Testing A New Court

In July 2002, after hasty renovations to an old Dutch telecom building on the margins of The Hague, the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened its doors to the world. Created by treaty in 1998, the ICC was a bold response to the hopes of many nations for a more compelling way to enforce the fundamental rights of humanity. A permanent international court would soon begin to prosecute suspects accused of mounting attacks on innocent populations – even if those accused were government officials, including heads of state. Amid investigations into more than a half-dozen global trouble spots, the ICC launched its first courtroom trials by charging a handful of men from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The following chapters tell the story of these pioneering trials, which dominated the ICC’s first decade of operation. Courtroom trials show us the law in action. The trial itself is not some quiet research survey or academic inquiry – even though courts do provide fruitful topics for researchers and scholars. In the core dynamics of a trial, out of the drama of adversarial testing, the outcome emerges as something greater than the sum of its parts. International trials are a kind of proving ground. And for new courts like the ICC, the initial trials unfolded like a brash laboratory experiment. In the alchemy of the courtroom, trials set off reactions between legal norms in the statute book and concrete facts in the particular case. These frictional sparks signal the appearance of a new organic bond at the conclusion of the trial. In international courts the legal norms begin as grand abstractions, proclaiming broad humanistic ideals, while the concrete facts of individual cases are as raw and unpredictable as life itself. From all these elements, the first ICC trials yielded a highly combustible mix. Unexpected twists and turns lengthened all the proceedings. Twenty years after the founding treaty was signed, the Court had completed just three full trials – in which two of four Congolese men were acquitted. These are the