The drafters of the ICC's founding document, the Rome Statute, foresaw what would become the main challenge to the Court's legitimacy: that it could violate national sovereignty. To address this concern, the drafters added the principle of complementarity to the ICC's jurisdiction, in that the Court's province merely complements the exercise of jurisdiction by the domestic courts of the Statute's member states. The ICC honours the authority of those states to conduct their own trials.This book asserts that the principle of complementarity, both dynamic and powerful, is the key legal...

The relationship between Islamic law and international human rights law has been the subject of considerable, and heated, debate in recent years. The usual starting point has been to test one system by the standards of the other, asking is Islamic law 'compatible' with international human rights standards, or vice versa. This approach quickly ends in acrimony and accusations of misunderstanding. By overlaying one set of norms on another we overlook the deeply contextual nature of how legal rules operate in a society, and meaningful comparison and discussion is impossible.
In this volume,...