The IACC proposal was further developed in a 2018 paper published in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, titled "The World Needs an International Anti-Corruption Court."[5] In 2022, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published a paper by Judge Mark L. Wolf, Justice Richard Goldstone and Professor Robert Rotberg, titled "The Progressing Proposal for An International Anti-Corruption Court."[6]
The campaign to create the IACC has been led by Integrity Initiatives International (III), an NGO that Judge Mark L. Wolf founded in 2016 with Judge Richard Goldstone, former Justice on the Supreme Court of South Africa and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and other colleagues. III's mission is to "strengthen the enforcement of criminal laws in order to punish and deter leaders who are corrupt and regularly violate human rights, and to create opportunities for the democratic process to replace them with leaders dedicated to serving their citizens."[7] Establishing the IACC, supporting national anti-corruption measures, and forging a network of young people committed to fighting grand corruption in their own countries are some of its main priorities.
Structure
Grand corruption – the abuse of public power for private gain by a nation's leaders (kleptocrats) – is a major barrier to responding effectively to pandemics, fighting climate change, promoting democracy and human rights, meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals, establishing international peace and security, and securing a more just, rules-based global order.
Grand corruption does not endure due to a lack of laws. The 189 countries that are party to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) each have laws criminalizing corrupt conduct. Yet kleptocrats enjoy impunity because they control the administration of justice in the countries that they rule.
The IACC would fill a crucial gap in the international framework for combatting grand corruption. The IACC would enforce existing national anti-corruption laws, or a new international counterpart to them, against kleptocrats and their conspirators.[8] The IACC would be a court of last resort. Operating on the principle of complementarity, it would only prosecute if a member state were unwilling or unable to prosecute a case itself. In this way, the IACC may act as incentive for domestic governments to establish adequate anti-corruption processes while ensuring that corrupt leaders are held accountable where the effective processes do not yet exist.
Prosecution in the IACC would, in many cases, result in the incarceration of convicted kleptocrats and thus create the opportunity for the democratic process to replace them with honest leaders. It is also foreseeable that kleptocrats will not permit the countries they rule to join a court that would prosecute them. In order to be effective, the IACC would need 20 to 25 representative countries to be effective as long as they include some major financial centers through which kleptocrats often launder the proceeds of corruption, and attractive countries in which kleptocrats invest and spend their wealth. The IACC would have jurisdiction to prosecute crimes if any or all elements of the crime were committed within the territory of a member state or by a national of a member state, and could therefore tackle transnational criminal networks.
Not only would successful prosecution of a kleptocrat result in his or her incarceration, but it would also result in an order of restitution or disgorgement of illicit assets or gains for the benefit of victims. The IACC would also have the potential to recover, repurpose, and repatriate stolen assets through sentences that include orders of restitution in criminal cases and possibly judgments in civil cases brought by whistleblowers, a small portion of which would be used to fund the Court itself.
The IACC's expert investigators, prosecutors, and judges would be valuable resources for strengthening their counterparts in countries striving to improve their capacity, and it would provide a forum for evidence raised by whistleblowers. In these respects, the IACC is similar to, but distinct from, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and may be designed in a way that draws on the strengths of the ICC model while avoiding some of its weaknesses.