The rapid ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the orderly election of its judges and prosecutor belie the radical nature of the new institution. The Court has jurisdiction over genocide, aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes-crimes of the utmost seriousness often committed by governments themselves, or with their tacit approval. The ICC has the formal authority to adjudge the actions of high state officials as criminal and to send them to jail, no matter how lofty the accused's position or undisputed the legality of those acts under domestic law. While the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) also possess this authority, those institutions operate directly under the control of the United Nations Security Council and within narrow territorial limits. The ICC, by contrast, is largely independent of the Council and vests the power to investigate and prosecute the politically sensitive crimes within its broad territorial sweep in a single individual, its independent prosecutor. The ICC Prosecutor sits at a critical juncture in the structure of the Court, where the pressures of law and politics converge. The cases adjudicated by the ICC are infused with political implications and require sensitive decision making by those members of the Court-including the Prosecutor-who are vested with the discretion to exercise its powers. Because of the high stakes of its subject matter and the threat that its decisions can pose to powerful international interests, the ICC will inevitably be subject to charges that it is a purely political institution, remote from both the rule of law and the places where the crimes it adjudicates occur.
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