ABSTRACT
In the solemn undertaking he made upon assuming office, on 16 June 2003, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo said that ‘as a consequence of complementarity’, the number of cases before the Court should not be used as a measure of its efficiency. ‘On the contrary’, he insisted, ‘the absence of trials before this Court, as a consequence of the regular functioning of national institutions, would be a major success’. Moreno Ocampo’s remarks were very much in the spirit of the preamble of the Rome Statute, which recalls that ‘it is the duty of every State to exercise its criminal jurisdiction over those responsible for international crimes’, and which ‘[e]mphasiz[es] that the International Criminal Court established under this Statute shall be complementary to national criminal jurisdictions’.
