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This chapter reflects, from both a theoretical and a legal angle, on the independence and impartiality of international prosecutors. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 analyses the de jure independence of the prosecutor. Section 3 looks at issues related to prosecutors' impartiality. Finally, Section 4 offers a case study of de facto independence and impartiality of international prosecutors looking beyond the statutes; it presents a tour of the different international criminal tribunals to illustrate how prosecutorial independence and impartiality is limited and often undermined by states' interests which do not always coincide with the interest of justice.

This chapter conceptualizes and analyses the understudied question of accountability and ethics of international prosecutors. Ethics refer to the set of standards and principles that characterize ‘right conduct’ in the exercise of a profession. Accountability can be seen as both a process (and the procedures that go with it), or an end-state, a quality (that of being accountable). The core of accountability is that one can be called upon to answer for one's behaviour and decisions. How one is made to answer in the context of international prosecutions is the object of the chapter.

This chapter discusses the role and position of international prosecutors in the appeal phase. It notes that today's international prosecutors have considerable discretion in relation to appeals, so much so that the very essence of their role on appeal lies in exercising this discretion by deciding which cases and points to appeal and how to respond to defence appeals. It describes how modern international prosecutors have exercised their discretion to appeal in cases finalized to 2011, and the outcomes of these appeals.

This chapter discusses the problem of securing arrest and detention. As international prosecutors know all too well, it is one thing to issue an indictment (and warrant of arrest) but another to get custody of an accused because international tribunals typically do not have arrest powers of their own. When it comes to arrest, the prosecutor ought to be a clever political operator rather than a stellar lawyer. The most he can do himself is to inform the international community about the presence of an accused in a particular state and request arrest and surrender from that state. Compliance is essentially tied to states' political willingness and international political pressure.

The need for international judges and prosecutors in Kosovo became apparent within the first few months of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), which was established pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1244 following the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military action in 1999. UNMIK restarted the justice system in the first weeks of the new mission, staffing the courts with Kosovan judges and prosecutors. However, it quickly became clear that this new judicial system would not be capable of trying cases of war crimes and inter-ethnic crimes with impartiality. The need for international judges and prosecutors to bring credible neutrality to criminal trials was recognized by UNMIK. The legal framework for the deployment of international judges and prosecutors (IJP) in Kosovo has been UNMIK Regulations 2000/6 and 2000/64. This chapter deals with internationalized criminal courts in Kosovo, the administration of the IJP programme, the future role of IJPs in Kosovo, criticisms of the IJP programme, and lessons learned from the programme.

The Kosovo courts have been counted among the so-called ‘hybrid’ or ‘internationalized’ courts. As with the Special Panels in East Timor, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the envisioned Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodia, the Kosovo court system is composed of both national and international judges and prosecutors, and is competent to apply laws with both a national and an international character. However, the Kosovo court system derives its competence from Regulations of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), whose authority is ultimately derived from a Chapter VII Resolution of the UN Security Council. This chapter describes the nature and composition of the Kosovo court system, providing an overview of the legal framework within which it operates, and highlighting the features that make it unique. The chapter also evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of this form of internationalized court, focusing primarily on the effectiveness of introducing international judges and prosecutors into the system.

This chapter considers the dominant issue of plea bargaining in the arena of international criminal law. It argues that despite some resemblance between international guilty pleas and their domestic counterparts, the two differ in fundamental ways. Every guilty plea functions to expeditiously resolve a case, but international guilty pleas may provide additional and more significant benefits to international tribunals. At the same time, however, international guilty pleas also prove more difficult to obtain than pleas in domestic systems. In particular, it is argued that, although international prosecutors are provided ample legal authority to secure guilty pleas through plea bargaining, they have difficulty implementing this legal authority because a variety of factors coalesce to render guilty pleas unattractive options to most international criminal defendants.

This chapter examines how criminal tribunals can contribute to the highest goal of transitional justice institutions: reconciliation. An in-depth analysis of the prosecutorial strategies of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) reveals that international prosecutors employed contrasting approaches in dealing with perpetrators of war crimes in the two municipalities. Moreover, the detailed analysis of Prijedor and Srebrenica that develop in this chapter suggests that paying the price of plea bargaining to reconstruct the chain of command and reach order-giving perpetrators reduces reconciliation. Thus, reconciliation may be lacking because justice awarded to victims of plea bargaining perpetrators is severely constrained. However, acknowledging the limitations of a comparison between the two municipalities, the chapter further sets out to explore the relationship between prosecutorial strategies and reconciliation for the set of all municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina.