Wednesday 9 April 2008

Travaux préparatoires of the Rome Statute

I was recently asked about where to find the travaux préparatoires of the Rome Statute on line: http://www.icc-cpi.int/legaltools/. The United Nations has published the 'Official Records' of the Rome Conference, in three volumes, and these are the core of the travaux. They can be found on the website and downloaded, so that you can search them by keyword. Also available are the reports of the International Law Commission from 1993 and 1994, the report of the Ad Hoc Committee from 1995, and the reports of the Preparatory Committee in 1996 and 1998. If you want further detail, the individual documents including many that are not strictly speaking official (and therefore there is some question as to whether they are, strictly speaking, travaux) can also be found. The ICC legal tools website is quite thorough, but it is not very user friendly because of the volume of documents. For the core documents of the travaux, it is actually much simpler to look on the UN website: http://untreaty.un.org/cod/icc/index.html.

No comments: