The Office of the Prosecutor
How the OTP decides which situations to investigate, which cases to bring, and the strategic choices that shape the Court's impact.
Choosing Cases
The Office of the Prosecutor receives thousands of communications each year from individuals, organizations, and governments reporting potential crimes. The OTP conducts a preliminary examination to determine whether a situation merits a full investigation, assessing jurisdiction, admissibility (including complementarity), gravity, and the interests of justice.
The Prosecutor has enormous discretion in selecting which situations to investigate and which individuals to charge. This discretion is both the OTP's greatest power and its greatest vulnerability. Every choice to investigate one situation implies a choice not to investigate others. Under Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first Prosecutor, investigations focused heavily on Africa, which led to charges of bias. Under Fatou Bensouda and Karim Khan, the OTP expanded to Georgia, Afghanistan, Palestine, Bangladesh/Myanmar, and Ukraine.
| Preliminary examination filter | Question asked |
|---|---|
| Jurisdiction | Does the crime fall within the Court's temporal, territorial, or personal reach? |
| Admissibility (complementarity) | Are national courts genuinely investigating or prosecuting? |
| Admissibility (gravity) | Is the scale and nature of the crimes serious enough? |
| Interests of justice | Would an investigation nonetheless not serve justice? |
