Peering behind the ‘Institutional Veil’ to Assess State Behaviour in the Security Council: Does/Should icc Membership Make a Difference?

Abstract

A considerable amount of literature exists on whether the Security Council’s actions towards the International Criminal Court (icc) as such are broadly consonant with the Rome Statute and the UN Charter. That literature, however, tends to treat the Security Council, and the United Nations with it, as a single bloc, and to judge the legality of its behaviour entirely independently from that of individual Security Council members in the Council. In revisiting these debates, this article examines the record of states in the Security Council in relation to the icc from the point of view of international law as a productive angle to understand how states reconcile various obligations of ‘good citizenship’ vis-à-vis international institutions.