New Generation of Prosecutors: Warrants, Summonses and Opening Statements

Abstract

This penultimate chapter introduces two individuals, Luis Moreno-Ocampo and Fatou Bensouda, the former as the first to occupy the post of ICC prosecutor and the latter as the incumbent. Exploring their preparation of warrants of arrest and summonses to appear, Rogers reveals a bias favouring the referring state authority by targeting leaders of rebel armed groups as well as leaders of outlaw states. The chapter also examines these prosecutors’ first opening statements, which express rhetoric containing a mix of legal, political and war registers. Rogers argues that when their biases and varying registers are understood as an extension of the conditions giving rise to the court, then prosecutions of mass atrocity become another means of waging politico-cultural civil war for control over the modernist project.