Active Complementarity Legal Information Transfer

'Positive complementarity' has become a trendy term since the 2010 Kampala Review Conference. Little thought went into its definition when it was first coined in informal discussions at the International Criminal Court in 2003. 'Complementarity' in the Court's Statute is a passive admissibility threshold below which the Court will not investigate or prosecute. The process to construct national ability to investigate and prosecute core international crimes, on the other hand, requires tireless efforts by numerous international and national actors for many years to come. Democratizing the access to legal information should lie at the heart of such capacity building and knowledge-transfer. One way of reducing existing conditions of inequality faced by war crimes lawyers and investigators operating in different jurisdictions is to facilitate the direct access of national actors to legal sources and knowledge. This book seeks to make the existing capacity building discourse more practical, focused and real. It brings together contributions by persons with expertise in the practice of capacity building, the development and maintenance of tools that can be used to make knowledge-transfer more effective and sustainable, and international criminal law. The Legal Tools Project of the International Criminal Court - a technical platform that can be used by those who intend to strengthen capacity - is discussed in some detail.