When Luis Moreno-Ocampo was sworn in as the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’), he commented that ‘the absence of trials before this Court, as a consequence of the regular functioning of national institutions, would be a major success’. He was referring, of course, to the Rome Statute’s complementarity principle, which permits the Court to exercise its jurisdiction over a serious international crime only if no State is willing and able to prosecute the crime itself. If States somehow prove willing and able to prosecute every act of genocide, every war crime, and every crime against humanity – an unlikely possibility, to be sure – the Court will be obsolete before it hears its first case. There is, however, a shadow side of complementarity, one that should temper our enthusiasm for the withering away of the Court: its effect on the likelihood that defendants will receive due process