International criminal justice currently finds itself under tremendous stress. The spirit of international cooperation, which enabled the reinvigoration of the discipline in the 1990s and 2000s, has long since dissipated, resulting in increased unilateralism with respect to the prosecution of international crimes. This shift, coupled with the failure to provide adequate international criminal responses to the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, and Gaza, just to name a few, has raised questions about the continued efficacy of the international criminal law project.
The miserable situation at the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’) itself has only amplified these questions. Once hailed by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as a ‘giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law’, the ICC now finds itself beset by internal and external turmoil. The Court’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan has temporarily stepped down from office pending the outcome of an investigation into sexual misconduct allegations made against him leaving his two deputies currently in charge of the Office of the Prosecutor; five member–states are in the process of withdrawing their membership in the Court; multiple ICC officials, including several judges, are the subject of economic sanctions by the United States; while others find themselves the subject of arrest warrants issued by the Russian Federation and have been convicted in absentia for the ‘unlawful prosecution of Russian citizens’. It is difficult, at the time of this writing, to see how the ICC will weather these storms.
Rather than despair at this state of affairs, we as the Coordinating Committee of the European Society of International Law’s (‘ESIL’) Interest Group on International Criminal Justice, decided to engage with these challenges. This started with questioning how international criminal justice might be reconstructed to make it more immediately responsive to situations of mass atrocities and become more fit for purpose going forward. From our perspective, efforts to restructure international criminal justice require diverse, yet interconnected, efforts to shaping its future. To identify what approaches should be pursued, we determined that it was necessary to ascertain those aspects of the discipline that have been successful and should be preserved; accept that some current practices are not working and require reframing; and identify successful practices from other judicial or quasi-judicial systems that might be borrowed and adapted to fit the needs of international criminal justice. Only after each has been identified is it possible to formulate an idea about how to move forward.
In furtherance of this effort, we organised a workshop in September 2025 held in conjunction with the ESIL annual conference in Berlin. Six papers focusing on the topic ‘Reconstructing International Criminal Justice As It Unfolds’ were presented, each focusing on a different way that international criminal justice might be reoriented to create better outcomes. Of those six, we present five in the forthcoming symposium.
In her contribution, Maria Crippa identifies the lack of state cooperation with regard to the execution of ICC arrest warrants as one of the Court’s most persistent problems. To address this, she proposes ways in which the practice might be reformed. Her suggestions are two-fold, isolating the need for greater consistency on the part of the Office of the Prosecutor when applying its established charging policies, and the recommending that Pre-Trial Chambers limit their decisions to unseal and publicize arrest warrants that have been submitted to them. These efforts, which should also be read against the background of the recent amendment to the Regulations of the Court regulating the classification of applications for arrest warrants or summons to appear, should also be further buttressed by a greater effort on the part of both organs to explain their actions, in the hope that doing so can help decrease the politicization of charging decisions encouraging greater compliance.
Alison Bisset’s post also considers issues around state cooperation, but in the context of coordinating domestic universal jurisdiction prosecutions as envisioned in the Ljubljana-The Hague Convention on International Cooperation in the Investigation and Prosecution of the Crime of Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Other International Crimes (‘LHC’). She specifically explores the dangers of adopting the practices of other international bodies without giving due consideration to the needs of the borrowing body. She does this through the lens of the LHC’s provisions on state cooperation, which were imported wholesale from the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime (‘UNTOC’). The piece argues that the familiarity of the UNTOC approach to state cooperation may make it attractive to states considering joining the LHC regime, but that the failure to adapt those provisions to the LHC framework may make them unsuitable in practice. The post concludes with a warning to the drafters of the currently under-negotiation Crimes Against Humanity Convention to avoid the mistakes of the LHC when incorporating provisions from other treaties. While including familiar provisions may encourage greater state interest in adopting the Convention, it could create long terms complications for its future practical application if they are not tailored to unique legal regime created in the treaty.
The next two posts, by Marie Wilmet and Damian Scalia, and Sharon Weill, also look at domestic criminal prosecutions, however unlike Bisset’s contribution, they are focused on what they can achieve that international criminal trials cannot. As Wilmet and Scalia point out, the aspirations for domestic universal jurisdiction trials can often differ from the reality. Their post draws on trial observations and empirical research into the lived experience of legal professionals with direct involvement in universal jurisdiction trials. It finds that there is a discordance between what legal professionals identify as the reasons for universal jurisdiction trials; contributing to the larger causes of international justice and delivering justice to the victims, and the reality that universal jurisdiction trials mostly reproduce the post-colonial power dynamics seen in international criminal prosecutions. From this research they extrapolate that this may be down to multiple factors, including a degree of localism found in national legislation, and a tendency towards intervention in situations arising in a state’s former colonies. The explanation for this is more complicated than simply attributing it to a sense of paternalism arising out of colonial legacy, but it does support the conclusion that a discrepancy remains between what universal jurisdiction aspires to be, and what they actually are.
Sharon Weill takes a different approach to domestic criminal trials by considering the prosecution of corporations by the states in which they are located. She does so through the Lafarge case, which concerns allegations that the French cement company was complicit in crimes against humanity committed by Daesh and other armed groups in Syria between 2013 and 2014. Weill uses this case to question the field’s long-standing reliance on individual criminal responsibility as the predominant model for addressing mass atrocity, and to show what is lost when the responsibility of collective actors, in this case corporations, is treated as peripheral. She shows how the Lafarge proceedings are potentially reshaping corporate criminal liability in ways that create broader space to pursue corporate complicity, and she argues that counter-terrorism proceedings can serve as a procedural avenue to accountability in domestic courts.
The symposium then proceeds with Yulia Ioffe’s reflections on how international criminal justice can be reformed so that it might shorten the temporal gap between when an individual is injured and when they receive reparations for that injury. She does this proposing a paradigmatic shift away from the dominant practice of connecting reparations to post-conflict accountability efforts and re-orienting the entitlement to reparations so that they might be rewarded when a conflict is ongoing. She does this through an examination of the Ukrainian Urgent Interim Reparations Programme for survivors of Conflict Related Sexual Violence, which prioritises the distribution of reparations as an immediate response to harm, rather than a byproduct of the criminal process. Programmes like this help encourage a transition towards a more nimble and multi-layered approach to justice, which if properly administrated can give greater meaning to the important mission of delivering justice to the victims of international crimes.
Ultimately, the symposium concludes with a contribution written by Patrick Siegle, Claire Beutter and Shima Esmailian. The concluding blogpost features the editors’ reflections on the five preceding symposium contributions. It argues that international criminal justice should be understood as a broader ecosystem operating at the intersections of international and domestic justice, peacebuilding, and cooperation. By highlighting the role of actors and processes ranging from transitional justice mechanisms to domestic prosecutions and inter-state cooperation, it emphasises that the effectiveness of international criminal law ultimately depends on the resilience of this wider accountability network.
International criminal justice may be in poor health, but its situation is not terminal. Indeed, although the field and its principal judicial institution, the ICC, are experiencing existential threats from both inside and outside the international criminal justice system, the discipline is also arguably more relevant than ever. With outstanding arrest warrants against the leadership of regimes that are actively involved in ongoing wars, the Court is positioning accountability and itself at the centre of the field of international criminal justice – or, as it unfolds. As the entries posted over the coming days of this symposium will demonstrate, there are fundamental ways in which international criminal justice can change that will make it better suited to face the legal challenges it confronts. However, implicit in all of the forthcoming posts is the necessity that those actors with the ability to create real change, including states, NGOs, and international criminal justice professionals themselves, have the appetite to do so. If they do not, the entire discipline is in danger of calcifying and being forgotten in a rapidly changing world.
