LCIL Lecture: 'What is an International Crime? And How This Question Matters Now for the Future of the ICC' - Professor Nikolas Rajkovic

Lecture summary: The International Criminal Court performs before a global audience of aggrieved populations, all primed in their myriad numbers, locations and claims. Yet, the Rome Statute operates within a privileged catalogue of “serious” crimes, which extends jurisdiction selectively across a vast breadth of international outrages. The key implication is narrow scope for public reflection on whether incumbent international crimes remain consistent with an evolving register of global solidarity and “shocking” deaths. Accordingly, my lecture engages the Rome Statute as both synonym and antonym of penal accountability, and how that operative tension has left the ICC struggling visibly to address emergent constitutional issues such as: how the ICC indicts overwhelmingly non-white Africans; and whether the institutionalized sources of chronic starvation in the Global South must be addressed as a crime against humanity.

Nikolas M. Rajkovic (b. 1974) is Professor and Chair of International Law at Tilburg University, and is an Adjunct Professor in International Law and International Relations at Kyung Hee University (South Korea). He came to Tilburg Law School from the University of Kent (UK), where in 2015 he was awarded the Faculty of Social Sciences Prize for Early Career Research. Nikolas is a senior faculty member of the Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP), and is an Associated Researcher at the Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law (CePTL) of the Faculty of Law, VU Amsterdam. In 2012-2013, he was awarded the Jean Monnet Fellowship in Global Governance by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (Florence). Nikolas has published in leading journals of both disciplinary International Law and International Relations, notably European Journal of International Relations, International Relations, and Leiden Journal of International Law. His most recent publication is an edited volume, together with Tanja Aalberts and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, titled: The Power of Legality: Practices of International Law and their Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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  The Lauterpacht Centre Friday lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press.

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