The German delegation's opening statements at the morning session of Monday 4 August are taking the lead as one of the most progressive and flexible states present at the August Prepcom:

Germany:

The draft articles on complementarity and trigger mechanisms build upon each other. If you accept, or if you want to change a certain building-block, a certain provision with a specific regulatory content, quite often this is bound to have consequences for other provisions of the draft statute, even for the functioning of the future Court in general.

What is the reason for this, why is this so?

In our view, when we discuss, when we devise the draft articles on complementarity and trigger mechanism, we are indeed laying the fundaments for the institutions to be built, the very fundaments of the Court to be established.

We all agree - at least in principle - that the ICC should be an effective and functioning complement to national criminal justice systems in cases where such trial procedures are not available or may be ineffective.

For an effective and functioning International Criminal Court, we have work on solid and effect building-blocks.

Number One:

The Court should have inherent (automatic) jurisdiction over the three core crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, so that the Court can exercise, if necessary, concurrent jurisdiction with each State party. The Court should also have inherent Jurisdiction with regard to the crime of aggression once the Security Council - in accordance with the principle contained in Art. 23 para. 2 of the ILC draft statute - has first determined that a State has committed an act of aggression.

Building-block number two:

The Court itself should have the power to determine whether in a given situation national trial procedures are not available or may be ineffective.

Building-block number three:

The Prosecutor of the Court should have the competence to initiate investigations ex officio, on his or her own initiative, in any case where the court has Jurisdiction. Such a regulation - in line with the statutes of the International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda - is in our view not only a meaningful but a necessary supplement to the ILC draft statute whereby hitherto only complaints by a State party and referrals by the Security Council can initiate an investigation.

Building-block number four:

We support the ILC proposal that the statute should give to the Security Council the explicit competence to submit to the Court situations involving.

Threats to or breaches of international peace and security and acts of aggression. But it would be in our view quite inappropriate if the Security Council could submit individual cases or prevent the investigation and prosecution of cases involving such situations.

With regard to the concrete form in which these principles are built into the draft statute we remain quite flexible. We are open for any reasonable text proposal that safeguards these principles.

I thought it useful to reaffirm these building-block-principles quite early, indeed at the beginning of this August session, for two reasons:

(1) To give partners, to give this working group a certain idea in which direction the German delegation - hopefully together with others - will be working.

(2) We intend to come back in more detail with specific proposals to these so-called building-blocks when we discuss the various draft articles of the ILC statute dealing with complementarity and trigger mechanism.

As my distinguished colleagues know, Germany has already submitted last year some text proposals with regard to complementarity and trigger mechanisms. You find them reproduced in the compilation. Tomorrow we will have a paper with a revised tentative proposal containing a set of draft provisions on these issues.

We are ready to share and to discuss this paper with all interested delegations and naturally we would be pleased and grateful if we could work with other States along the same lines, maybe even as co-sponsors of certain proposals.