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In its Burmych and Others v. Ukraine judgment of October 2017 the European Court of Human Rights dismissed more than 12,000 applications due to the fact that they were not only repetitive in nature, but also mutatis mutandis identical to applications covered by a previous pilot judgment rendered against Ukraine. This raises fundamental issues as to the role of the Court within the human rights protection system established by the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as those concerning the interrelationship between the Court and the Committee of Ministers.
Draft Article 15 of the International Law Commission’s project on crimes against humanity — dealing with the settlement of disputes arising from a proposed convention — attempts to strike a balance between state autonomy and robust judicial supervision. It largely follows Article 22 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which renders the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) conditional upon prior negotiations. Hence, the substance of the clause can be interpreted in light of the recent case law of the ICJ, especially in the case Georgia v. Russia. In addition, this contribution discusses several issues regarding the scope ratione temporis of the compromissory clause. It advances several proposals to improve the current draft, addressing its relationship with state responsibility — an explicit reference to which is currently missing — as well as the relationship between the ICJ and a possible treaty body. It also proposes to recalibrate the interplay of the requirement of prior negotiations with, respectively, the possibility of seizing a future treaty body and the indication of provisional measures by the ICJ.
On 14 December 2017, the Assembly of States Parties of the Rome Statute decided to activate the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over the crime of aggression. In doing so, it however seems to have rescinded the Kampala amendment adopted in 2010, and in particular, the need for State Parties to eventually opt out from the Court’s aggression-related jurisdiction. This reversal, while being more in line with the Rome Statute than the Kampala amendment itself, raises new (and old) and challenging legal questions which are highlighted in this article.