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Complementarity And Alternative Justice, Gregory S. Gordon

Gregory S. Gordon

Certain commentators believe that domestic resort to alternative justice mechanisms (ARMs), such as Uganda's "mato oput" (a local tribal rite) or truth commissions, can relieve the International Criminal Court of its obligation to prosecute under the complementarity principle. However, this literature provides only general suggestions for how the ICC could determine whether alternative mechanisms render a case inadmissible under the complementarity regime. This article proposes a concrete set of analytic criteria the ICC can use to formulate an admissibility test for conducting complementarity analysis in difficult cases of municipal reliance on ARMs. The admissibility test entails consideration and parsing of …