Otto Triffterer and Kai Ambos (eds), The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: A Commentary

Abstract

The Statute of the first permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) was adopted in 1998 at the Rome Conference, paving the way for the future of modern international criminal law. Only one year later, a German-Austrian professor of law from the University of Salzburg with a long-standing passion for international criminal law and justice, Otto Triffterer, published the first edition of his seminal book on the legal framework of the newly established Court, entitled Commentary on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: Observers’ Notes, Article by Article. Almost ten years later, in 2008, the second edition of the so-called ‘Triffterer’ was released, followed by the third edition in November 2015. This edition was edited by another well-known expert in international criminal law, Kai Ambos, and dedicated to its founder, as Triffterer died on 1 June 2015, only a few months before the third edition of his Commentary was published.1 In the past two decades, since the adoption of the ICC Statute, international criminal law has experienced a quite unexpected renaissance, not only in the courtrooms of the ICC, the two ad hoc tribunals of the United Nations, the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR), and other international and/or mixed courts, but also — due to the principle of complementarity laid down in Article 17 of the ICC Statute — on the domestic level, where, like in Germany, legal provisions pertaining to the core international crimes were adopted or amended in accordance with the ICC Statute.