Would international justice be advanced or thwarted if an African Regional Court was given jurisdiction to try individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity? Is it part of international justice to provide training and other assistance to domestic police, prosecutors, and defense lawyers as well as judges, or is this beyond the scope of the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court? In this six-minute video, leading figures in international justice debate these questions and others under the rubric of “positive complementarity,” the principle that the ICC should complement, rather than displace, domestic justice systems.

It was day one of the defense’s case. I was in Chicago. I had planned to wake up at 2:30 AM and watch over the Internet as Charles Taylor’s defense team laid out their case in The Hague at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. But I had overslept. When I woke up around 9:00 AM I ran to my computer, but the lawyer had wrapped up for the day. I read some news articles online and learned the basics: Defense would argue over the next months that Taylor, the former president of Liberia, was a peacemaker for Sierra Leone, and that the prosecution had not proved his criminal responsibility for aiding Sierra Leonean rebel groups that committed…

Over 120 countries have united to form the International Criminal Court—the first permanent court created to prosecute perpetrators, no matter how powerful, of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. The Reckoning follows dynamic ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and his team for three years across four continents as he issues arrest warrants for Lord’s Resistance Army leaders in Uganda, puts Congolese warlords on trial, shakes up the Colombian justice system, and charges Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur. The Reckoning keeps you on the edge of your seat.