Regional complementarity in international criminal law: making sense of the four-tiered justice paradigm

Doctoral Thesis

This study deals with how to organize legal pluralism occasioned by the emerging four-tiered justice paradigm. I seek to shift attention away from universalism by interrogating specific organizing principles for legal pluralism. Secondly, I introduce the idea of system of justice which seeks to organize the relationships between different levels of courts and tribunals that exist as different parts of an ecosystem of criminal justice. I establish that there is a system of justice beyond the ICC. This system of justice approach presents a normative framework for analysis of principles to navigate the chaos that would attend the interaction between domestic, hybrid, regional and international courts with similar and overlapping jurisdictions. I aim to show that there is now a maturation of the justice system which should involve encouraging and clarifying the role of regional mechanisms in international criminal justice. The thesis shows that regionalism is not a challenge to...Show moreThis study deals with how to organize legal pluralism occasioned by the emerging four-tiered justice paradigm. I seek to shift attention away from universalism by interrogating specific organizing principles for legal pluralism. Secondly, I introduce the idea of system of justice which seeks to organize the relationships between different levels of courts and tribunals that exist as different parts of an ecosystem of criminal justice. I establish that there is a system of justice beyond the ICC. This system of justice approach presents a normative framework for analysis of principles to navigate the chaos that would attend the interaction between domestic, hybrid, regional and international courts with similar and overlapping jurisdictions. I aim to show that there is now a maturation of the justice system which should involve encouraging and clarifying the role of regional mechanisms in international criminal justice. The thesis shows that regionalism is not a challenge to international criminal justice. While some aspects are challenging, it is a progress to have this four-tiered model that encourages different levels of courts dispensing justice in the spirit of cooperation and mutual deference. I show that regionalism is not a challenge to international law, rather, it is an asset. I argue that regionalism should therefore not be seen as opposition to the universal conception of international criminal justice, but as a concept that promotes the latter in a different language and in a more contextualised way.
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Complementarity

Systems