Day three of the 2018 ICC Assembly of States Parties focused on state cooperation and the 20th anniversary of the Rome Statute.

The day opened with a special plenary meeting on the topic of “20 Years After Rome: Back to the Major Challenges of Cooperation”.  The discussion focused on cooperation related to arrests, financial and other types of investigations, and enforcement of sentences. Slovenia signed its agreement on enforcement of sentences with the ICC at the plenary [above, photo credit: CICC]. Many states made three minute interventions during this plenary, including Austria for the European Union, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Japan, Mali, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Palestine, South Korea, Spain, Uganda, Uruguay, United Kingdom and Venezuela. Spain pledged to enter into additional cooperation agreements with the ICC.

The afternoon plenary was titled “Rome Statute 20 years – Addressing current and future challenges”. The plenary began with a video on the 20th anniversary, available here. This was followed by a panel discussion with representatives of the African Union, Chile, the Coalition for an ICC (CICC), Costa Rica and Romania, and Prof. John Dugard of Leiden University. This was followed by state interventions. As noted by Bill Pace of the CICC, and echoed by others, some of the innovations of the Rome Statute are under threat today.

The General Debate also resumed today, with seven civil society speakers taking the floor to make statements, including Human Rights Watch.

The day was packed with 12 side events, and a reception hosted by the CICC and the City of The Hague. For an excellent summary of these side-events, please see the CICC’s summaries here.

Marie-Laure Tapp joins the IntLawGrrls symposium today with a two-part blog post on domestic prosecutions of individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Syrian conflict.

Marie-Laure is a lawyer and LL.M. Candidate (International and Transnational Law) at Université Laval. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and International Development from McGill University and degrees in Civil Law and Common Law, also from McGill University. She completed her articles at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva and subsequently worked as a volunteer legal advisor in Mali with Lawyers Without Borders Canada and in Nepal with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. She was involved with Université Laval’s

International Criminal and Humanitarian Law Clinic and works as a translator and team supervisor for the translation of the Updated Commentary on the Second Geneva Convention, a partnership between Université Laval and the ICRC Delegation in Paris. Her main areas of interest (which are numerous) are the respect and dissemination of international humanitarian law and, on the international criminal law front, the principle of complementarity and universal jurisdiction. She is also very much interested in human rights investigation and advocacy. She has also been involved in several human rights education and access to justice initiatives over the past 10 years.

A heartfelt welcome to Marie-Laure to this IntLawGrrls symposium!