The control of the Exercise of Proprio Motu Powers by the Prosecutor of the ICC - Case Study Example

At this point, all the investigations that had been opened were either received from the Security Council or referred by State in reaction to Darfur. Earlier before this case, the Prosecutor turned down the request to open investigations in Venezuela and Iraq. This step resulted to both fears and jokes of the Article 15 opponents as they felt that it might get to the point of politicizing OTP operations who might in turn utilize his powers to get back to the western powers1. Such fears still exist till now especially with more investigations being opened in Africa.

Article 15 provides that in an event that the Prosecutor has the mandate to conclude that there exists reasonable basis for an investigation to proceed, then he or she shall have to table an authorization request before the Pre-Trail Chamber of an investigation. This submission has to be accompanied with concrete supporting material. At this point, the victims can now make representations according to the Rules of Procedure and Evidence to the Pre-Trail Chamber (Amediola, 2006, 349). . This is to determine if the crime committed falls under the courts jurisdiction, whether the court can be considered as being admissible according to Article 17 and whether that particular investigation will not be to the interest of justice.

Based on the above, the PTC II believes that it has the right to authorize an investigation to commence on condition it is in control of all the mentioned elements; the most important of all being the jurisdiction of the court and the admissibility of the case. The Admissibility Issue The PTC II acknowledges the need for a Prosecutor supervision to ensure that his or her obligations under the Statute are mirrored. It requires that if the statue expects the Prosecutor to evaluate admissibility, then the PTC has to control this evaluation2.

However, this contradicts with the Court law case with relation to Pre-Trail Chambers in assessing issuance admissibility of a warrant of arrest under Article 58 (Bruce 2004, 13). In a situation where there crimes are widespread and the victims are many, like what happened in Kenya, then the Prosecutor has to insist on the crimes scale. Hence the gravity threshold has to be refined further for it to have an ICC procedural rule. Crimes against Humanity The crimes that were allegedly committed in Kenya are believed to be crimes against humanity because the situation did not leave the prosecutor with many options as its scope did not fall under war crimes or genocide as there were no armed conflicts involved.

The question that remains is to determine whether the attacks that took place amounted to what was termed as crime against humanity as stated in Article 7 Statute of the ICC (Bolton 1999, 71). According to the Rome Statute, crime against humanity means the acts committed