l courts to try all other cases, including of the most serious crimes.
Serious crimes like rape and murder and kidnapping that take place in the context of armed conflict or in the context of widespread and systematic abuses, like crimes against humanity.
The problem is in too many places around the world, courts lack the capacity and governments lack the will to take on these crimes and we are left with an impunity gap—crimes without justice.
Complementarity is about building the structures that can fill that gap. It’s the effort to create domestic accountability for international or serious crimes.
So, complementarity is about expanding the reach of justice.
Complementarity is, in part, a new way of addressing a very old problem. The course of human history has largely been a history of impunity. And we have only recently been taking very small but important steps to address the issue.
Why is addressing impunity important?
Because continued impunity undermines the rule of law. It prevents stability. It prevents democracy. It prevents societies from developing in an orderly way. And it has terrible human consequences.
Impunity has an enormously debilitating impact on victims. For people who have suffered sexual violence or whose family members have been killed, impunity is a continuing violation of these people’s rights to closure, to know the truth about what happened, and to ensure that the perpetrators of these crimes are punished.
I recall when I was working in Bosnia, in 1996, the year after the Dayton agreement was signed, and a number of alleged war criminals were still on the loose. It was widely known that they had not been arrested. And it was very palpable, the fear that this instilled—their continued presence on the streets instilled fear in ordinary people. And one could sense that. One could feel that in everyday conversations. It was enormously important when, a couple of years later, NATO troops were used to arrest war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. That began to change some of the atmosphere. It was not perfect, but it was a start.
What might complementarity look like in practice?
There are actually many positive examples to build on. We’ve seen complementarity work well in Peru, with the trial of Alberto Fujimori, and in Yugoslavia, where domestic Bosnian prosecutors and judges were able to carry forward work that the international tribunal has not been able to do.
One of the most notable recent successes has been the mobile court project, which the Justice Initiative has been assisting in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Congo has endured millions of deaths due to conflict in recent years. The International Criminal Court has been active in the country and is currently trying several high-profile figures—including Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga—in The Hague. But with the court’s limited capacity, investigations have focused on just a few defendants.
The mobile courts, then, have stepped into the void. They’ve been created to help domestic Congolese judges, prosecutors, and lawyers address other perpetrators of serious crimes. So, for example, in January of this year—on New Year’s Day, in fact—a mass rape occurred in the town of Fizi, in the eastern Congo. Within two months, a mobile court had conducted trials that were, by all accounts, fair and in accord with due process. It convicted a number of army officers of rape and other crimes of sexual violence and imposed appropriate sentences.
The ability of a court to conduct trials and identify perpetrators and impose sentences, within two months of the crime, was extraordinary—and at a cost, frankly, that was a fraction of what the International Criminal Court would have been able to do.
What stands between us and complementarity in practice? What are the obstacles?
The two primary obstacles are, on the one hand, technical and, on the other, political.
The technical obstacle is the fact that very often investigators at the national level do not have adequate training in how to investigate certain kinds