Understanding International Criminal Justice as a Network

The richness of the symposium contributions presented on Völkerrechtsblog over the course of the past days has brought to light an evident fact, but one which nonetheless merits attention today more than ever: International criminal justice is far more than just supranational criminal law. It is becoming increasingly important to focus on the ecosystem within which international criminal justice operates, including its place at the intersection of the national and the international as well as of peace and justice. The contributions in this symposium have indeed shed light on this ecosystem of international criminal justice in manifold ways. They have highlighted the interplay between international criminal law and transitional justice, as demonstrated by way of example of reparation proceedings; the OTP’s enforcement limits when it comes to arrest warrants; the domestic proceedings and universal jurisdiction efforts of States; and inter-state cooperation. We see all these small reconstructions as pieces of the wider new network of international criminal justice: a network which, despite its imperfections and occasional inability to deliver on its promise of expeditious justice, shows resilience through the containment of perpetrators’ possibilities to commit crimes or escape punishment. Only such a robust network will give the substantive law the space it needs to operate effectively.

Towards Timely Reparations for Ukraine

Loffe’s blogpost, which highlights the significance of reconstructing international criminal justice in real time and focuses on the urgent interim reparations for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in Ukraine, addresses a significant innovation in international criminal justice. Traditionally, justice for mass atrocities follows a sequential model, whereby violence occurs first, criminal investigations and prosecutions follow later, and reparations arrive only after accountability processes are completed. Building on Moffe and Narayan’s article on provisional justice in protracted conflicts, the author contends that this model is inadequate in ongoing conflicts because survivors often face immediate physical, psychological, and economic harms that cannot wait for lengthy legal proceedings. Ukraine’s approach challenges the assumption that reparations must be postponed until after conflict or criminal convictions, instead providing support while hostilities continue.

The post focuses on Ukraine’s Urgent Interim Reparations Programme, which offers financial assistance and access to medical, psychosocial, and social services to CRSV survivors without requiring criminal complaints, convictions, or identification of perpetrators. It argues that, by relying on an administrative recognition process with a relatively low evidentiary threshold, the programme prioritises survivors’ needs, autonomy, and dignity while reducing barriers such as stigma and retraumatisation. The initiative has already provided support to hundreds of survivors and was formally institutionalised through legislation that entered into force in 2025, making Ukraine the first state to establish a statutory system of interim reparations for CRSV during an active armed conflict.

More broadly, the author presents Ukraine’s experience as a model for rethinking international criminal justice and argues that delaying justice until peace is achieved may itself perpetuate injustice. While the programme undoubtedly represents an important development in the timing of reparative responses, the article risks overstating its novelty within the field of international criminal law. For several decades, scholars and practitioners have criticised the limitations of a purely prosecutorial model of justice (see here). Multilateral institutions have increasingly embraced broader frameworks of transitional justice that incorporate truth-seeking, reparations, institutional reform, and guarantees of non-recurrence alongside criminal accountability (for UN documents on transitional justice, see here). From this perspective, Ukraine’s initiative is less of a transformation of international criminal law than an improvement of the efficiency of the pillar of reparation that transitional justice has long advocated.

Indeed, Ukraine’s experience may be more valuable for what it reveals about the shortcomings of conventional transitional justice practice. Reparations programmes have been designed for post-conflict or post-authoritarian settings, often requiring a political transition before victims can access meaningful redress. This sequencing has frequently left survivors waiting years or decades for recognition and support. Ukraine challenges this assumption by demonstrating that reparative measures can be implemented during an ongoing conflict. The significance of the programme, therefore, lies not so much in expanding the scope of international criminal law as in exposing the temporal limitations embedded in prevailing transitional justice models and prompting a reconsideration of when reparations should be delivered.

Harmonising Actors’ Efforts: Inter-State Cooperation and Domestic Proceedings

Following on from when justice should be done to who should be contributors to the endeavour, Bisset’s blogpost examines the significance of the Ljubljana-The Hague Convention (LHC) for the inter-state “cooperation gap” impeding the domestic investigation and prosecution of international crimes. The Convention, adopted in May 2023, establishes the first global framework for inter-state judicial cooperation on international crimes. Yet its provisions are largely transplanted from other international instruments: from the substantive definitions of crimes, taken from the Rome Statute, to the cooperation regime itself, borrowed from the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). As a result, the post argues, the LHC’s cooperation regime is overly conservative, retaining a traditional state-centric model rather than adopting an innovative cooperation regime tailored to the realities of international criminal investigations. Moreover, the available data suggests that the UNTOC framework is under-utilised as a basis for cooperation. By re-deploying existing provisions instead of transforming them to work effectively in a different context, the post concludes, the negotiators of the LHC missed an opportunity to truly transform cooperation between states in international crimes prosecutions.

While cooperation is vital for modern international criminal justice, adequate space also needs to be given to individual States’ own judicial proceedings. Weill’s blogpost on individuals, corporations and states’ responsibilities for mass crimes takes up the landmark French proceedings against Lafarge for paying around ten million dollars to Daesh and other armed groups to keep its factory operating in Daesh-controlled territory. In 2021, the Court of Cassation ruled that the company itself may be prosecuted for complicity in crimes against humanity, opening the door to prosecuting corporations that support non-state actors engaged in the commission of international crimes. The case is part of a broader series of proceedings in France against companies for complicity in international crimes that challenge individual-centric conceptions of international criminal responsibility, even as they highlight the structural asymmetries between NGOs and well-funded corporate defense teams. These cases also illustrate how security-oriented legal frameworks, especially counter-terrorism regimes, may in practice advance international criminal law. Ultimately, the post suggests that the Lafarge case may signal a shift beyond Nuremberg’s legacy of focusing solely on individuals, holding corporate and potentially even state-level actors accountable for facilitating mass crimes.

A key feature of the reconstruction of international criminal justice is therefore a shift away from purely international institutions and towards domestic legal systems. Yet fundamental tensions persist, with the individualisation of international criminal responsibility obscuring the role of collective entities in mass violence, even as state-centric frameworks constrain meaningful judicial cooperation on international crimes. This raises the question of how far this domestic turn can go in addressing the structural dimensions of mass violence that international criminal law has long struggled to reach.

Anti-Impunity Network Effects: International Arrest Warrants and Universal Jurisdiction Proceedings

Part of the answer may lie in an increasingly networked nature of contemporary international criminal justice. Crippa’s blogpost on the ICC-OTP’s enforcement powers and their limits, as well as Wilmet and Scalia’s blogpost on the current landscape of universal jurisdiction illustrate this growing network character. This angle situates both arrest warrants and domestic proceedings not strictly within the narrative of ending impunity for international crimes per se, but rather focuses on the beneficial outcome of cooperation between the ICC and national jurisdictions through a larger, multi-actor accountability ecosystem, at a time when physical custody over suspects is not reflective of the reality. Crucially, this ecosystem’s success is not measured solely on the basis of the number of arrest warrants enforced and convictions obtained.

Rather, national proceedings as well as international arrest warrants can be seen as diminishing the perpetrators’ mobility and excluding them from global systems, leading towards a form of transnational legal containment. Much like ICC officials sanctioned by unilaterally imposed sanctions, perpetrators see their travel possibilities restricted and their access to financial systems and international organisations affected. Travel bans and immigration and visa restrictions then become a reality not only for those working in international criminal justice, but also those responsible for international crimes.

Thus, rather than constituting a tool of immediate apprehension, an arrest warrant functions as a mechanism which progressively narrows the perpetrator’s international operating space. By extension, it also shapes reputational costs for implicated governments and third States and frames international criminal justice as a leverage point in diplomatic engagement, connecting it to broader developments in international law.

In this framework, universal jurisdiction is an incentive for healthy competition between the ICC and national authorities. With suspects faced with overlapping risks stemming from the international and national domain, their attempts at avoiding jurisdiction becomes an indefinite challenge. Whether extraterritorial jurisdiction is then strictly universal or ultimately based on the active or passive personality principle, becomes less important. What counts is that the net of international justice is becoming more tight-knit in each instance where jurisdiction is triggered on the basis of a local connection to the prosecuting and judging forum.

While this turn away from the importance of physical custody towards network effects is not a matter of choice, but rather a symptom of the ICC’s increasingly empty judicial calendar, it can nonetheless be a piece in the puzzle of international criminal justice’s attempt at achieving its objectives. For example, cooperation between the ICC-OTP and national prosecutors growingly includes evidence-sharing, and the digital nature of evidence records makes arrest warrants more durable as they do not disappear over time. Waiting for international justice is then no longer only a defect of the system, but also a strategic calculus for enforcing authorities. Networked enforcement means being able to focus on long-term exclusion and risk-balancing. As the example of judicial cooperation with Libya in the blogpost on ICC-OTP enforcement powers shows, this network of international justice is made up not only of international and national actors, but local ones, too.

Within this new transnational criminal network, shortcomings of both universal jurisdiction proceedings and international arrest warrants do not necessarily reflect a failure of the system. A network’s success is not called into question by an individual component’s temporary inability to achieve its individual objective – what counts is the network’s overall performative balance. But three safeguards merit attention. Firstly, what will be important going forward is that the network’s individual actors – international, national and local – act not only in coordination, but also on equal footing. In this vein, the ICC-OTP’s Complementarity and Cooperation Policy’s narrative of the Court as a “central hub” should not be seen as promoting the Court as an overarching authority. It is one egalitarian actor amongst others. Secondly, transparency is key. The network of international criminal justice should be an open one. This means welcoming new actors who need to join the playing field (such as the International Court of Justice, which is increasingly involved in criminal matters), but also showing transparency to those outside the network who require reasoning for decisions taken (such as on prosecutors’ case selection and, inversely and more importantly, tacit decisions not to prosecute). Finally, Ukraine’s urgent interim reparations programme for survivors of CRSV is giving us more reasons to think of international criminal justice as not being the sole and primary means of providing justice, but to think more seriously about how to broaden and improve the ways justice can be done in a manner that brings a concrete and tangible impact to victims’ lives.