Latest developments

The Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) has commissioned ICLS to prepare a briefing paper on the potential role that the International Criminal Court could play in the residual functions of the UN international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. ICLS and OSJI have recently updated a briefing paper on the residual functions of the UN international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone and potential mechanisms to address them. See ICLS' projects site for more information.

ICLS, in cooperation with the Centre for Human Rights in Tshwane (Pretoria), will soon hold a workshop to launch the Southern Africa Programme. It is the first of ICLS’ region-wide, long-term programmes, aimed at building and strengthening the capacity of senior lawyers (including judges, prosecutors, government legal advisers and human rights NGOs) in the field of international criminal law as applied in national, international and other fora.

ICLS has received grants from the Foundation Open Society Institute (Zug) and the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office to assist conventional-court judges in Rwanda in enhancing their capacity to better adjudicate and manage atrocity-crime cases, including any cases transferred to Rwandan courts by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, extradition cases from foreign countries, and Rwanda’s so-called category-1 cases. ICLS is working with the Institute of Legal Practice and Development in Nyanza, Rwanda, to further develop and implement the project.

ICLS has launched a programme focussing on international criminal law principles and their application to business people. Ms. Magda Karagiannakis is ICLS' special adviser to the programme.

ICLS and the OSJI will update the international criminal law training materials which were developed for lawyers involved with the Khmer Rouge chambers (Extraordinary Chambers for the period of the Democratic Kampuchea in Cambodia, ECCC). The current version of the materials has been translated into Khmer, and is used at training seminars in Cambodia, including trainings for judges, prosecutors and defence counsel at the Khmer Rouge chambers.

ICLS and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) have recently entered into a cooperation agreement.

Read more about ICLS' programmes and projects.