FIRST PLENARY SESSION Revisiting the First National IHL Summit and Significant New Developments Domestic I m plementation of the Rome'statute *$,il Atty. Celeste Mallari lnstitute of lnternational Legal Studies (llLS) I workwith the lnstitute of lnternational Legal Studies which is one of the lnstitutes of the UP College of Law. Among the mandaies of the institute is to study and of crimes under the Rome Statute. ln order for conduct research on international issues that have political and legal implications in the Philippines, and one of the projects that was recognized by the complementarity to lnstitute is the domestic implementation of the Rome Statute. My report this morning will be on our project in relation to the Rome Statute. Our project created a technical experts group which consists of experts from the DOJ, DFA and international law experts including Prol Harry Roque and two delegates from the drafting committee of the Rome Statute, Dean Raul Pangalangan and Dean Merlin Magallona. The Commission on Human Rights and PCICC are also in the team. The team recognized two to be addressed in the domestic implementation of the Rome Statute. First is to address the requirements of complementarity of the Rome Statute, which means the ICC will not issues that have investiqate and prosecute unless the domestic court is genuinely unwilling and unable to do so. And the second issue that we have to address is cooperation with respect to requests for arresl investigation and surrender and the confldentiality requirements, with respect to requests to the lCC. apply it must follow strictly the wording of the Rome Statute. Another issue is that, we also followed the Rome Statute definltion of war crimes, and distinguishing strictly whether it is for international or non-international armed conflicts only, because in RA 9851, these were somehow merged for other sources of crime under war crimes. Since the group agreed to follow strictly the Rome Statute then we also likewise agreed to separate the non-international and international armed conflicts. However, although we strictly follow the Rome Statute, the technical group also agreed to allow for expansions for as long as the definition under the Rome statute will not compromised, An example of this is our definition of war crimes. One of the acts of war crimes which we allowed for an expansion is the act of subjecting persons who are in the power of an adverse party to physical mutilation or medical or scientific experiments of any kind, which are punishable under the Rome Statute, We allowed for inclusion of the removal of tissues or organs for transplantation which was included in the RA 9851 or the IHL Act. So we decided not to remove that since it will not change in any way the jurisdiction of Rome Statute for existing Now with respect to the complementarity issues, the definitions. There are several definitions that we had to technical group recognized that there are certain issues in the IHL Act that we need to address. The first is, we need to amend the IHL acl RA 9851 in order to address complementarity because we realized that there are certain definitions of crimes under RA 9851 which do not strictly follow the definitions tweaK but we followed that principle all along, that we will not compromise the crimes defined in the Rome Statute but we can expand. That means the trial court which has Jurisdiction in the Philippines can have the jurisdiction on those crimes and on those expanded crimes as defined in the IHL AcL Proceedings of the Second National Summit on lnternational Humanitarian Law in the Philippines lL December 2012 @