| Summary: | "This book is about the International Criminal Court, the world's first permanent judicial body established to prosecute mass atrocity crimes, and the legal transformations its interventions have spawned in three "situation countries" to date: Uganda, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Its origins date back to the summer of 2010, a time that, in various ways, marked a turning point for the Court, as well as the countries the book traverses. In June the first "Review Conference of the Rome Statute," the ICC's founding treaty, was held in Kampala, Uganda. Billed partly as a "stock-tacking" exercise after the Court's first eight years of operation, the conference was yet another illustration of international criminal ustice's remarkable ascendance as a post-Cold War political project. The conference provided an opportunity for member states to finally establish an agreeable definition of aggression-the most contentious crime over which the ICC now has (partial) jurisdiction-and an occasion to issue a number of ambitious resolutions. One resolution extolled the impact of an emergent "Rome Statute system" on victims and affected communities, while another noted the "importance of States Parties taking effective domestic measures to implement the Statute" in their own legal systems (as the conference's host country, Uganda, had ust done).1 The final Kampala Declaration recalled the heady language of the Rome Statute's preamble-"that all peoples are united by common bonds," whose "delicate mosaic may be shattered at any time"- as it summoned "the common bonds of our peoples, our cultures pieced together in a shared heritage."2 And yet, by 2010, these bonds were being sorely tested. After commencing its first investigations in both Uganda and the DRC (situations that were referred to the Court by those countries' own governments), the ICC had begun to navigate an increasingly rocky political terrain. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC's inaugural Prosecutor, had initiated the Court's first, controversial proprio motu investigation in Kenya that spring, following the government's failure to establish a domestic tribunal for the post-election violence of late 2007. Shortly thereafter, ICC judges issued a second arrest warrant against former Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir, the first sitting head-of-state to then be charged by the Court. This time the charge was for genocide, the "crime of crimes."3"--
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