This week Karim Khan has taken over as the third prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, prompting legitimate curiosity over the future of the ICC under his leadership. Also, we saw a devastating report set up by states – the Independent Expert Review – which has pointed out many issues with how the court functions. Huge investigations – Palestine and Afghanistan, not to mention potential Ukraine and Nigeria – weigh down the Office of the Prosecutor, and ones like Georgia are stuck in a rut. States have stuck to several years of zero budget increases and NGOs demand more and more..

Overall, we thought the times were ripe for a little reflection over the state of the ICC right now, so we invited two guests to help us, Diane Orentlicher, who is professor of international law at American University in Washington DC and worked at the State Department under the Obama administration, and Dire Tladi, also a professor of international law at the University of Pretoria and former senior legal adviser to the South African government. We asked them what they think the state of health of the ICC is right now, whether this is truly the court that was imagined at the time of the Rome meeting and what expectations do they have for the third age of the ICC.

Small warning: home recording can be tricky and the quality of these ones is not perfect.

Dire wrote a novel about the ICC, Blood in the Sand of Justice, while Diane has her own book about the ICTY called Some Kind of Justice: The ICTY’s Impact in Bosnia and Serbia. Dire had to run off before we could extort any podcast/book/movie recommendations out of him, but Diane came through first with a true classic, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and then with a more technical read, Christian de Vos’s Complementarity, Catalysts, Compliance: The International Criminal Court in Uganda, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.