts from a wide array of countries, in particular those…
In May 2016, the government of Kenya announced its plans to close Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, by the end of this month, November. The government asserted that one of their primary reasons was security. The camp is home to almost 300,000 refugees from neighbouring countries with the vast majority – over 260,000…
This has been a rough month for the International Criminal Court (ICC). After years of threats of withdrawal from the Rome Statute which created the ICC by African states, South Africa, Gambia and Burundi have made moves to do so this month (South Africa and Burundi have formally notified the UN of their withdrawals while…
Published in Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Deterrent Effect of the International Criminal Court, published by the International Nuremburg Principles Academy, 4 November 2016. Read the full article.
The idea of the deterrence project originated in one of the Academy’s Advisory Council meetings. Justice SONG Sang-Hyun, former President of the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’), proposed that the Academy could conduct a study into whether the ICC has had a deterrent effect. A preliminary literature survey disclosed that no major study had been conducted…