Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago’s role in the creation of the ICC

Ratification of the ICC treaty

Commitment to the international human rights regime: a focus on compliance costs

Trinidad and Tobago and the ICC: assessing the explanatory power of the credible threat theory

Conclusion

This chapter explores Trinidad and Tobago’s International Criminal Court (ICC) ratification decision and how the court’s strong enforcement mechanism influenced that decision. Like the countries studied in prior chapters, Trinidad and Tobago is a democracy with relatively good human rights practices. Its domestic law enforcement institutions, however, are somewhat weak, meaning that it could have some difficulties if it were called upon to prosecute individuals accused of committing mass atrocities. ¹ Trinidad and Tobago is also not as powerful as the countries previously studied. These distinguishing characteristics, however, provide an opportunity to examine the power of external pressures theories to explain the country’s ratification behavior and to compare those theories to the explanatory power of the credible threat theory.