Unilateral declaration accepting the competence of the International Criminal Court (article 12.3 of the SICC).From the statutory formulation to its implementation (Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Palestine, Ukraine...)

Abstract

The article 12.3 of the International Criminal Court’s Statute allows the States not party of the treaty to make a unilateral declaration accepting the competence of the Court, without expressing their consent to be bound to the Statute. This paper addresses the survey of the provision in the light of the practice arisen from its statutory formulation and the interesting matters that its implementation has brought up regarding aspects such as the entitlement to issue the declaration, the material, temporal, territorial and subjective scope thereof, the procedure after its submission before the Secretary of the ICC and the problems derived from the possibility that a State may withdraw the trust placed in the ICC in the form of a declaration. The declarations issued until now on behalf of Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Palestine, Ukraine and even Egypt, and the response given by the ICC to the different matters mentioned above, allow to have a glimpse of a provision full of possibilities, not only for the States that have not ratified the treaty yet, but also for the 124 States that already did.