>>20207114
>>20207141
How the International Criminal
Court Threatens Treaty Norms
Michael A. Newton*
ABSTRACT
This Article demonstrates the disadvantages of permitting
a supranational institution like the International Criminal
Court (ICC) to aggrandize its authority by overriding
agreements between sovereign states. The Court's constitutive
power derives from a multilateral treaty designed to augment
sovereign enforcement efforts rather than annul them. Treaty
negotiators expressly rejected efforts to confer jurisdiction to the
ICC based on its aspiration to advance universal values or a
self-justifying teleological impulse to bring perpetrators to
justice. Rather, its jurisdictionderives solely from the delegation
by States Parties of their own sovereign prerogatives. In
accordance with the ancient maxim nemo plus iuris transferre
potest quam ipse habet, states cannot transfer jurisdictional
authority to the supranationalcourt that they themselves do not
possess at the time of the alleged offenses. Upon ratification of
the Rome Statute, both Afghanistan and Palestine conveyed
jurisdiction to the Court, but the scope of that delegation is
limited by their preexisting treaty-based constraints. American
forces and Israelis remain subject to the exclusive criminal
jurisdiction of their own states for criminal offenses committed
on the territory covered by those binding bilateral agreements so
long as those treaties remain applicable. Hence, the Rome
Statute by its own terms does not automatically extend
territorialjurisdiction over American forces in Afghanistan or
over Israeli citizens suspected of offenses in the Occupied
Territory of the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip. Yet, the Office
of the Prosecutor uncritically accepts the premise that
ratification of the multilateral treaty conveyed indivisible
territorialjurisdiction. The ICC is not empowered to sweep
aside binding bilateralagreements between sovereign states. By
asserting that it has power to abrogate underlying bilateral
treaties, the Court undermines ancient precepts of international
law and harms the principles of treaty law. The ICC is not
constructed as an omnipotent super-court with self-proclaimed
universal jurisdiction based upon the presumption that the
Rome Statute operates in isolation from other treaty-based
constraints on sovereign prerogatives. This Article examines the
conflicts between current Court assumptions and the tenets of
the Rome Statute. Its final Parts dissect the foreseeable damage
caused by the present policy. ==The conclusion asserts that the
Court cannot unilaterally override the validity of existing
jurisdictional treaties. The assertion of such powers would
violate the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and
muddy the existing debates related to resolving conflicts between
equally binding treaty norms==
https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1162&context=vjtl
The Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", referred to the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and German Empire (1871–1918). The Third Reich, which the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, ended in May 1945, after only 12 years, when the Allies defeated Germany and entered the capital, Berlin, ending World War II in Europe.