ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the history of Security Council engagement with international humanitarian law (IHL) in general and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in particular as a measure of the Council's legislative proactivism. It considers the Security Council's use of the referral and deferral mechanisms ascribed to it under the Rome Statute and will critically examine the Council's relationship with the ICC. A major motivation was that a permanent organ would be jurisdictionally and financially capable of investigating and prosecuting crimes of the kind committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The referral mechanism in Article 13 was first used by the Security Council for alleged crimes committed in Sudan, a non-state party to the ICC. The Security Council condemned the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan and determined the situation to be a threat to international peace and security resolution 1547, June 2004. Unlike the ICC prosecutions in Sudan and Libya that were initiated by Security Council referrals.
