The International Criminal Court’s intervention in the Lord’s Resistance Army war: impacts and implications

Abstract

This thesis argues that the International Criminal Court (ICC) brings a new more deontological paradigm to international interventions, founded upon the universal application of legal principle, and displacing consequentialist notions of justice linked to human rights. Based upon the Court’s Statute and mode of operations, it is argued that this is associated with assumptions concerning the ICC’s primacy, military enforcement, and theory of change. The consequences of this development in volatile contexts are demonstrated.

The case study, founded upon analysis from the war-affected community, examines the impact of the International Criminal Court in the Lord’s Resistance Army war, and reveals the relationship between criminal justice enforcement, and community priorities for peace and human rights. On the basis of evidence, and contrary to narratives repeated but unsubstantiated in the literature, it demonstrates that in this case these two imperatives were in opposition to one another. The Court’s pursuit of retributive legal principle was detrimental to the community’s interests in peace and human rights. The subsequent failure of the ICC’s review process to interrogate this important issue is also established.

The research establishes that statutory and operational assumptions upon which Court interventions are based do not hold in volatile contexts. For the case study community and elsewhere, this has had adverse impacts, with significant implications for the ICC. The findings indicate that if these issues are not fundamentally addressed, principled international criminal justice enforcement in volatile environments will continue to have profoundly negative human rights consequences.