There are scholarly books that take a restrained and self-denyingly impartial approach to their subject matter. There are others that are passionate and partisan. There are scholars whose aim is to get things right. There are others whose aim is to make things right. Chile Eboe-Osuji is the second type of scholar. End of Immunity: Holding World Leaders Accountable for Aggression, Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity is the second type of book.
Eboe-Osuji, a former president of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is best known for having been the presiding judge of the ICC Appeals Chamber and animating spirit of the judgment and four-judge joint concurring opinion in the appeal in Jordan Referral re Al-Bashir.Footnote 1 There the decision was ultimately founded on the claim that the immunity ratione personae from criminal jurisdiction from which a state is entitled to see its head of state benefit before the courts of another state did not bar the exercise of jurisdiction by an international criminal court over that head of state in respect of the latter’s alleged responsibility for international crimes. This was for the stated reason that no rule of customary international law established the availability of this immunity before such a court.Footnote 2 The Court’s grounding of the unavailability of head-of-state immunity in the absence of a rule of customary international law rendering this immunity available before an international criminal court had a crucial upshot. In the case of the ICC or any other international criminal court established on the basis of a treaty between states, the unavailability of immunity applied in relation to the head of state of a state not party to the treaty, such as the then-President Al-Bashir of Sudan, as much as to the head of state of a state party. The judgment’s reasoning proved controversial.
The preface, prologue, fifteen chapters, conclusion, and epilogue of End of Immunity are in essence an extended defense of this most fundamental of Al-Bashir’s claims, reproducing faithfully and elaborating as they do on the arguments advanced in the judgment and especially in the joint concurring opinion, as well as in the previous reasons of Judge Eboe-Osuji in a Trial Chamber decision in Ruto and Sang.Footnote 3 More specifically, the work’s “primary purpose,” as declared in the prologue, “is to recall and retrace with clarity the journey of international law’s rejection of immunity for anyone—including heads of state in particular—when they are suspected or accused of atrocities that international law has proscribed as crimes and are especially facing prosecution before international courts” (p. xviii).
The book is as timely as the stakes of the debate are high. In 2023, a Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC issued a warrant for the arrest, on allegations of responsibility for war crimes, of President Vladimir Putin, head of state of the Russian Federation, a state—like Al-Bashir’s Sudan—not party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the treaty on the basis of which the ICC is established. Arrest warrants for other high-ranking Russian officials, alleged to be responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, followed in 2024. The immunity or otherwise of Putin and other senior Russian and potentially Belarusian officials before an international criminal court created under a treaty to which Russia and Belarus are not parties loomed similarly large in the negotiations that led to the signing on June 25, 2025 of the Agreement between the Council of Europe and Ukraine on the Establishment of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (Agreement on the Establishment of the Special Tribunal).Footnote 4 Additionally, in late 2024, in a move perhaps even more politically fraught than those before it, the ICC issued warrants for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, head of government of Israel, another state not party to the Rome Statute, and Yoav Gallant, minister of defense of Israel at the time of the relevant acts, in connection with their alleged responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In response, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the three judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber that issued the warrants, as well as on the ICC’s prosecutor and his two deputies.Footnote 5
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A state has a right under international law in certain circumstances to the grant to its serving and former officials of immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of another state (“forum state”). The forum state is consequently obliged in those circumstances not to, inter alia, prosecute those officials or ex-officials. The first state is free, however, to consent to the forum state’s prosecution of its officials or ex-officials, who have no individual right under international law to benefit from immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of another state.
Jurisdictional immunity under international law is a procedural, not substantive, bar. It relates solely to whether those serving and former foreign-state officials who benefit from it may be subjected to judicial proceedings, not to whether they may be considered legally responsible under the applicable criminal law. That said, historically the term “immunity” was often used in a substantive sense to refer to an obligation on the forum state not to impose legal responsibility, criminal or otherwise, on the officials or ex-officials of a foreign state.
For its part, an international criminal court is a criminal court established and empowered directly on the basis of international law, which is to say a criminal court whose existence and powers derive without formal interposition of national law from an international legal instrument or act.Footnote 6
Where the legal basis of the establishment of an international criminal court is a treaty between states, the court’s jurisdiction derives from the pooling by the states parties, to the extent reflected in the treaty, of their respective criminal jurisdictions. All other things being equal, however, states have no greater authority under international law to do together what none of them may, as a matter of international law, do alone. Where instead the legal basis of the establishment of an international criminal court is a treaty between a state and an international organization, the court’s jurisdiction derives, to the extent reflected in the treaty, from the criminal jurisdiction of the state party. All other things again being equal, however, a state has no greater authority under international law to do in cooperation with an international organization what it may not, as a matter of international law, do alone.
Where, then, an international criminal court is established on the basis of a treaty between states, or between a state and an international organization, to which another state is not party, prosecution before the court in derogation of any right of that other state to see its serving and former officials benefit from immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the respective states parties, or of the state party, infringes that right unless the other state consents to the derogation.
This, at least, is the orthodox view.Footnote 7
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Chile Eboe-Osuji rejects the orthodox view outright, in a sprawling, ebullient work written in colorful and on occasion intemperate prose. To say that the book bursts with ideas would be an understatement. Via a non-linear narrative woven from impressively researched primary and secondary sources, the reader is treated to everything from the history of the criminalization of aggression and whether Emperor Hirohito of Japan bore personal responsibility for war crimes through to the divine right of kings and a proposed “right to peace,” with cameo roles by Nero, Seneca, Caligula, Louis XIV, Pope Gregory the Great, and Saints Peter, Paul, Irenaeus, and Augustine, not to mention Bynkershoek, Vattel, Blackstone, and Dicey. The sweeping account is informed by the “great man” school of historiography.Footnote 8 It is a story in which, “at the right place and the right time, individuals can steer the ship of circumstances positively or negatively in defining ways,” a story of “the difference that personalities can make … in the affairs of nations and in international relations” (p. 200). The narrative paints a similar portrait of states:
Legal fictions, such as those that insist on the notion of equality of all states, serve important value. But even among equals, some will be leaders, as it is among all social animals. It is the leader-states that lead the world as it goes. And so it is in the making of international law. (P. 68.)
The account is suffused too with an antinomic sensibility. On the one side are far-sighted statesmen of the past informed by “eminent lawyers,” indeed by “the giant jurists of the leading nations” (p. xix; see also p. 82).Footnote 9 On the other side is a present “insurgency” of “interests” against what is said to be long-settled customary international law, “an insurgency that must be taken seriously,” warns Eboe-Osuji, since “complacency has been known to allow many an insurgency to destabilize or overthrow a sensible order of things, unleashing chaos” (p. xix).
The book’s thesis “boils down to this” (p. 240):
Since 1919, when the leaders of Allied and Associated Powers resolved to prosecute the kaiser of Germany before an international criminal tribunal, with no absolving immunity recognized on account of his position as head of state at all material times, that same anti-immunity norm of international law—in relation to international crimes—has been consistently repeated in all international prosecutorial efforts that have followed…. That this anti-immunity norm is now a usual, customary, or standard feature of international law is the very essence of customary international law. In other words, customary international law does not recognize immunity for anyone including heads of state charged with international crimes before international courts and tribunals. (Id., emphasis in original.)
In addition, in a very brief epilogue extraneous to his historical account, Eboe-Osuji seeks to rebut the proposition that states may not do collectively through an international criminal court what none of them may do alone. Elsewhere he calls this “the most meretricious” of the “potpourri of fallacies” (p. xxiii) propagated by “a minority” (pp. xi, xii, xxi) to whom he refers as “the immunity apologists” (p. 19) and the “immunity-tolerant” scholars (pp. xxi, 20, 22)—those, he says, whose work
is always consistent in its alignment with the preferences of the axis of geopolitical power or with countries and organizations that had retained them as consultants and counsel in topical legal questions of the day. (P. 22, emphasis in original.)
The focus for present purposes, as in the book, is on the claim as to the existence of a rule of customary international law rendering jurisdictional immunities unavailable before an international criminal court in respect of allegations of international criminal responsibility.
The narrative accords pre-eminence to Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles 1919 between a Germany defeated in World War I and the victorious Allied and Associated Powers. The provision envisaged the trial of the former kaiser of Germany, “for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties,” by a “special tribunal” composed of judges from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Japan, to be “guided by the highest motives of international policy.” (Neither the trial nor the tribunal came to pass, on account of the refusal—for reasons other than immunity—of the Netherlands, where the former kaiser had taken refuge in the dying days of the War, to surrender the latter.) Eboe-Osuji portrays Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles as “mark[ing] the inception of an international law norm that has endured into our own times,” “the norm that those who act even in the position of heads of state enjoy no immunity from accountability for international crimes” before international criminal courts (pp. 67, 68). The provision is said to represent “a monumental outcome of the Paris Peace Conference, which reshaped international law in a revolutionary way,” “an iconic piece of international lawmaking”, and “a crowning achievement in a determined process of international social engineering” (pp. viii, 67–68). One hundred pages are devoted to the background to Article 227 (Chaps 4–6), with a further sixteen to its immediate afterlife (Chap. 7). In its vivid dramatization of this material through “ample historical vignettes” and the device of direct speech, the treatment is reminiscent of William Schabas’s The Trial of the Kaiser (p. vii).Footnote 10
During the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, the U.S. representatives to the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties of the Preliminary Peace Conference of Paris (Commission on Responsibilities) dissented, on grounds including sovereign immunity, from the majority view as to the amenability of the head of an enemy state to prosecution before a criminal court of another state or group of states for offenses against the laws and customs of war or the laws of humanity.Footnote 11 Eboe-Osuji, however, sets great store by the fact that it was subsequently U.S. President Woodrow Wilson who penned the first draft of what became Article 227 of the Treaty (pp. ix, 152–53, 155, 166). Equally “underappreciated in the scholarship on the subject,” he avers, is Wilson’s support for implementing Article 227, in particular his instructions to prepare the first draft of the diplomatic note by which the Allies requested the Netherlands to surrender the ex-kaiser for trial (pp. ix, 169–70, 175). In highlighting Wilson’s active involvement in the attempt to try the former kaiser before an inter-Allied tribunal, Eboe-Osuji “corrects,” in his words, the “misunderstanding” that “the U.S. government was opposed to article 227, thus limiting the importance to be attached to it as an enduring precedent for the development of international law along the lines of rejection of immunity for heads of state” (p. ix).
The book goes on to examine, more briefly, subsequent developments concerning the prosecution of serving or former state officials, especially heads of state or government, before international criminal courts on charges of international crimes (Chaps 9–12). It portrays all of these as relating to jurisdictional immunity, their “culmination” being “jurisprudence such as the Jordan Referral re Al-Bashir appeals judgment of the International Criminal Court” (p. 183). Pride of place is afforded to Article 7 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg (Nuremberg Charter), which stipulated that “[t]he official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment.” No less emphasized is Principle III of the Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal (Nuremberg Principles), adopted by the International Law Commission (ILC) in 1950. Echoing Article 7 of the Nuremberg Charter, Principle III provides that “[t]he fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him of responsibility under international law.” Next comes the common provision, closely modeled on Article 7 of the Nuremberg Charter and Principle III of the Nuremberg Principles, in Article 7(2) of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Article 6(2) of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and Article 6(2) of the Statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), along with the trials before these courts of, respectively, Slobodan Milošević, former head of state of Yugoslavia, Jean Kambanda, former head of government of Rwanda, and Charles Taylor, former head of state of Liberia. Stress is laid in particular on the immunity decision of the SCSL—an international criminal court established under a treaty between Sierra Leone and the UN—in Prosecutor v. Taylor, in which the Appeals Chamber held that “the principle seems now established” that jurisdictional immunity does not bar the prosecution before any such court of the serving head of a state not party to the treaty.Footnote 12 Finally, the book highlights Article 27(1) and (2) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court 1998.
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Despite the passion and panache with which it is espoused, one need not be “the leading apologist of head-of-state immunity” to query the book’s thesis (p. 20). This is so in relation to its specific claim as to the significance in terms of customary international law of Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles. It is equally so in relation to its general claim as to the existence today of a customary international rule rendering jurisdictional immunities unavailable before international criminal courts in respect of alleged responsibility for international crimes.
Pace Eboe-Osuji, rules of customary international law are not merely “legal standards to which the international community has become accustomed” (p. xvii). Likewise, that a certain practice is “a usual … or standard feature of international law” is not “the very essence of customary international law” (p. 240, emphasis removed). Even leaving aside the question of its generality, what is further required is that the “feature” at issue be motivated by a belief, which is to say opinio juris, on the part of the states concerned that, in the present context, it accords with a right under customary international law. This belief appears absent in respect of past trials of former heads of state or government or other former state officials before international criminal courts for alleged international crimes.
Quite apart from the fact that, and regardless of why, it was eventually agreed that the proposed inter-Allied high tribunal was to be guided by “international policy,” not criminal law, the trial of the former kaiser was always envisaged by the Allied and Associated Powers as taking place with the consent, precisely via what became Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles, of the defeated GermanyFootnote 13—a consent which, in principle, would have rendered the trial lawful. To be sure, this was to be a purely formal consent, eventually given under strenuous and sustained objection by Germany. But consent it was to be, and was, nonetheless.
Nor was the unavailability before later international criminal courts of the immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of other states from which serving and former state officials benefit under customary international law founded, in either inspiration or fact, on the international character of the court or of the crimes alleged.
The four victorious Allied parties to the multilateral treaty by which the Nuremberg IMT was established in accordance with its Charter based their authority jointly to try former high-ranking German officials for acts done in their official capacity on what they considered to be the extinction of the statehood, by way of debellatio, of the completely defeated, occupied, and by-then-ungoverned German Reich,Footnote 14 in consequence of which they “assume[d] supreme authority with respect to Germany” without purporting to annex the territory.Footnote 15 This supreme authority was taken to encompass the authority to prosecute the former officials of the now-nonexistent German Reich for acts done in their official capacity. As for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East at Tokyo, the victorious Allied powers on whose behalf the proclamation establishing the Tribunal was promulgated and its Charter approved relied for their authority jointly to prosecute the former members of the Japanese imperial cabinet for acts performed in their official capacity on Japan’s express consent in the terms of its unconditional surrender to the foreshadowed trial by the Allies of its former leadership.Footnote 16
The international legal authority to prosecute before the ICTY the former head of state of Yugoslavia, among others, for acts performed in his official capacity was conceived of as deriving from the consent to prosecution given, at one remove, by Yugoslavia through its membership of the UN.Footnote 17 In accordance with Article 25 of the UN Charter, UN member states agree to accept the decisions of the Security Council. In Security Council Resolution 827 (1993), the Council, acting pursuant to the powers conferred on it by member states under Chapter VII of the Charter, decided to establish an international criminal tribunal with the powers specified in its statute, itself adopted by decision of the Council in the same resolution. This statute made no allowance for any immunity from the exercise of criminal jurisdiction by other states from which serving or former officials of UN member states might otherwise have benefited under international law.Footnote 18 The same, mutatis mutandis, authorized the prosecution before the ICTR, established under Security Council Resolution 955 (1994), of the former head of government, among others, of Rwanda. As it was, by its request for the establishment of and its active support for the Tribunal, Rwanda manifestly consented to the trial of its former officials before the same, as did Yugoslavia when it surrendered its former head of state for trial before the ICTY.
When it comes to the SCSL, it is doubtful whether it was foreseen when the Court was established that the head of state of Liberia, Charles Taylor, would be indicted by the prosecutor. The request to the UN by the government of Sierra Leone for the establishment of the Court focused on prosecuting the leaders of the Revolutionary United Front, a Sierra Leonean rebel group active in Sierra Leone, who had “reneged on [the Lomé Peace] Agreement” and “resumed their atrocities.”Footnote 19 In turn, Security Council Resolution 1315 (2000), by which the Council requested the secretary-general to negotiate an agreement with Sierra Leone for the establishment of what became the SCSL, speaks, as does Article 1(1) of the Court’s Statute, only of those who bear the greatest responsibility for the commission of the crimes in question, “including those leaders who, in committing such crimes, have threatened the establishment of and implementation of the peace process in Sierra Leone.”Footnote 20 In the event, the denial before the SCSL of the immunity from criminal proceedings owed in respect of Taylor by Sierra Leone would have been internationally unlawful were it not for the consent of Liberia, which agreed to the trial before the SCSL of its by-then former head of state. Insofar, furthermore, as the SCSL prosecutor indicted Taylor while he was still head of state, such non-judicial practice of an organ of an international court cannot contribute formally to the formation of a rule of customary international law on the jurisdictional immunities of states.Footnote 21 Nor perhaps is it irrelevant that Ghana refused to arrest Taylor in its territory when requested to do so by the Court.
It is not only the lack of the requisite opinio juris which casts doubt on Eboe-Osuji’s thesis. In spite of his persistent interpolated commentary suggesting otherwise, the greater part of the other state practice adduced in the book, in support of both its specific claim as to Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles and its overall claim as to a customary “anti-immunity norm,” relates not to the procedural question of immunity from jurisdiction but to the substantive question of the conceptual possibility or desirability of imposing criminal responsibility on a head of state or other high official for acts performed in their official capacity.Footnote 22
True it is that in the wake of World War I, as highlighted by Eboe-Osuji, the UK’s Committee of Enquiry into Breaches of the Laws and Customs of War and, more significantly, the Commission on Responsibilities considered and rejected the former kaiser’s possible immunity from the jurisdiction of any international tribunal established to try him, which is to say his procedural immunity (pp. 86–87, 133–34).Footnote 23 Yet the great majority of the deliberations, especially in the “Council of Four,” concerned whether the ex-kaiser should be held personally responsible in the first place for Germany’s starting the War in breach of its treaty obligations and for violations of the laws and customs of war and the laws of humanity that he did not order but merely failed to prevent, put a stop to or punish.
For its part, Article 7 of the Nuremberg Charter, with its words “freeing them from responsibility, or mitigating punishment,” was inserted not to dispense with jurisdictional immunity but, as the judgment of the IMT makes clear,Footnote 24 to obviate the defendants’ reliance on the substantive defense of “act of state”—the argument that, where individuals committed violations of the laws and customs of war in their capacity as organs of state, only that state, not they, bore responsibility under international law.Footnote 25 As it was, given what the four occupying Allies viewed as the extinction of the German Reich and their assumption of “supreme authority with respect to Germany,” it was unnecessary to provide in the Nuremberg Charter for the unavailability of jurisdictional immunity. Pace again Eboe-Osuji, it is also to this substantive defense that Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, was referring when, during the preparation of the Nuremberg Charter, he rejected “the defense … that a head of state is immune from legal liability” (pp. 201–02, 206).Footnote 26 Equally, it was to the submission nonetheless advanced by the defendants that “where the act in question is an act of State, those who carry it out are not personally responsible”Footnote 27 that the Nuremberg IMT directed its dictum, quoted in the book, that “[h]e who violates the laws of war cannot obtain immunity”—meaning again exemption from responsibility—“while acting in pursuance of the authority of the state if the state in authorising action moves outside its competence under international law” (p. 223).Footnote 28 What goes for Article 7 of the Nuremberg Charter goes too for Principle III of the ILC’s Nuremberg Principles. It is just not correct, as Eboe-Osuji asserts, that Principle III “is adequately understood in its context, and against the background of its historical provenance, as precluding immunity [from] the judicial process” (p. 238).
In turn, what is the case for Article 7 of the Nuremberg Charter and Principle III of the ILC’s Nuremberg Principles is the case also for the provisions modeled on it in the respective statutes of the ICTY, ICTR, and SCSL,Footnote 29 whatever the UN Office of Legal Counsel may have advised the secretary-general in its haste to draft the ICTY Statute.Footnote 30 Each of these provisions is found in a paragraph of an article entitled “Individual Criminal Responsibility,” the other paragraphs of which all deal with substantive issues, namely general modes of responsibility, command and other superior responsibility, and the defense of superior orders. Lastly, despite Eboe-Osuji’s valiant attempt to minimize this, it is precisely in recognition of the distinction between the substantive question of non-responsibility and the procedural question of jurisdictional immunity that the two are finally teased apart in Article 27 of the Rome Statute, with Article 27(1) regulating the former and Article 27(2) the latter (id.).Footnote 31
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There is no shortage of judgments of international courts on points of customary international law which, while at the time having only a tenuous evidentiary basis, have soon become self-fulfilling prophecies through their rapid acceptance by, and influence on the practice and opinio juris of, states. One need only think of the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY’s interlocutory decision on jurisdiction in Tadić, in relation to the customary status of war crimes in non-international armed conflict,Footnote 32 or of the Arrest Warrant case, insofar as the International Court of Justice held there that serving ministers for foreign affairs enjoyed as a customary matter immunity ratione personae, not merely ratione materiae, from foreign criminal jurisdiction, as well as inviolability.Footnote 33 In principle the same could happen with the claim in the judgment and joint concurring opinion in Al-Bashir, and by extension in End of Immunity, that jurisdictional immunities are unavailable under customary international law before an international criminal court in respect of allegations of international criminal responsibility.
But the odds on this occurring are not promising, at least at present.
For a start, it is sufficiently clear that the fifty-five member states of the African Union (AU) do not currently accept and are unlikely to accept in the near future that, as maintained in End of Immunity, customary international law renders jurisdictional immunities unavailable before international criminal courts when the charges concern international crimes. Indeed, in notable state practice omitted by Eboe-Osuji, the Assembly of the African Union, comprising the heads of state and government of all member states, adopted in 2014 the Protocol on Amendments to the Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights (Malabo Protocol).Footnote 34 Although not in force, the Malabo Protocol contains a provision relating to the exercise by the envisaged African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights of the international criminal jurisdiction to be vested in the Court. The provision stipulates:
No charges shall be commenced or continued before the Court against any serving AU Head of State or Government, or anybody acting or entitled to act in such capacity, or other senior state officials based on their functions, during their tenure of office.Footnote 35
In theory this could represent merely an agreement inter se that rules different from those under customary international law should apply before the future Court. In reality it is far more likely that it reflects a belief on the part of AU member states that the customary international rules, as viewed by those states, on the immunity of state officials from another state’s criminal jurisdiction in respect of alleged international crimes apply and should apply in the context of an international criminal court established under a treaty between states.
Nor does it seem that the forty-six member states of the Council of Europe are to date convinced, as Eboe-Osuji is, that the immunity ratione personae from which a serving head of state benefits under customary international law before a criminal court of another state in respect of alleged international crimes is unavailable in respect of the same before an international criminal court established under a treaty between that other state and an international organization. Article 23(5) of the Statute of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine—annexed to the Agreement on the Establishment of the Special Tribunal, which the member states authorized the Secretary General of the Council of Europe to concludeFootnote 36—provides, in relation to the so-called “troika” of high-ranking officials of Russia and potentially Belarus:
Where the indictment concerns a head of State, head of government or minister of foreign affairs, the Pre-Trial Judge shall not confirm the indictment and shall order the proceedings be suspended until that person no longer holds that office or an appropriate waiver has been presented to the Special Tribunal. During the suspension, the Pre-Trial Judge shall not otherwise act upon the indictment.Footnote 37
The motivation for Article 23(5) of the Statute is apparent from the fourteenth recital of the preamble to the Agreement, which, contradicting the position insisted on in End of Immunity, declares the understanding of the parties “that the jurisdiction of the Special Tribunal shall be based on the territorial jurisdiction of Ukraine.”Footnote 38
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Ultimately, some will find in End of Immunity a rousing affirmation of their faith. Others will remain unconverted by its missionary zeal, perhaps thereby courting charges of “fastidious academic self-indulgence” and “Swiss cheese exceptions and gerrymandering in legal reasoning” (pp. 7, 22). Yet readers of all persuasions should get something out of this exuberant, eclectic, provocative, and prickly book by an indefatigable gadfly of international criminal justice.
