THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT IN THE PREVENTION AND RESOLUTION OF CONFLICTS BETWEEN ACHIEVABLE UTOPIAS AND DECEITFUL REALITIES

From a historical-legal perspective, the establishment of the International Criminal Court marks the decisive step towards the implementation of the idea of putting an end to impunity for the authors of the most appalling international crimes.. Decisive, but not final nor irreversible, insofar as the translation of this ideal into the abstract legal formulas of the Rome Treaty must be followed by an effective transposition, boosted by the Court itself, in the international community and its law. Quite on the contrary, in this last respect, the crisis of the International Criminal Court, almost a decade after the entry into force of its Statute, is a well-established fact, and deserves in-depth examination in the following pages. The research hypothesis that the current contribution sets out to develop and critically test is that the aforementioned negative balance is not so much due to incidental, though important, factors (such as the United States boycott or certain controversial choices of the Prosecutor), but rather to the more dangerous and progressive emergence of a common perception according to which the suppression of international crimes in conflict situations is counter-productive with respect to the peace process and the internal stabilization, unless it is subject to the imperatives dictated by the relevant political context. The aforesaid realist conception, which will be proven erroneous, accounts for the depiction of the Prosecutor as a necessarily “politicized” organ in search of continuous compromises, which, beside contributing to explaining various stances, hardly acceptable or transparent, initially embraced by Moreno Ocampo, also risks questioning the very raison d'être of the International Criminal Court.