International Criminal Court

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 17th of March 2023, the International Criminal Court did something it had never done before. Its judges issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, making him the first head of state of a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to be wanted by the Court. Russia called the warrants outrageous. The charge concerned child abductions during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here is the strange part. Russia withdrew its signature from the founding treaty in 2016, and it is not subject to the Court at all. Yet Putin could still be charged, because Ukraine, though not a member, accepted the Court's jurisdiction in 2014. This single case opens a set of questions. How does a court reach a man whose country rejects it? What gives it the right to judge presidents and generals? And why, after more than two decades, do four of the most powerful nations on earth still refuse to join it?

• 2. Crimes Of Last Resort

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  Four crimes sit at the center of the Court's authority: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. They are defined in articles 6, 7, 8, and 8 bis of the Rome Statute, the treaty that serves as the Court's charter. Genocide means acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. That definition is identical to the one in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948. Crimes against humanity cover sixteen listed acts, from murder and enslavement to apartheid and enforced disappearance, when carried out as part of a widespread or systematic attack on civilians. War crimes form the longest list of all. Article 8 names 74 of them, split between international and non-international conflicts, including the use of poison, the conscription of child soldiers, and attacks on peacekeepers. The Court does not race national courts to the courtroom. It is meant to be the court of last resort, stepping in only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute. This idea has a name, complementarity, and it means the Court will not act if a legitimate national investigation has already done its work, even if that investigation ended in acquittal or no charges at all.

• 3. Triggering The Court

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  Three doors lead into a case at the Court, and only one of them belongs to the prosecutor. A situation can be brought by a state party, by the United Nations Security Council, or by the prosecutor acting on their own initiative, a power known as proprio motu. When a state or the Security Council refers a situation, the prosecutor can open an investigation without first asking the Pre-Trial Chamber for permission. The Security Council door is the widest of the three. Through article 13 it can refer situations that would otherwise lie outside the Court's reach, as it did with Darfur and Libya, neither of which is a member. The Court normally cannot touch crimes on the soil of a non-member, yet a Security Council referral lifts that limit. Time, too, draws a hard line. No statute of limitations applies to these crimes, but the Court cannot reach back before the 1st of July 2002, the day the Rome Statute entered into force. For a state that joined later, the clock starts on the date of its membership. The same Council that opens cases can also stop them. Article 16 lets it freeze any investigation for twelve months, and that freeze can be renewed without end.

• 4. Who Sits In Judgment

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  Eighteen judges make up the Judicial Divisions, sorted into a Pre-Trial Chamber, a Trial Chamber, and an Appeals Chamber. They are elected by the Assembly of States Parties to nine-year terms and generally cannot be re-elected. No two of them may hold the same nationality, and all must come from member states. The Rome Statute demands they be persons of high moral character, impartiality and integrity, fit for the highest judicial offices in their own countries. Removing one is deliberately hard. It takes a two-thirds majority of the other judges and a two-thirds majority of the states parties. Tomoko Akane of Japan became President on the 11th of March 2024, succeeding Piotr Hofmański, with her first term set to expire in 2027. Before her, Song Sang-hyun led the Court from 2009 to 2015. The prosecutor's office stands apart from all of this, sworn to act independently and forbidden to take instructions from any state, organisation, or individual. Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina held the role first, from 2003 to 2012. Fatou Bensouda of Gambia followed, serving until the 16th of June 2021, when the British barrister Karim Khan took over. Khan had once led the United Nations team investigating Islamic State crimes in Iraq, and at the Court he had worked as defence counsel on cases from Kenya, Sudan and Libya. Around 900 personnel from roughly 100 countries keep the institution running, working in English and French.

• 5. From Nuremberg To Rome

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  The dream of a permanent court for international crimes is more than a century old. It was first proposed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, by the Commission of Responsibilities, in the aftermath of the First World War. A 1937 conference in Geneva, held under the League of Nations, produced the first convention calling for a permanent court to try acts of international terrorism. Thirteen states signed it. None ratified it, and it never came into force. After the Second World War, the allied powers built two temporary tribunals instead. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried German leaders, including for the Nazi perpetration of the Holocaust. Its counterpart in Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, tried Japanese leaders. The United Nations General Assembly first recognised the need for a permanent court in 1948, and the International Law Commission drafted statutes by the early 1950s, only to see them shelved as the Cold War made the project politically impossible. Two men kept the idea alive in print. Benjamin B. Ferencz, who had investigated Nazi war crimes and served as chief prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen trial, argued for such a court in his 1975 book Defining International Aggression: The Search for World Peace. Robert Kurt Woetzel, a German-born professor of international law, co-edited Toward a Feasible International Criminal Court in 1970 and founded a body to push for it the following year. The thaw came in June 1989, when A. N. R. Robinson, later Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, revived the idea by proposing a tribunal to address the illegal drug trade.

• 6. The Rome Vote

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  On the 17th of July 1998, in Rome, the treaty was adopted by a vote of 120 to seven, with 21 countries abstaining. The seven who voted no were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen. Israel objected to one provision in particular. The list of war crimes included the action of transferring population into occupied territory, a clause added at the insistence of Arab countries with the stated aim of targeting Israeli citizens. The road to that vote ran through years of committee work. From 1996 to 1998 the Preparatory Committee held six sessions at United Nations headquarters in New York City, with non-governmental organisations gathering under the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. In January 1998 the drafters met in Zutphen in the Netherlands to consolidate the text. Sixty ratifications later, the Rome Statute entered into force and the Court was formally established. The first bench of 18 judges was elected in February 2003 and sworn in on the 11th of March 2003. The Court issued its first arrest warrants on the 8th of July 2005. Its first judgment came in 2012, when it found the Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty of war crimes for using child soldiers. In 2010 the states parties gathered in Kampala, Uganda, for the first Review Conference, where they finally agreed on a definition of the crime of aggression. That jurisdiction was activated on the 17th of July 2018, exactly twenty years after the treaty was adopted.

• 7. Presidents In The Dock

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  The list of the Court's indicted reads like a roll call of heads of state. It includes Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, former President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi, President Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast, and former Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The verdicts have been uneven. Thomas Lubanga drew 14 years, Germain Katanga 12 years, and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui was acquitted. Bo Ntaganda received 30 years for crimes against humanity. The Malian Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was sentenced to nine years, later commuted to seven, and released on the 18th of September 2022. Ugandan Dominic Ongwen was convicted to 25 years. Jean-Pierre Bemba's case marked a milestone and then a reversal. Convicted in March 2016 on counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, his case was the first time the Court convicted someone of sexual violence after adding rape to his conviction. The Appeals Chamber overturned those convictions in June 2018, and the Court refused to compensate him for ten years of imprisonment. Recent warrants have reached far beyond Africa. Alongside Putin, the Court named Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights, and later the Russian commanders Sergey Kobylash and Viktor Sokolov. On the 21st of November 2024, warrants were formally issued for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Deif. Warrants for the Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar were withdrawn after their deaths were confirmed in July and October. On the 8th of July 2025 the Pre-Trial Chamber issued warrants for Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Afghanistan's chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, over the persecution of Afghan women and girls.

• 8. The Powers That Stay Out

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  China, India, Russia, and the United States are not party to the Rome Statute and do not recognise the Court's jurisdiction. Their absence is the Court's deepest fault line. Opponents question its very legitimacy, citing national sovereignty and warning that the institution is open to political influence. The Court has also been accused of bias and of disproportionately targeting African leaders. Sarah Knuckey, a Columbia law professor, notes that it is often critiqued for being selective, or imperialistic, or reflecting the geopolitical interests of powerful states. The Court's reliance on others runs deeper than reputation. It has no police force and no power to compel witnesses to appear, only the ability to fine those who choose to come. Without state cooperation it cannot mount successful cases, which means it acts inconsistently, avoids the hardest cases, and loses deterrent value. A perpetrator who seizes a government and refuses to cooperate can simply wait the Court out. Critics go further still. Research suggests that prosecuting culpable leaders can make them less willing to step down peacefully, prolonging conflicts and pushing them toward more violence. The outstanding warrants for four leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army are seen by some as an obstacle to ending the insurgency in Uganda. Czech politician Marek Benda argues the Court as a deterrent will only mean the worst dictators try to retain power at all costs. The institution did not arrive at this moment cheaply. The Assembly of States Parties approved a budget of €141.6 million for 2017, and the Court itself sits in The Hague on the grounds of a former military barracks, the Alexanderkazerne, where it moved into its permanent home on the 14th of December 2015.