Our Crime, Our Justice: International Head of State Immunity and the Malabo Protocol

Gulin Ustabas’ human rights capstone centers around the legal immunity offered to leaders of nations as a way of preventing them from being prosecuted by international courts and how this captures one of the central tensions in international criminal law: the balance between justice and peace. She specifically focuses on the case between the African Union (AU) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) with the introduction of the Malabo Protocol by the AU, which seeks to expand the jurisdiction of the AU’s regional court and the African Court of Justice and Human Rights (ACJHR) to include a regional criminal court. Ustabas further seeks to understand the dispute over this immunity law and to what effect the African opposition has altered this customary international protocol. She argues that the African opposition to the immunity law is concerned with not the law itself, but rather with how the law has been used in a way that produced several grievances by African states, from the issue of the disruption of peace processes to double standards.