Immunities of Foreign Officials for International Crimes: The Dilemmas of Strategic Litigation

This article analyses the elusive search to restrict immunities for foreign officials accused of international crimes as a form of strategic litigation. It emphasizes how litigation ‘constitutes’ legal reality beyond particular victories. Problematizing ‘success’ in litigation makes it possible to pay attention to unintended effects and even perverse outcomes of certain strategic routes. A proper understanding of success as more than victory is then used to assess three routes that have been used to try and limit, circumvent or oppose functional immunities of former officials. These routes are found not to be of even value for human rights, independently of their legal validity or their odds of success: the idea that international crimes are not committed as part of state functions trivializes the ‘public’ character of most international crimes; the argument that the jus cogens norm that prohibits international crimes trumps immunities either constantly needs to be finessed or sets up too dramatic a showdown; the idea that immunities offend human rights finds some favour as the one that is closest to the heart of human rights, although its tendency to symbolically sanctify the right to prosecutions could also have problematic ripple effects. Offered as a contribution to thinking through the rights implications of litigation, the article insists on the responsibility of human rights lawyers in creating legal worlds of their own making.