Ingrid Roestenburg-Morgan. 2022. The road to reconciliation? Optimizing the legitimacy and efficacy of the International Criminal Court within the African Union and Africa. Louvain-la-Neuve: Larcier Intersentia, Human Rights Research Series 102. 411 p.

Abstract

The book provides a rigorous multi-disciplinary analysis of the ingrained tensions between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the African Union (AU) related to a crisis of legitimacy of the ICC in the continent. According to the author, these tensions threaten the foundational principles of an international criminal justice system and have the potential of undermining impunity at a global level. Roestenburg-Morgan aims at identifying the factors that contribute to the erosion of legitimacy and explores three critical legitimacy deficits: institutional legitimacy, jurisdictional legitimacy and cultural legitimacy. To do so, this comprehensive work combines a mix of insights from political sciences, research methods from the legal domain as well as social sciences techniques (such as grounded theory guided by participant observation and unstructured interviews). The ample data collected on core categories and from diverse angles related to legitimacy for both the ICC and the AU, allows the author to advance solid solutions on how this legitimacy crisis could be redressed in order to reconcile the two institutions.