ICC Prosecutor Releases Report on Investigations from 2014 (December 2, 2014) [1]
On December 2, 2014, the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) released a report [3] entitled, “Preliminary Examination Activities 2014,” detailing the status of preliminary investigations into various situations to determine if they meet the legal criteria established by the Rome Statute to warrant investigation by the Court. The OTP is currently investigating U.K. authorities for “war crimes involving systematic detainee abuse in Iraq from 2003 until 2008.” The OTP is also conducting an investigation into all actors involved in the conflict in Afghanistan, including U.S. Armed Forces and the Taliban. The OTP is considering “available information relating to the alleged abuse of detainees by international forces within the temporal jurisdiction of the Court,” specifically that “the information available suggests that between May 2003 and June 2004, members of the US military in Afghanistan used so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against conflict-related detainees in an effort to improve the level of actionable intelligence obtained from interrogations.” Another investigation is into the conflict between Georgia and Russia in 2008, in which the OTP is considering both the alleged forcible transfer of ethnic Georgians by Russian forces and alleged attacks on Russian peacekeepers by Georgian forces.