Complementarity and Cooperation in International Criminal Law: In Conversation with Elsa Taquet
- Nadia Jahnecke
- Jul 1, 2024
- 28 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Elsa Taquet has been serving as a Senior Legal Advisor for TRIAL International’s program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since September 2015. Before joining TRIAL International, she interned with the Emergencies Team at Human Rights Watch, focusing on the armed conflict in the Central African Republic. Commencing her legal career as a criminal law trainee handling legal aid cases in Quebec, Elsa is a qualified lawyer in the region. Possessing an LLM in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International Studies and Development in Geneva (Switzerland), a Master’s degree in Transnational Law, and a Law degree from Quebec (Canada), Elsa is an expert in safeguarding vulnerable populations during armed conflicts. In the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, Elsa plays a pivotal role in TRIAL International’s involvement in addressing war-related matters. Her expertise contributes significantly to the organisation’s efforts in protecting vulnerable populations and addressing international crimes.
CJLPA: Welcome, Ms Elsa Taquet. Thank you very much for taking the time to come and interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art to discuss your work at TRIAL International, a non-governmental organisation that fights international crimes and provides victims access to justice. Different legal avenues enable the international community to prosecute crimes committed by state actors. At TRIAL, the focus is on domestic investigation based on universal jurisdiction. Can you please provide us with more overview and insight into what this means and how it works in practice?
Elsa Taquet: I want to start by saying that in times of conflict, the prioritisation of the prosecution and the investigation of core international crime by the domestic jurisdictions themselves is a way for international justice to be more reactive and efficient. What we are seeing here with the Ukrainian conflict is that the Ukrainian authorities have the primary mandate to investigate and prosecute core international crimes committed on their territories. If they are willing and capable to do so, the focus should be on them primarily.
They need additional expertise and resources to help and assist them. They are the main actors that should be investigating simply because they have access to the crime scenes, are in contact with a large number of victims and witnesses, and have also been able to arrest some suspects, so they are definitely the main jurisdiction to do it.
But it does not happen in a vacuum. What is interesting here is how, in complement to what the Ukrainian authorities can do, other domestic jurisdictions can assist in pushing the accountability agenda forward. For example, by triggering universal or extraterritorial jurisdiction, some countries can take on investigating some of the war crimes or other types of quarantine national crimes that were committed since the full-scale invasion in Ukraine.
In that sense, they are able to assist the Ukrainian authorities and other international mechanisms where they are not necessarily the best equipped to target some types of cases. For example, they can bridge some of the current gaps that we have seen in the Ukrainian criminal system in responsibility, which is something that Ukrainian authorities are not necessarily able to prosecute because they do not have that in their legal framework. But they also have additional resources and expertise in profiling perpetrators who are likely to travel abroad, for example. If we look at the international justice sector right now, when it comes to the Ukrainian conflict, it is crucial to see the key role that domestic jurisdiction can play.
