ABSTRACT
On 18 July 2012, Fatou Bensouda, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, received a letter referring the “situation in Mali since January 2012” from the country's interim minister of justice. The idea that international criminal justice (ICrJ) poses a high sovereignty cost is predicated on a particular absolutist notion of state authority—the so-called Westphalian notion of sovereignty. This notion of sovereignty entails internal and external dimensions. The internal dimension connotes supremacy of the state as a unified, indivisible, comprehensive, and direct authority over its territory and peoples. The very argument, however, that ICrJ is antithetical to previous conceptions of sovereignty under international law was always a kind of “conceptual sleight of hand” that exaggerates the shifts in the international legal order. The fact that individuals are criminally prosecuted for mass violence adds a further dimension to the cost-shifting opportunity of ICrJ.
