ABSTRACT
Scholars generally agree that nothing in the Rome Statute prohibits states from prosecuting international crimes as ordinary crimes.2 They have yet to identify a complementarity heuristic, however, that is capable of reliably distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable national prosecutions. In this chapter, I propose a heuristic that focuses exclusively on sentence. More specifically, I argue that the Court should deem inadmissible any national prosecution of an ordinary crime that results in a sentence equal to, or longer than, the sentence the perpetrator would receive from the ICC, regardless of the gravity of the crime or whether it is based on different conduct than the international crime.
