Online Journal

By: Jake Spilman

This article will discuss the origins of the International Criminal Court and the progression of the theory surrounding a permanent international tribunal—beginning with the United Nations’ creation of ad hoc tribunals following atrocities in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and proceeding through a discussion of the regime created in Rome. It will then outline the violence that engulfed Kenya following its 2007 presidential election and the procedural posture of the ICC’s case against those responsible. The analysis will then turn to the effect of the ICC’s rulings in the Kenya situation on the admissibility of cases to the Court, and the status of complementarity in creating the competitive environment surrounding the Court, as evidenced by the jockeying for jurisdiction that occurred during the Kenya adjudication.

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By: Cory Howard

Due to the recent global financial crisis, shareholders, voters, and politicians in North America and Western Europe have become increasingly concerned with the issue of executive compensation. New regulations, such as say-on-pay shareholder votes, tax incentives to reduce base salary, and hard caps on bonuses have been enacted in an attempt to slow the exponential growth in the value of executive compensation packages in the both the United States and Europe. This trend is not limited to developed nations, as in other regions, most notably in Asia, executive pay has risen dramatically, oftentimes with little or no oversight by government institutions or formal regulatory bodies. This article attempts to track how nations in different regions of the world regulate executive compensation and tries to extrapolate from that sample general tendencies in order to detect broader corporate governance trends. Using this methodology, this article identifies two basic trends: (1) one hemisphere is enacting strict legal mechanisms to control executive compensation, while the other relies on self-regulation and (2) one region is using executive compensation reform to open up access to the corporate governance arena for small investors, while the other is attempting to limit shareholder democracy.

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