This book focuses on the evolving relationship between China and the International Criminal Court (ICC). It examines the substantive issues that have restricted China’s engagement with the ICC to date, and provides a comprehensive assessment of whether these Chinese concerns still constitute a significant impediment to China’s accession to the ICC in the years to come. The book places the China-ICC relationship within the wider context of China’s interactions with international judicial bodies, and uses the ICC as an example to reflect China’s engagement with international institutions and global governance in general. It seeks to offer a thought-provoking resource to international law and international relations scholars, legal practitioners, government legal advisers, and policy-makers about the nature, scope, and consequences of the relationship between China and the ICC, as well as its impact on both global governance and order. This book is the first of its kind to explore China’s engagement with the ICC primarily from a legal perspective.

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Politics - Topic: International Organisations, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen, language: English, abstract: More than 10 years ago the International Criminal Court entered into force. It was designed to be a model of a global governing of human rights. Trying to set universal standards for the jurisdiction of human rights, it is the first time in human history, that serious human rights violations such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression can be judged in a court of law. The thesis will argue, that the ICC therefore presents a milestone on the realization of international human rights. However, the ICC has to face many obstacles, most prominently the opposition by several UN member states, who refuse to accede the Court. The thesis will illuminate this development with the help of some cosmopolitan approaches. The focus will be on the progress of universal human rights over the last centuries with the remarkable climax of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which also laid the roots for the later foundation of the ICC. In chapter 3 this thesis will broach the issue of the obstacles regarding the realization of human rights. As mentioned above, a major opposition still stems from the nation states, who are partly still stuck on a realist view of the international system. Out of fear, that they might lose sovereignty, they prefer to follow their national interest instead of putting universal human rights into practice. To explicate this behavior of nation states, I have consulted the article „In the national interest“, published by Allen Buchanan in 2005. He reflects on the observation that human rights are in practice in most of all cases incompatible with the national interest of a nation state. Although the majority of all states will commit themselves on paper to the noble goal of human rights promotion, in reality their foreign policy will quite often display quite the opposite. As a reply, I will argue with the help of David Held, that a cosmoplitan answer to overcome these obstacles is possible by creating common institutions as a new layer of legal competence to which people can transfer public powers. To illustrate these considerations I will then discuss the International Criminal Court, as an example of such a cosmopolitan institution.

On August 21, 2013, chemical weapons were unleashed on the civilian population in Syria, killing another 1,400 people in a civil war that had already claimed the lives of more than 140,000. As is all too often the case, the innocent found themselves victims of a violent struggle for political power. Such events are why human rights activists have long pressed for institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate and prosecute some of the world’s most severe crimes: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. While proponents extol the creation of the ICC as a transformative victory for principles of international humanitarian law, critics have often characterized it as either irrelevant or dangerous in a world dominated by power politics. Christopher Rudolph argues in Power and Principle that both perspectives are extreme. In contrast to prevailing scholarship, he shows how the interplay between power politics and international humanitarian law have shaped the institutional development of international criminal courts from Nuremberg to the ICC. Rudolph identifies the factors that drove the creation of international criminal courts, explains the politics behind their institutional design, and investigates the behavior of the ICC. Through the development and empirical testing of several theoretical frameworks, Power and Principle helps us better understand the factors that resulted in the emergence of international criminal courts and helps us determine the broader implications of their presence in society.