Complementarity and the Assembly of State Parties: Opportunities for Impact

Complementarity and the Assembly of State Parties (ASP): Opportunities for Impact sets out a series of recommendations from the Open Society Justice Initiative aimed at strengthening the ability of national courts to support the International Criminal Court.

The document was presented on June 21, 2011, before The Hague Working Group on the Rule of Law, which comprises select representatives of the more than 100 states that have ratified the Treaty of Rome establishing the ICC that form the ASP.

The submission makes three proposals for the ASP members: arguing that they should educate a wide range of actors—development agencies, embassies on the ground, national governments, and civil society—about the value of prioritizing complementarity efforts; that they should convene a cross-section of actors needed to address complementarity effectively; and that they should promote the exchange of information between these various actors on complementarity.