Roundtable Blog: After the Rupture: International Lawyers Reckon with the Disruption of the Rules-Based Order

Roundtable Blog:

 After the Rupture: International Lawyers Reckon with the Disruption of the Rules-Based Order 

Editor’s Note

This post is part of the PILPG Lawyering Peace working group series. It presents a curated set of expert reflections drawn from a roundtable discussion held in March 2026.  The experts examine one of the most consequential questions in contemporary international affairs: whether the post-1945 rules-based international order is experiencing a temporary disruption or a fundamental, potentially irreversible rupture. The roundtable also contributes to a forward-looking policy conversation: what can international lawyers, policymakers, and civil society do to adapt or respond.

A simple question was discussed at the outset: Are we overreacting?  What followed was, rather than a debate, an agreement among experienced international lawyers and policymakers, coalescing into an unambiguous no.  The more troubling possibility, several experts suggested, is that the world has not yet grasped the full magnitude of what is already underway.

Drawing on the diverse expertise of our Peace Fellows, this post moves beyond the immediate headlines and examines the structural forces at work, characterizing the moment, tracing its causes, and asks what international lawyers, policymakers, and middle powers can realistically do in response.  Published under the Lawyering Justice banner, this post reflects our commitment not only to chronicling the legal and diplomatic dimensions of active conflicts, but also to fostering strategic foresight and connecting lawyering to policy planning. We hope this format will serve as a model for future collaborative work on peace and justice.

Characterizing the Moment

Before addressing causes, consequences, or responses, the working group spent considerable time on a terminological question that turned out to carry real analytical weight: is what is happening a paradigm shift, an evolution from one coherent order to another? or something more sudden and less legible?

Dr. David Crane, Founding Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone and Founder of the Global Accountability Project

Dr. Crane opened with a rejection of the premise embedded in the question. “We are not overreacting,” he said. “I am not sure what overreacting even means in this day and age.” He reached for the image of a kaleidoscope: a change in which, when one element shifts, everything simultaneously reconfigures.  The scale of the disruption, in his reading, places us at or near a threshold that previous generations associated with world war. “We are on the verge of World War III,” he said, “or we can argue it has already begun.”  The implication is not panic, rather a call for clear-eyed urgency.  Dr. Crane emphasized the need to think about how we keep ahead of the paradigm shift, through patience and scholarship.

Ambassador Jorge Lomonaco, former Ambassador of Mexico to the UN Human Rights Council and to the Organization of American States 

Ambassador Lomonaco pushed back on the premise of the opening question.  The concern, in his view, is not that the international community is overreacting to current events but that it has not yet fully reckoned with their scale.  The situation is considerably worse than most have yet grasped.  Later in the session he returned to the terminological debate with a precision that reframed the entire discussion.  A paradigm shift, he argued, implies that something new is already taking shape to replace what is being lost.  

History offers examples such as the shift from the multipolar European order to the bipolar Cold War, or from the Cold War to the post-1991 moment of American primacy.  In each case, the contours of the successor arrangement became visible relatively quickly.  What the world is facing today is different.  The post-1945 order has not shifted toward something recognizable; it has fractured, and nothing coherent has yet emerged to take its place.  In other words, “the paradigm is broken,” he said.  That distinction, between a shift and a rupture, carries real consequences for how policymakers and legal practitioners should respond.  Planning for a transition assumes a destination.  Planning for a rupture requires a different kind of thinking entirely.

Ambassador Keith Harper, former US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council

Ambassador Harper refined the terminology directly.  “I don’t know if it is a paradigm shift so much as a rupture of the paradigm,” he said. “The question is what replaces it.”  For Ambassador Harper, that question is not rhetorical.  He pressed the group toward a longer historical view, drawing on two of the twentieth century’s great moments of deliberate institutional construction.  The first was the preparatory work that preceded the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where Woodrow Wilson and a team of lawyers, academics, and diplomats spent months drafting proposals for what a post-war international order should look like before a single negotiation had begun.  That preparation produced the blueprint for the League of Nations. 

The second was the drafting of the UN Charter in 1945, where Allied powers translated the wreckage of World War II into a new architecture of collective security, international law, and multilateral cooperation.  Ambassador Harper’s point was that neither of those moments happened by accident.  They were the product of deliberate, advanced thinking about what kind of world the next generation of states wanted to inhabit.  His argument was that this moment calls for exactly that kind of effort again: a serious, forward-looking rethinking of how multilateral institutions should be designed, how alliances should be structured, and what shared rules should govern a world that looks nothing like the one those earlier architects faced.  His hope is that American politics will ultimately recognize the current trajectory for what it is and that space will reopen to do that work alongside allies.

The American Recalibration: Cause or Symptom?

The Trump administration’s reorientation of American foreign policy is the most visible driver of the current disruption.  But several experts pressed a harder question: is the US the cause of the rupture, or the symptom of forces that would have produced it regardless?

Ambassador Julian Braithwaite, former British Ambassador to the WTO, UN, and Other International Organizations in Geneva

Ambassador Braithwaite traced a line through three successive Western military interventions in the Middle East, each one revealing something about the state of the international order at the moment it occurred.  The 1991 Gulf War, launched in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, was authorized by the UN Security Council and assembled one of the broadest multilateral coalitions in the post-war era.  It represented the rules-based order functioning close to its intended design: collective authorization, shared burden, declared objectives. 

The 2003 invasion of Iraq showed a more complicated picture.  The legal basis was disputed, the coalition was narrower, and the objectives became increasingly difficult to define as the conflict deepened.  But the US and its partners still operated within a framework of justification, however contested, and still sought to build an international rationale for what they were doing.  

The current situation represents something categorically different.  For instance, the current US-Israeli invasion of Iran is neither accompanied by a UN Security Council resolution, nor a justification or alliance.

What that sequence reveals, he argued, is not simply a change in American behavior under a particular administration but a structural trend that has been building for decades, and that is the progressive erosion of the multilateral architecture that once gave military action its legitimacy.  The rules-based international order was never a purely principled construction.  It was built to serve interests and it functioned because powerful nations were willing to act as the enforcer of last resort when the system’s norms were violated.   As the costs of that role grew and the domestic political appetite for it diminished, the system began hollowing out from within.  Without the state that designed and underwrote it, the architecture does not simply weaken, it atrophies.

Dr. Igor Lukšić, Former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Montenegro

To Dr. Lukšić, the absence of UN Security Council authorization for major military action is not a new phenomenon.  The historical record reflects a pattern in which the use of force has often proceeded outside the Charter framework, with outcomes shaped heavily by prevailing geopolitical dynamics.  The US-led military intervention in Korea in 1950 was formally enabled by a Security Council mandate secured only because of the Soviet Union’s temporary boycott; the 1999 NATO intervention in Yugoslavia unfolded without any Council authorization; and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq proceeded without explicit UNSC authorization, justified instead through contested claims about weapons of mass destruction and existing UNSC resolutions. 

By contrast, the response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 did receive Security Council approval.  In many cases, military action undertaken outside the Council’s prior authorization was later followed by Security Council engagement or resolutions addressing the evolving situation.  The current situation, where military force is being deployed outside the framework the UN Charter was designed to provide, is not, on that dimension alone, historically unprecedented.

What is different, and what makes the present moment genuinely novel, is the simultaneous layering of multiple crises across different regions and domains, combined with a pace of change that is outrunning the capacity of institutions and governments to respond coherently.  The world, in his framing, has moved past the era of clear American primacy that defined the post-Cold War decades, but it has not arrived anywhere new.  It occupies an unstable in-between, it is no longer unipolar, not yet genuinely multipolar, and without an agreed framework for managing the competition that fills the space between those two conditions.  Dr. Lukšić was candid about the limits of what anyone can predict from this position.  The process of finding a new equilibrium will be long and structurally disruptive, he emphasized. “It will be a painful process that will lead to something, what exactly is hard to say, but it will have to be another rules-based order.”

Speed, Enforcement, and the Deliberate Demolition

Ambassador Elizabeth Richard, former US Ambassador to Lebanon & Coordinator for Counterterrorism / Ambassador at-Large

What the international community is witnessing, Ambassador Richard argued, is not improvised disruption but a deliberately designed strategy, and its central instrument is speed.  The logic she described is one that anyone familiar with legal and institutional processes will recognize: rules-based systems, whether domestic courts, international tribunals, or multilateral bodies, operate on timelines.  Investigations take months.  Litigation takes years.  Treaty renegotiation takes longer still.  When governments move faster than those timelines, they can reshape facts on the ground before any accountability mechanism has had time to engage.  Withdrawal from international agreements, defunding of multilateral institutions, reassignment of treaty obligations, restructuring of alliances, each of these actions is considerably easier to execute than it is to reverse, and that asymmetry between dismantling and rebuilding is not incidental. 

It is, in Ambassador Richard’s reading, the defining feature of the current moment. “Eventually the law may catch up, but by the time it does, you cannot put the pieces back together again.”  That observation raises a question she left deliberately open: if the space vacated by retreating multilateral engagement cannot be reclaimed through legal or institutional challenge in real time, can a coalition of middle powers construct and enforce a values-based alternative before that space is filled by something else entirely? 

States like Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan, and Australia individually lack the singular weight of a great power, but collectively they represent significant diplomatic, economic, and normative influence.  The question is whether that influence can be organized quickly enough and with sufficient coherence to matter.

Major General Darrell Guthrie, US Army (Ret.)

In agreement with Ambassador Richard, the compression of decision-making timelines is not simply a political phenomenon, Guthrie argued.  It is structural, and it has been accelerating for decades.  Financial markets now execute transactions in fractions of a second.  Information travels across the globe instantaneously.  Corporate decisions that once required weeks of deliberation are made in hours.  The private sector adapted to that reality long ago, redesigning its institutions, its processes, and its expectations accordingly.  However, the international governance system has not.  The UN Security Council still deliberates.  International courts still move through years of procedure.  Treaty bodies still require consensus among dozens of states before anything binding can be agreed.  Those processes were designed for a world where the pace of events allowed for reflection, negotiation, and incremental adjustment.  That world no longer exists. “An international rules-based order was premised on time,” Guthrie said.   

The result is a structural imbalance. Those whose power depends on deliberation and consensus are increasingly disadvantaged, while those willing to treat speed as a strategic instrument gain the upper hand. Institutions that cannot keep pace with the challenges they were built to address do not simply become less effective. They get bypassed altogether, left out of the decisions that actually shape outcomes.

Elayne Whyte-Gomez, former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations, Senior Fellow of the United Nation Institute for Disarmament Research, and Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. 

The international order, Ambassador Whyte-Gomez argued, is not simply something that powerful states construct and destroy on their own terms.  It is sustained by the willingness of the broader community of states to defend it, invoke it, and refuse to look the other way when it is violated.  When small and middle powers invoke its norms, challenge violations, and insist on accountability, the order retains its functional weight even when the most powerful actors strain against it.  When they go silent, or worse, retreat into vague diplomatic language designed to offend no one and commit to nothing, the order loses the constituency that gives it life.  “The international order does not cease to exist by the actions or the narrative of powerful actors alone,” she said.  “It ceases to exist when the rest, such as experts and middle and small nations, acquiesce.” 

What concerned Ambassador Whyte-Gomez was precisely that pattern of acquiescence beginning to take hold.  States that might otherwise serve as normative anchors are increasingly issuing statements carefully calibrated to avoid confrontation, offering wishy-washy expressions that say nothing.  The pressure to accommodate is real and understandable, she acknowledged, but she drew a sharp distinction between principled restraint and silence.  A state that chooses not to speak when the rules it has long championed are being dismantled is not staying neutral.  It is making a choice, and that choice has consequences for the durability of the very framework it depends on.

Ambassador Whyte-Gomez then placed the current moment in a longer historical frame.  She drew on two precedents where deliberate, advanced legal and political thinking produced institutions that shaped the international order for generations.  The first was the preparatory work that preceded the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, as mentioned previously in this post, where Wilson and a team of advisors spent months drafting proposals for a post-war order before negotiations began, work that ultimately produced the blueprint for the League of Nations.  The second was the drafting of the UN Charter in 1945, where the architects of the post-war order translated the lessons of catastrophic failure into a new framework for collective security and international law.  In both cases, lawyers played a central role not as technicians implementing decisions already made by politicians, but as architects of the conceptual framework within which those decisions were made. “There is a role now for lawyers,” she said.  “To stop and think.”  

Ambassador Whyte-Gomez then returned to the historical arc that Ambassador Braithwaite had opened earlier in the session and brought it to a precise conclusion.  Where Ambassador Braithwaite had traced the erosion of multilateral architecture across three decades of Western military interventions, Ambassador Whyte-Gomez identified what is categorically new about the present moment. 

Throughout the post-war period, the United States, even when acting outside the bounds of international law, maintained the practice of constructing a legal justification for its use of force and formally communicating that justification to the UN Security Council, invoking the right to self-defense pursuant to Article 51 of the UN Charter.  The justifications were sometimes thin and sometimes contested, but they existed, and their existence mattered, because they acknowledged the framework even in the act of straining against it.  They provided other states with something to engage with and challenge; they openly conveyed a vision of the situation and a shared vocabulary through which other actors could understand it and hold power to account through a formal communication process. 

The present difficulty in building a legal rationale is therefore not a minor procedural omission.  Rather, it reveals a new context for the decision-making process and the standard inter-agency contributions.  The policy process has become disarticulated from the framework itself, playing no role in the final decision.  “This,” she concluded, “is the real rupture.”

Accountability, Institutions, and the Compliance Crisis

Kateryna Kyrychenko, Head of Ukraine Legal Affairs and Program Management at PILPG

Kyrychenko’s contribution reframed the institutional discussion in a way that cut against the grain of much of what had preceded it.  “There is nothing inherently wrong with international law,” she argued.  “The real problem lies in its execution and compliance.”  She described what she called an age of “international populism,” a period in which international agreements are signed as political gestures, frequently rushed to meet symbolic deadlines or demonstrate quick diplomatic success, producing documents that are “difficult, if not impossible, to enforce.”  The politicization of international law, in her diagnosis, consistently prevails over its genuine legalization.

Her prescription looked inward: greater attention to national legislation and constitutional frameworks.  Wars are ultimately won by states, not international institutions, and the preservation of constitutional order is critically important.  Ukraine, she argued, offers a powerful example: despite more than four years of full-scale aggression, the country has continued to uphold its constitutional regime, “an achievement that deserves recognition,” demonstrating how, in practice, domestic legal resilience becomes critical where international law cannot ensure compliance.

Stephanie Gusching⁩, Associate at White & Case, secondee at PILPG

Gusching focused on the structural pathologies of the UN Security Council.  The veto mechanism has rendered the Council functionally inoperative at precisely the moments it is most needed, including with respect to Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran.  “If international law exists, we need to reimagine how these institutions operate and evolve,” she said.  Her proposals are specific: majority-based consent structures within the Council and required abstention for parties directly implicated in a conflict.  The world that produced the UN Charter in 1945 no longer exists; the institution designed for that world should not be expected to function as if it still does.

Middle Powers and the Question of What Comes Next

Dr. Williams posed the session’s most forward-looking question: when we come to this fork in the road, who chooses which way we go?  Some will say the US.  Some will say a new coalition of middle powers.  Is it possible that both paths are pursued simultaneously, the US doubling down on a constricted definition of its interests while others construct an alternative architecture?

Ambassador Jorge Lomonaco, former Ambassador of Mexico to the UN Human Rights Council and to the Organization of American States 

Ambassador Lomonaco articulated the middle power dilemma with the precision of someone who has spent decades navigating it from the inside.  For much of the post-war period, he argued, middle powers had a clear orienting framework.  They could look to a set of principles that were anchored in international law, multilateral cooperation, and the peaceful resolution of disputes, and align their foreign policy accordingly.  That alignment was not always without tension, and the principles were not always perfectly applied, but the framework itself was coherent and the direction of travel was clear.  What the current moment has disrupted is not simply the application of those principles but the willingness of the state that underwrote them to continue doing so.  That leaves middle powers in genuinely uncharted territory.  Aligning with a world order stripped of the principles that once gave it legitimacy is not an attractive option.  Aligning with an alternative order built around spheres of influence and the primacy of force is equally untenable for states whose security and prosperity depend on rules that apply to everyone. 

“What do we do as a middle power now?” he asked.  The question, in his framing, is not rhetorical.  It is the central strategic challenge facing a significant portion of the international community, and it does not yet have an answer.  What it demands is the construction of a third path, one that does not yet exist but that middle powers may have both the incentive and the collective capacity to build.

Ambassador Julian Braithwaite, former British Ambassador to the WTO, UN, and Other International Organizations in Geneva. 

Ambassador Braithwaite offered a candid counterweight to the more aspirational threads of the discussion.  The history of international order, he argued, has never been one of genuinely collective governance.  It has always been shaped by the interests and the power of the states willing and able to enforce its rules.  That is a structural observation and it carries direct implications for what middle powers can realistically hope to achieve. 

The Russian position, he noted, has been about a world organized around spheres of influence, where great powers exercise predominant authority within their respective regions and smaller states navigate their relationships with those powers accordingly.  That model has deep historical roots, predating the post-1945 order and never fully displaced by it.  The current US posture, in Ambassador Braithwaite’s reading, reflects a degree of comfort with that framework, a willingness to think about international relations in terms of deals, bilateral leverage, and zones of interest rather than universal rules and multilateral institutions.  China, meanwhile, has been watching the erosion of the rules-based order with considerable strategic interest.  A world in which the rules-based order weakens is not, from China’s perspective, an unambiguously unwelcome development.  The space that opens as multilateral institutions atrophy is one in which bilateral leverage, economic coercion, and regional dominance become more consequential. 

For middle powers, the challenge is that none of these trajectories leave an obvious role.  A world organized around great power spheres of influence is precisely the world in which states that are too large to be ignored but too small to set the terms find themselves most exposed.  “We need to be realistic,” he said, “about what rules-based order can be constructed on top of the ashes of this one.”  The aspiration to build something better is necessary.  But aspiration without a clear account of who will build it, on what foundation, and with what enforcement capacity is not architecture; it is hope.

Jason Steinbaum, Former Staff Director, Committee on Foreign Affairs, US House of Representatives

Steinbaum offered a perspective that resisted the session’s more pessimistic conclusions without dismissing them.  “We may not be at a complete rupture,” he said, “but we can discern some things from the current actions.  There is still a thirst for a rules-based order, for democracy, although it’s not in all corners.” 

Steinbaum pointed to a debate that he argues is still very much alive within the US itself.  The war powers framework, which governs the constitutional relationship between the executive branch and Congress over the use of military force abroad, has been stretched and strained repeatedly since its codification in the War Powers Resolution of 1973.  Presidents of both parties have pushed its limits; Congress has oscillated between reasserting its authority and acquiescing to executive action.  That tension is not resolved, and the question of who in the US constitutional system has the authority to commit the country to military action, and under what conditions, remains genuinely contested.  His broader point was that the internal US debate about the country’s role in the world and the limits of executive power is unfinished.  The outcome of that debate will have consequences that extend well beyond US borders, which is precisely why the international legal community has a stake in following it closely.

Conclusion

The urgency in this post’s contributions suggests that these are not merely academic questions. Dr. Crane states it plainly: “We are in an age of aggression, a corollary of the rise of the strongman, where the unilateral use of force outside the UN paradigm is becoming a norm.”  The question then becomes whether we can live in a world where the UN does not matter.

The experts converge not on pessimism, but on a specific and actionable form of urgency.  The rupture is real.  The normative vocabulary is losing value. The institutions are atrophying.  The middle powers face a choice between constructing an alternative architecture and acquiescing to a world ordered by spheres of influence.

But acquiescence, as Ambassador Whyte-Gomez reminds us, is a choice too, and it is the choice that will determine whether what has been broken can eventually be rebuilt.  The working group’s consensus is that it cannot afford to be made by default.  At historical inflection points, lawyers and practitioners can stop, think, and help construct the vocabulary for what comes next.

The Global South and the Russian War on Ukraine: Structural Constraints on Diplomatic Alignment

The Global South and the Russian War on Ukraine: Structural Constraints on Diplomatic Alignment

An assessment of the political, economic, and institutional factors shaping multilateral engagement with Russia's war against Ukraine

By Dr. Paul R. Williams*

Three years into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a striking diplomatic gap persists between the breadth of international condemnation and the depth of practical alignment.  While 141 states voted in the UN General Assembly to demand Russia's immediate withdrawal in March 2022, the countries that have joined Western-led sanctions regimes, restricted Russian access to their financial systems, or curtailed bilateral trade with Moscow represent a narrower group.  That gap is not incidental and it reflects durable structural realities across the Global South that are rooted in economic dependencies, regional security pressures, institutional history, and the architecture of development finance.  Understanding those realities is a prerequisite for any realistic assessment of how the conflict's diplomatic landscape might evolve.

A related question follows from this analysis: given the structural depth of these constraints, whether Ukraine's diplomatic strategy would be better served by consolidating and sustaining existing Western commitments rather than investing heavily in outreach to states whose non-alignment is unlikely to shift within any operationally relevant timeframe.

Voting Patterns and the Geometry of Non-Alignment

United Nations General Assembly resolution ES-11/1, adopted on March 2, 2022 with 141 votes in favor, demanded Russia's immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Ukrainian territory.  The 35 abstentions told their own story: India, China, South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the majority of Central Asian states declined to vote in favor.  A subsequent resolution in November 2022 demanding reparations from Russia received only 94 affirmative votes, with 73 abstentions, a result that illustrated both the limits of early momentum and the increasing discomfort of non-aligned states with being asked to take progressively stronger positions.

The geography of abstention maps closely onto economic and geopolitical relationships rather than regional or ideological blocs.  Several abstaining states have simultaneously affirmed Ukraine's sovereignty as a principle in bilateral diplomatic communications while declining to translate that position into a formal UN vote or participation in Western sanctions architecture.  This distinction matters legally and diplomatically.  Abstention is not acquiescence in Russia's conduct under international law, and most abstaining governments have been careful to preserve legal and normative space by avoiding explicit endorsement of Russia's legal arguments.  What abstention does reflect is a deliberate judgment that public alignment with the Western-led coalition carries costs that outweigh the benefits, given each government's particular economic situation, security relationships, and domestic political constraints.

Ukraine's diplomatic outreach since 2022 has been genuinely extensive.  President Zelensky addressed the Arab League summit in Jeddah in May 2023, his first appearance before that body, and made direct appeals on sovereignty and international law to an audience of governments that had largely abstained or remained neutral on the conflict.  He engaged directly with African heads of state throughout 2023 and 2024, including a June 2023 peace summit in which several African leaders proposed a ten-point peace framework of their own.  

The Peace Summit hosted in Switzerland in June 2024, which Ukraine convened as a broader multilateral gathering, attracted approximately 90 delegations, though several major Global South states either declined to attend or sent lower-level representation, and the final communiqué was not signed by a number of key developing country participants.  These outcomes do not indicate diplomatic failure in any simple sense, but they do indicate that outreach and dialogue have not yet produced the depth of alignment that Ukraine and its Western partners had hoped to generate.

Embedded Economic Dependencies

The most consequential constraint on broader Global South alignment is economic rather than ideological, and it operates across energy, food, and defense procurement in ways that are deeply embedded in national development strategies.  

Energy and Commodities

India's expansion of Russian crude oil imports following Western sanctions in 2022 is the most analytically significant case.  By mid-2023, Russia had displaced Saudi Arabia and Iraq to become India's single largest oil supplier, accounting for approximately 40% of total crude imports.  The discounts available on Russian crude, which reached $20 to $30 per barrel below Brent benchmark prices at peak in early 2022 and again in late 2025, represented a material economic benefit for an economy managing significant energy import costs and a current account sensitive to oil price movements.  The Indian government has publicly defended this policy on development and energy security grounds, framing it as a sovereign economic decision rather than a geopolitical statement.  India imports approximately 85% of its crude oil requirements and price sensitivity at this scale has direct effects on domestic fuel costs, inflation, and the government's fiscal position.

The broader significance of the India case is what it demonstrates about the limits of Western pressure on large emerging economies with independent development trajectories.  India is simultaneously a member of the Quad security dialogue, a deepening defense partner of the United States, and a major purchaser of Russian energy.  These positions are held concurrently, without apparent contradiction from New Delhi's perspective, because Indian foreign policy operates on a doctrine of strategic autonomy that predates the current conflict and reflects the foreign policy legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement.  The conflict has not changed that fundamental orientation.

Food Supply Chains

The food security dimension of Global South non-alignment is particularly significant for African governments, where the dependency on Russian and Ukrainian agricultural exports created acute vulnerabilities following the February 2022 invasion.  Prior to the conflict, Russia and Ukraine together accounted for approximately 28% of global wheat exports and a comparable share of sunflower oil and fertilizer supply chains.  For example, the two countries supplied approximately 85% of Egyptian wheat imports before the war.  The disruption of Ukrainian Black Sea grain exports following the invasion and Russia's suspension and eventual termination of the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July 2023, contributed to food price inflation exceeding 60% in Egypt by 2023, against a backdrop of a severe foreign exchange crisis and negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over a $3 billion support program.  Cairo has been navigating these pressures while simultaneously managing its bilateral relationship with Washington, its arms supply relationship with Moscow, and domestic political dynamics that limit the government's tolerance for economic disruption.

The situation in Egypt is illustrative of a broader pattern across North Africa and parts of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, where governments are managing food price inflation, foreign exchange shortfalls, and IMF conditionality simultaneously, while being asked to absorb additional economic costs through alignment with Western sanctions.  The structural redirection of grain supply chains of this scale is a multi-year undertaking even under favourable conditions, and alternative suppliers at comparable price points and volume have not been readily available.

Defense Procurement

Several of Russia's most significant arms export relationships involve countries that have abstained or declined to support Ukraine in formal multilateral settings.  India maintains one of the world's largest accumulated inventories of Russian-origin military equipment, including Sukhoi Su-30MKI fighters, T-90 main battle tanks, S-400 air defense systems, and a fleet of Russian-built submarines and frigates.  The S-400 procurement in particular generated significant friction with Washington, which threatened CAATSA (Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) sanctions before ultimately granting a waiver in 2022, partly in recognition of the strategic complexity of sanctioning a country simultaneously regarded as a key Indo-Pacific partner.

Algeria sources the overwhelming majority of its military hardware from Russia, including Su-30 and MiG-29 aircraft, T-90 tanks, and S-400 systems.  Ethiopia, Vietnam, and several Southeast Asian states have similarly deep Russian equipment dependencies.  The procurement relationships in question were built over decades, involve training pipelines and maintenance ecosystems that cannot be transferred overnight, and require capital outlays that Western governments have not offered to subsidise.  A country seeking to transition its air force from Russian to Western platforms faces not only the capital cost of new aircraft but the cost of training new pilots and ground crews, rebuilding maintenance infrastructure, renegotiating basing and logistics arrangements, and managing a capability gap during the transition period. 

Regional Priorities and the Gulf Security Environment

The Gulf Cooperation Council states, comprising Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman, represent a diplomatically and economically significant bloc whose engagement with the Ukraine conflict has been shaped primarily by a regional threat environment that has deteriorated sharply since October 2023.  While Gulf states have not endorsed Russia's invasion, they have maintained independent diplomatic postures, declined to join Western sanctions regimes, and continued to participate in OPEC+, the alliance formed in 2016 between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and ten major non-OPEC oil-producing nations, in which Russia holds a co-decision-making role on global oil production.

The broader pattern across the Global South reflects a similar dynamic.  Governments that are managing active or escalating security crises in their own regions have limited political bandwidth to direct toward a conflict in Europe, however significant its implications for the international legal order.  The Ethiopian civil war in Tigray and Amhara, the ongoing conflict in Sudan, and persistent instability across the Sahel have consumed the crisis management capacity of African governments and regional institutions.  In South and Southeast Asia, persistent territorial tensions in the South China Sea, the unresolved conflict in Myanmar, and the structural fragility of several South Asian states represent competing priorities that crowd out sustained engagement with the Ukraine file.

For Gulf states specifically, the regional threat environment has undergone a major shift since October 2023.  Israel's use of force in Gaza and Lebanon, and the subsequent twelve-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, initiated a cascading escalation that Gulf capitals had actively sought to prevent, precisely because it placed them in the middle.  By early 2026, Israeli and US strikes against Iranian territory, and Iranian retaliatory strikes targeting US military facilities across the Gulf, had transformed what was a serious but manageable regional tension into a direct security emergency on Gulf soil.  For governments managing the consequences of missile strikes, disrupted energy exports, and acute vulnerability along the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately a third of global seaborne crude oil transits, the diplomatic bandwidth available for sustained engagement with a European land war has narrowed considerably.

The cumulative effect is that the ask being made of Global South governments to prioritize alignment on Ukraine is arriving at a moment when most of them are already absorbing the costs of conflicts and crises closer to home.  That is not indifference to international law.  It is the predictable consequence of asking governments operating under acute regional pressure to extend finite diplomatic capital toward a conflict whose resolution lies, in any near-term scenario, primarily in the hands of Western states and their partners.

Institutional Scepticism and the Consistency Question

Governments across Africa, Asia, and Latin America have raised, in both public statements and diplomatic communications, whether the principles most vocally championed in the Ukraine context, primarily sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the prohibition on the use of force, are being applied consistently by the Western states invoking them.  The cases cited include the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Ethiopian civil war in Tigray and Amhara, the civil war in Sudan, and Israel's use of force in Gaza and Lebanon.  In none of these conflicts did the Western governments now leading the sanctions coalition against Russia impose comparable measures against the parties responsible for the conduct in question, and in several cases those same governments provided arms, financing, or diplomatic cover to them.

For many Global South governments, that asymmetry is not a peripheral observation.  It is the central lens through which the broader diplomatic ask is evaluated. When the same capitols that organized the fastest and most comprehensive sanctions regime in modern history declined to impose comparable measures in a conflict involving a Western ally, the conclusion drawn across much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America was not that the two situations are legally distinct, which they are, but that the architecture of international accountability is applied according to strategic interest rather than principle.  

None of this amounts to a legal defense of Russia's conduct in Ukraine, which violates foundational norms of international law that exist independently of who enforces them and how selectively.  The distinction, however, is precisely the point.  International law derives its authority not only from its text but from the perceived legitimacy of its application.  When the states most invested in enforcing a norm are also the states most visibly exempted from its consequences, the norm does not disappear, but its claim to universal obligation is weakened in the eyes of those being asked to bear the cost of upholding it.  What Global South governments are contesting is not the illegality of Russia's invasion but the moral standing of the states demanding a response to it, and those are different questions. 

A legal prohibition can be simultaneously valid and selectively enforced, and it is precisely that selectivity, accumulated across decades and conflicts, that has eroded the political authority the rules-based order needs to function as something other than a coalition of the willing operating under a universal banner. The ask being made of the Global South is ultimately an ask to treat that banner as genuine.  For many of the governments receiving it, the evidentiary record makes that difficult to do.

The China Variable

China's economic footprint across the Global South is the largest single structural factor shaping the background conditions within which Global South governments evaluate their Ukraine-related diplomatic positioning.  The relationship is not primarily about ideological affinity or coordinated diplomatic strategy, though both exist to some degree.  It is primarily about the material dependencies that Chinese financing has created across a wide range of countries and the economic costs that would flow from positions that openly antagonise Beijing.

Chinese state-backed lending through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and bilateral financing arrangements has been extensive and geographically broad. Sub-Saharan Africa has received an estimated $170 billion in Chinese financing since 2000, a figure that encompasses infrastructure loans, concessional credit, and commercial bank lending.  The distribution is uneven, with countries including Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo carrying particularly significant Chinese debt exposure relative to GDP.  Zambia's 2020 external debt default, the first by a sub-Saharan African country in the post-pandemic period, involved Chinese creditors holding a substantial share of the debt, and its restructuring process illustrated the degree to which Chinese bilateral creditors have become central actors in sovereign debt negotiations across the continent.  In Southeast Asia, Laos has a particularly deep infrastructure dependency on Chinese financing, having committed a majority stake in its national electricity grid to Chinese creditors as part of a debt restructuring arrangement.  Pakistan, which straddles the South and Central Asian categories, has received approximately $26.5 billion in Chinese financing under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor component of the BRI, with total repayment obligations, including debt service and dividends, projected to reach nearly $40 billion over twenty years.

China's formal position on the Ukraine conflict, as set out in its twelve-point position paper released in February 2023 and elaborated in subsequent joint statements with Russia, declines to characterize Russia's operations as an invasion, attributes the conflict in part to NATO expansion and Western security policies, and proposes a ceasefire framework premised on conditions that Ukraine and its Western partners have not found acceptable.  China has maintained and in some categories expanded its trade and economic relationships with Russia throughout the conflict.  Whether trade represents deliberate state policy or the actions of Chinese commercial actors exploiting regulatory gaps has been a matter of ongoing debate, but their operational significance for Russian defense industrial production is not seriously disputed.

For governments that depend on Chinese financing for debt rollovers, infrastructure project completion, or sustained trade access, public alignment with positions that China actively opposes carries measurable costs.  The relevant constraint is not that these governments will do whatever Beijing instructs.  Most have demonstrated independent judgment on a range of diplomatic questions.  The constraint is that the diplomatic calculus for a government managing Chinese debt obligations and seeking continued infrastructure financing includes, as a background factor, the cost of damaging a relationship with one of its most consequential creditors.  

The Material Offer Gap

The diplomatic effort to build Global South alignment has been framed predominantly around normative and legal arguments, with insufficient attention to the material interests of the countries being courted.  That imbalance has been noted, and has generated a persistent perception among Global South governments that the ask is being made on Western terms, without genuine reciprocity.

The concrete material incentives that could plausibly shift the cost-benefit calculation for non-aligned states, including meaningful debt relief for heavily indebted African and South Asian countries, preferential or restructured trade access to European and American markets, accelerated and genuinely concessional technology transfer arrangements, or credible security architecture for non-aligned states, have not been systematically advanced by Western governments or by the international financial institutions they influence.

The IMF and World Bank have continued to operate under standard program conditionality frameworks during this period.  For governments negotiating painful fiscal adjustment programs with the Fund, including Egypt, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia, all of which have had active IMF programmes during the conflict period, the experience of conditionality is an immediate and often politically costly reality, not an abstraction.  The request to absorb additional economic costs through Ukraine alignment, in an environment where the same institutional architecture is imposing austerity-adjacent conditions, generates a credibility problem that is difficult to surmount through diplomatic engagement alone.

The trade dimension compounds this problem.  Several Western governments have simultaneously sought diplomatic alignment from developing nations while maintaining agricultural subsidies that depress global commodity prices for the agricultural products on which many Global South economies depend, and trade barriers including tariff structures and phytosanitary requirements that restrict market access for developing country exports.  The EU's Common Agricultural Policy, the United States' domestic farm support programmes, and the various non-tariff barriers maintained by wealthy countries against developing country agricultural, textile, and manufacturing exports are well-documented features of the global trade architecture that Global South governments have sought to reform through the WTO and bilateral negotiations for decades, with limited success.  The asymmetry between the standards being invoked in the diplomatic context and the economic policies being maintained simultaneously is not invisible to the governments being asked to align.

A foreign policy ask that requires a government to absorb near-term economic costs, in exchange for normative commitments from partners who are not offering near-term economic concessions, is a structurally weak diplomatic offer regardless of the merit of the underlying cause. Addressing that weakness would require a level of material reciprocity that Western governments have not yet demonstrated a willingness to extend.

Conclusion

The degree of Global South alignment with Ukraine's diplomatic position is shaped by structural constraints that operate largely independently of the legal merits of Ukraine's case or the quality of its diplomatic outreach.  Economic dependencies on Russian energy, food, and defense supply chains create genuine costs for governments considering alignment.  Regional security pressures, particularly across the Middle East, consume political bandwidth that might otherwise be directed toward a European conflict.  Institutional scepticism about the consistent application of international legal principles by Western states creates a reception environment in which normative arguments carry less weight than their legal foundations warrant.  China's economic footprint across the developing world creates background constraints on how far governments can move against Beijing's stated preferences.  And the absence of systematic material reciprocity from Western governments means the diplomatic ask has been presented without the economic accompaniment that might meaningfully shift the calculus.

A more durable international coalition would require Western governments to reckon seriously with each of these dimensions, not as communication problems to be managed, but as substantive constraints that reflect the actual interests and experiences of the countries being courted.  The normative case for Ukraine's position is legally sound.  Whether the political authority exists to translate that case into sustained multilateral action depends on whether the states leading that effort are willing to extend the kind of reciprocity they are asking others to demonstrate.

In light of these structural constraints, there is a reasonable argument that Ukraine's diplomatic resources are more efficiently deployed in deepening and sustaining the commitments of existing allies than in pursuing incremental shifts among states whose non-alignment reflects durable material and institutional realities unlikely to change within the timeframe of the conflict.  Managing alliance cohesion, particularly as domestic political pressures in key Western states create uncertainty about long-term military and financial support, may represent a higher-return diplomatic investment than continued outreach to governments whose cost-benefit calculus is structurally resistant to realignment.

* Dr. Paul R. Williams is the Co-Founder and Director of the Public International Law & Policy Group and Rebecca Grazier Professor of Law and International Relations at American University

Roundtable Blog: Four Years Since Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion Into Ukraine: What Have We Learned?

 Roundtable Blog:  Four Years Since Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion Into Ukraine:  What Have We Learned? 

Editor’s Note:

This blogpost is part of the PILPG Lawyering Peace roundtable series.  Rather than a traditional co-authored article, it presents a curated set of expert reflections from members of PILPG’s Peace Fellows and Ambassador Circle networks.  Marking four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, this roundtable examines how the war has reshaped international law, global security architecture, accountability mechanisms, and our understanding of modern aggression.

Anniversaries invite commemoration.  This roundtable instead invites assessment.  Four years on, the international community possesses insights that were unavailable in the early days of the invasion.  The war has tested the resilience of collective defense systems, exposed the limitations and adaptability of international institutions, accelerated transformations in military technology and information warfare, and catalyzed new approaches to sanctions, energy security, and legal accountability.  It has also revealed both the extraordinary durability of Ukrainian statehood and the profound human costs of prolonged high-intensity conflict.

This collection seeks to move beyond retrospective narrative toward forward-looking analysis.  What assumptions proved mistaken?  What institutional innovations have emerged?  How has the legal framework governing aggression and atrocity crimes evolved under pressure?  What lessons should policymakers internalize to deter future wars of aggression?  By elevating diverse expert perspectives across disciplines, this roundtable aims to distill the most consequential lessons of the past four years — and to consider how they should inform the future of peacebuilding, deterrence, and the international legal order.

If February 2022 was a moment of shock, February 2026 is a moment of reckoning. What have these four years revealed about power, law, resilience, and the future of the international order?

Dr. Paul R. Williams, Rebecca Grazier Professor of Law and International Relations at American University

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, the first and most striking transformation has been the acceleration of technological change in warfare.  Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, precision-guided drones, satellite-enabled targeting, and real-time data fusion have compressed decision cycles and expanded the battlefield into cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum.  Ukraine has demonstrated how commercially available technology, agile software development, and decentralized innovation can offset traditional force disparities.  The war has made clear that future conflicts will be shaped as much by code, algorithms, and adaptive manufacturing as by tanks and artillery.

Yet even as technology has evolved exponentially, the fundamental constraints of warfare remain stubbornly constant.  Attrition still matters. Manpower, training, logistics, and industrial capacity continue to determine strategic endurance.  Economic resilience based on energy security, defense production, fiscal sustainability has proven as decisive as battlefield ingenuity.  The lesson of the past four years is therefore not that technology replaces fundamentals, but that it amplifies them.  States that combine technological agility with demographic depth, industrial mobilization, and societal cohesion will shape the future of warfare; those that rely on innovation alone will discover that the enduring logic of war has not disappeared.

Second, the resilience and limits of the Euro-Atlantic alliance have come into sharper focus over the past four years.  In February 2022, many assumed that the United States would continue to underwrite European security with little political friction.  That assumption has eroded.  Domestic pressures in Washington have sharpened scrutiny of asymmetric burden sharing, signaling that long-term U.S. support cannot be detached from questions of allied contribution and strategic reciprocity.  The alliance has endured, but its internal equilibrium has shifted.

At the same time, the war exposed that Europe was militarily weaker and less prepared for high-intensity conflict than many believed.  Stockpiles were thin, defense industrial capacity had atrophied, and rebuilding credible surge capacity is proving more difficult than many policymakers had assumed.  Yet the war also catalyzed a remarkable strategic reawakening: increased defense spending, joint procurement initiatives, expanded production of ammunition and air defense systems, and a broader political acceptance that deterrence requires sustained investment.  The lesson is not alliance fragility, but alliance recalibration — toward a more balanced distribution of risk, cost, and capability within the Euro-Atlantic community.

The next lesson learnt is that the economic sanctions policy as a tool to deter aggression remains strikingly anemic.  Despite unprecedented coordination in response to Russia’s invasion, sanctions have struggled to produce rapid behavioral change or to meaningfully constrain a determined, resource-rich state.  Financial restrictions, export controls, and asset freezes have imposed real costs, but they have not fundamentally altered strategic decision-making in Moscow. The limits are both institutional and structural.  Institutionally, sanctions regimes are fragmented, unevenly enforced, and vulnerable to political fatigue.  Structurally, decades of deep economic integration, particularly in energy, finance, and critical supply chains, created mutual dependencies that diluted deterrent credibility before the war and complicated escalation once it began.  The lesson is sobering: sanctions can signal condemnation and incrementally degrade capacity, but absent broader strategic alignment and sustained enforcement, they remain an insufficient stand-alone mechanism for deterring wars of aggression.

Finally, over the past four years, it has become increasingly clear that this is not simply Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but a broader war of aggression against Europe itself.  The objectives extend beyond territorial control to reshaping the European security architecture, weakening transatlantic cohesion, and reasserting spheres of influence long thought obsolete.  Energy coercion, cyber operations, election interference, disinformation campaigns, and calibrated military pressure along NATO’s eastern flank reveal a strategy aimed not only at Kyiv, but at the political and strategic unity of the continent.

Seen in this light, Ukraine has been the frontline, but not the sole target.  The war has tested Europe’s energy resilience, industrial capacity, democratic institutions, and willingness to bear sustained economic and military costs.  It has forced a reckoning with assumptions about post–Cold War stability and exposed how deeply European security remains intertwined with the outcome on Ukrainian territory.  The central question is no longer whether Europe is supporting Ukraine, but whether Europe is defending its own security order through Ukraine.

Major General Darrell Guthrie, US Army (Ret.), PILPG Senior Peace Fellow

 Four years into the war, Russia has failed to translate its initial ambitions into sustained strategic success.  Since the early phases of the invasion and the subsequent Ukrainian counter-offensives, the Russian Army has been unable to generate a decisive offensive threat beyond the eastern oblasts it currently contests.  At sea, the Russian Navy has largely withdrawn from active Black Sea operations, deterred by Ukraine’s innovative use of autonomous maritime systems.  In response to battlefield constraints, Russian leadership has increasingly relied on ballistic missile and suicide drone attacks targeting civilian populations and critical energy infrastructure — a shift that reflects both strategic frustration and a continued willingness to weaponize terror. 

At the same time, Ukraine’s military has demonstrated resilience, adaptability, and operational creativity.  Ukrainian forces have integrated autonomous systems across the frontlines and conducted deep strikes against oil production and logistical facilities inside Russia.  Despite earlier fears that fluctuations in U.S. support would create crippling ammunition shortages, coordinated domestic production and expanded European defense cooperation have significantly strengthened supply chains and replenished critical stockpiles over the past year. 

Several lessons stand out.  The Russian military remains anchored in a 20th-century attritional mindset, relying on mass and firepower rather than agility.  In contrast, Ukraine’s experience underscores the importance of securing reliable supply chains, reducing operational restrictions on advanced weapons systems, and integrating autonomous capabilities at scale.  The war has already reshaped how major powers assess force structure, industrial preparedness, and the role of unmanned systems in future conflicts.  While the fighting continues, each failed Russian attempt to break Ukraine’s defensive lines or erode civilian resolve narrows Moscow’s strategic options and reinforces the long-term limits of coercive warfare.  

Dr. David M. Crane, Founding Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone and Founder of the Global Accountability Project

Four years into Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, the world has had time to absorb what this war has revealed — about Ukraine, about Russia, and about the international system that surrounds them. The war has not followed the script many expected in February 2022, and the lessons that have emerged are sobering.

First, Ukraine’s resilience has been extraordinary.  What was supposed to be a quick decapitation strike instead became a national awakening.  Ukrainians have shown that motivation, local knowledge, and a sense of existential purpose can outweigh assumptions about military size.  Their ability to adapt — whether through drone innovation, rapid battlefield learning, or community-driven defense — has reshaped how modern resistance is understood.

Second, Russia’s strengths and weaknesses have both been laid bare.  The early failures exposed deep problems in planning, logistics, and leadership.  Yet Russia has also shown a capacity to absorb losses, reconstitute forces, and grind forward despite sanctions and diplomatic isolation.  The war has demonstrated that an authoritarian state can sustain a long, costly conflict if it is willing to sacrifice its own people and economy to do so.

Third, civilians have paid the highest price.  Millions have been displaced.  Families have been separated.  Children have grown up in basements, shelters, and foreign countries.  Russia’s strikes on energy grids, apartment blocks, and public infrastructure have made civilian life unpredictable and dangerous.  The humanitarian toll is not a side effect of the war — it is one of its defining features.

Fourth, the war has tested the cohesion of democratic alliances.  Ukraine’s survival has depended on sustained Western support, and that support has not always been guaranteed.  The war has revealed both the power of collective action and the fragility of political will.  It has forced democracies to confront a basic question: how much does the international order matter when it is challenged by force?

Fifth, the nature of warfare is changing in real time.  Drones, electronic warfare, satellite intelligence, and commercial technology have become central to the battlefield.  The war has shown that large-scale land conflict in Europe is not a relic of the past, and that future wars will blend traditional combat with rapidly evolving digital tools.

Sixth, time itself has become a strategic weapon.  Russia is betting that fatigue — political, economic, and emotional — will outlast Ukraine’s ability to fight and the West’s willingness to help.  Ukraine, in turn, is betting that determination and international solidarity can outlast Russian coercion.  The duration of the war has become part of the war. Time and distraction are Putin’s ultimate weapons.

Finally, the war in Ukraine has reshaped the landscape of international law.  The invasion has revived global attention to the crime of aggression, a charge rarely pursued since Nuremberg.  Ukraine’s partners have pushed for new accountability mechanisms, including a special tribunal focused specifically on Russia’s decision to wage an unlawful war.  At the same time, the systematic targeting of civilians, forced deportations, and attacks on critical infrastructure have forced the international community to confront gaps in how atrocity crimes are investigated and prosecuted.  The war has reminded the world that international law is only as strong as the political will behind it — and that accountability for aggression and mass harm cannot be an afterthought if the rules-based order is to survive.  The bright red thread to atrocity accountability is political not legal.

In the end, the fourth anniversary offers no easy conclusions.  What it does offer is clarity: deterrence cannot be assumed, borders are not self-enforcing, and the defense of a rules-based order requires more than statements of principle.  Ukraine’s struggle is reshaping global security, and the lessons learned today will influence international politics for decades.

Ambassador Zorica Marić-Djordjević, former Head of the Permanent Mission of Montenegro to the World Trade Organization and Special Representative of Montenegro to the UN Human Rights Council

Four years on, any commemoration of Russia’s full-scale invasion must hold two realities together: the magnitude of devastation and the depth of Ukrainian resilience.  The war has shattered cities, displaced millions, and reintroduced to Europe a form of industrial, attritional violence many believed had been confined to history.  Yet it has also revealed a society capable of extraordinary mobilization, improvisation, and sacrifice, alongside an international coalition that, despite hesitation and internal divisions, has sustained Ukraine far longer than the aggressor and many observers initially expected. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forced Europe to confront its own vulnerability, accelerating a shift from a market-driven union toward a more security-conscious, geopolitical actor.  Power dynamics within the Union have subtly shifted: the Baltic and Nordic states, Poland, and Romania now carry greater influence on Russia policy; Germany has undergone a difficult strategic reorientation; and Finland and Sweden, long associated with neutrality, have joined NATO.  As a result, the EU now speaks about its security, strength, and even its “destiny” in far starker terms than before 2022.

As the end of the war approaches, the prospect of some form of “emergency accession” or accelerated integration of Ukraine into the EU has shifted from a peripheral debate to a central test of European unity.  A credible, fast tracked EU pathway would not merely reward Ukraine’s sacrifice but also function as a security instrument in its own right, anchoring Ukraine irreversibly within Europe’s political, legal, and economic space and raising the long term costs and complexity of any renewed Russian attempt to control Ukraine. 

Ambassador Ylber Hysa, former diplomat of the Republic of Kosovo 

In the years preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, intelligence warnings from the United States and the United Kingdom were met with skepticism across parts of Europe.  This hesitation reflected the dominant post-Cold War paradigm: the assumption that large-scale interstate war in Europe had become structurally irrational.  The skepticism felt reasonable, because leaders of Europe felt Russian invasion was not “rational”.

This paradigm rested on three core premises: economic interdependence reduces incentives for conflict; institutional frameworks provide mechanisms for dispute resolution; and state actors primarily calculate interests in material terms. Within such a framework, invasion appeared strategically self-defeating.

However, developments in 2021 indicated an alternative logic. Following the Geneva summit with the United States, Vladimir Putin increasingly articulated a historical narrative that challenged Ukrainian sovereignty.  His interpretation of medieval statehood and shared origins suggested that identity and historical grievance, rather than economic calculation, were central to the Kremlin’s strategic worldview. The emphasis on historical continuity evokes comparisons within Russian discourse to transformative rulers such as Peter the Great or Joseph Stalin — figures associated with territorial expansion and centralized authority.

The invasion exposed miscalculations on multiple sides.  European governments and Ukrainian leadership underestimated the likelihood of maximalist action.  Russian planners appear to have underestimated Ukrainian resistance and Western cohesion.  These reciprocal misjudgments highlight the limits of rationalist models when actors prioritize ideological or historical objectives.

The events of February 2022 may therefore represent the end of the post-Cold War security order in Europe.  Rather than signaling the collapse of rationality per se, the war demonstrates the inadequacy of narrow materialist assumptions about rational behavior.  States may act “rationally” according to internally defined ideological goals, even when such actions impose significant economic costs.

In this sense, the contemporary period could be conceptualized as a transition from liberal institutional optimism toward renewed geopolitical realism. Defense spending, alliance structures, and deterrence strategies have regained prominence.

At the same time, Ukraine’s resistance has challenged deterministic assessments of military capability. The conflict has also acquired normative dimensions, framed by many Western actors as a defense of sovereignty and liberal political order.

Whether this normative framing will shape the long-term structure of European security remains uncertain. What is clear, however, is that February 2022 marked a structural rupture in the assumptions that governed European politics for more than three decades.

Ambassador Joachim Rücker, former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and Head of the UN Mission in Kosovo

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the contrast with earlier responses to aggression within the United Nations system remains striking.  Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait triggered swift and decisive action by the UN Security Council, culminating in the authorization of force and the rapid liberation of Kuwait.  In the case of Ukraine, by contrast, the Security Council has been structurally paralyzed by the veto of a permanent member that is itself the aggressor.  The comparison underscores both the promise and the vulnerability of the collective security framework established under the UN Charter.

Yet the story does not end with the Security Council deadlock.  Faced with paralysis, the UN General Assembly has assumed a more visible and assertive role.  Through emergency special sessions and repeated resolutions invoking the “Uniting for Peace” precedent, the General Assembly has articulated clear and sustained condemnation of Russia’s aggression and reaffirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity.  While its resolutions are not legally binding, they carry significant normative weight and demonstrate that multilateral legitimacy does not disappear when the Security Council fails to act.

This more assertive posture of the General Assembly is not accidental.  It has emerged largely as a response to Russia’s war of aggression and the institutional vacuum created by Security Council inaction.  The evolution of the Assembly’s role should not be overlooked amid competing global crises or diplomatic distractions.  It reflects an effort by the broader membership of the United Nations to preserve the principles of the Charter when the primary enforcement organ is unable to fulfill its mandate.

Stephanie Gusching⁩, Associate at White & Case, Secondee at the Public International Law and Policy Group

Four years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has exposed the structural weaknesses of the UN collective security apparatus.  Under Articles 39-42 of the UN Charter, the Security Council (UNSC) is tasked with identifying threats to peace and authorizing collective, binding measures to combat them.  However, Russia’s status as a permanent member of the UNSC has enabled it to veto draft resolutions condemning its actions and instituting remedial measures.  This case illustrates a core weakness in the enforcement authority of a system dependent on the consent of the most powerful states: when a permanent member is itself the alleged aggressor, the system is functionally inoperative.

In response to UNSC paralysis, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) invoked the “Uniting for Peace” procedure to impose normative pressure on Russia.  The UNGA adopted multiple resolutions with large majorities that condemned Russia’s invasion, affirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and called for the withdrawal of Russian forces.  However, the key weakness of UNGA resolutions is their non-binding nature.  This demonstrates that while international law provides strong rules against aggression, it has comparatively weak mechanisms to enforce them.

By highlighting these weaknesses, Russia’s war in Ukraine has thus ignited discussion on reform within the UNSC.  Proposals include voluntary veto restraint, mandatory abstention, and expansion of UNSC membership.  However, the path to reform is laden with its own set of challenges, as amendments to the UN Charter require ratification by the permanent members whose very power would be curtailed.

Kateryna Kyrychenko, Head of Ukraine Legal Affairs and Program Management at the Public International Law and Policy Group

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, one of the most visible changes has been the shift from discussing accountability to building it.  In February 2022, many conversations about justice felt premature - almost theoretical - while the trajectory of the war remained deeply uncertain.  Today, we are living with institutions that did not exist when the invasion began.

The foundations of the International Compensation Mechanism have been laid.  The Register of Damage for Ukraine, the first chain of the Mechanism, is operational, creating a structured mechanism to document claims and prepare the groundwork for reparations.  The Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, established last year, marked a historic step in addressing leadership responsibility for the decision to wage an unlawful war.  At the same time, international investigations have expanded across jurisdictions, and the International Criminal Court has issued six arrest warrants in the situation in Ukraine, which is a notably rapid pace by international criminal law standards.  None of this eliminates the political challenges of enforcement.  But it does show that international law is not static.  Faced with gaps and paralysis, states and practitioners have demonstrated an ability to innovate — to create complementary mechanisms rather than accept impunity as inevitable.

Yet the legal architecture tells only part of the story.  Civilian resilience has been the constant foundation beneath every institutional development.  Local authorities continue governing despite repeated attacks.  Civil society organizations document crimes while supporting displaced families.  Energy workers restore power after each strike on infrastructure.  Teachers, doctors, volunteers, and ordinary families have adapted to a reality of prolonged uncertainty without surrendering their sense of dignity or national identity.

For me, the lesson of these four years is that institutions and people sustain each other.  Accountability mechanisms derive strength from a society that refuses to normalize aggression.  And civilian endurance is reinforced by the knowledge that crimes are being recorded, named, and pursued.  International law does not defend itself, it rather advances when communities insist that it must.

Roundtable Blog: Voting Under Duress — Referenda, Aggression, and the Limits of Democratic Consent

Roundtable Blog: Voting Under Duress — Referenda, Aggression, and the Limits of Democratic Consent

Editor’s Note:

This post is part of the PILPG Lawyering Justice roundtable series.  Rather than a traditional co-authored article, it presents a curated set of expert reflections from members of PILPG’s Ukraine Peace Negotiations Working Group.  Drawing on a closed-door discussion held on 6 February 2026, this roundtable examines one of the most legally and politically fraught questions facing Ukraine: whether a national referendum can play a legitimate role in a peace process shaped by aggression, occupation, and mass displacement.

Referenda are commonly understood as the highest expression of democratic will.  Yet in contexts defined by coercion and force, democratic instruments themselves may be distorted into tools that legitimise unlawful outcomes.  This roundtable explores the legal limits of consent under international law, the precedent-setting risks of post-aggression referenda, and the strategic choices Ukraine faces in navigating popular participation without eroding its sovereignty or the international legal order.

1. Can Territorial Change Resulting from Aggression Ever Be Legitimated by Referendum?

Dr. Paul R. Williams, Rebecca Grazier Professor of Law and International Relations at American University

The issue involves both legal and ethical dimensions.  Even if procedurally lawful under domestic legislation, referenda in occupied territories raise profound normative concerns.  Creating a referendum-based validation mechanism would institutionalise a pathway for legitimising aggression.  The core question is not merely whether Ukraine can hold a referendum, but whether international law permits the consequences such a referendum would produce.

Dr. David Crane, Founding Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone and Founder of the Global Accountability Project

Any referendum conducted after aggression risks negating the crime of aggression by retroactively legitimising unlawful territorial claims.  Even a procedurally valid vote may be interpreted as acknowledgement of Russia’s claims over Crimea or Donbas.  Allowing referenda to validate conquest creates a dangerous global precedent — invade, hold territory, organise a vote, and claim legality.  Ukraine is not the only audience; other potential aggressors are closely watching how international law responds.  At the same time, a clearly framed referendum rejecting territorial concessions could place Ukraine in a strong bargaining position by demonstrating unified public resistance to ceding land.

Prof. Milena Sterio, Distinguished Professor of Law at Cleveland State University

The prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force is a jus cogens norm that cannot be derogated from through popular consent.  Even genuine democratic approval cannot cure the illegality of territorial change resulting from aggression.  Referenda held under coercive conditions undermine the non-recognition doctrine that protects Ukraine’s territorial integrity. International law draws a clear line: sovereignty cannot be voted away when force is the determining factor.

2. Does Democratic Consent Retain Legal Meaning When Given Under Duress?

Prof. Michael Kelly, The Senator Allen A. Sekt Endowed Chair in Law at Creighton University School of Law

Democratic sovereignty theory does not support territorial concessions made under military pressure.  Consent obtained under invasion and occupation constitutes duress and invalidates any agreement to surrender territory.  If territory were ever relinquished, international law would require full compensation, including land value, infrastructure, and subsurface resources, underscoring the impracticality of referendum-based territorial loss.  

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter protects political independence and territorial integrity.  Referenda combined with elections under current conditions would be nearly impossible to organise without fatally undermining legitimacy.

Ambassador Zorica Marić-Djordjević, former Head of the Permanent Mission of Montenegro to the World Trade Organization and Special Representative of Montenegro to the UN Human Rights Council

Democratic legitimacy cannot override the principle of non-recognition of unlawful acts.  A Ukrainian referendum ratifying territorial change would validate aggression through democratic means.  The optics alone would weaken Ukraine’s position and offer a model for other conflicts.  Any referendum must avoid even implicit recognition of annexation outcomes.

At the same time, a referendum conducted by Ukraine under its own constitutional framework differs fundamentally from any vote organised under foreign occupation.  In principle, Ukraine may consent, through a treaty freely negotiated between sovereign equals, to a boundary adjustment without breaching the duty of non-recognition (provided it does not validate the prior unlawful use of force).  A referendum could serve as a channel of domestic democratic endorsement for such consent.  However, such consent would not erase the illegality of the original aggression, nor extinguish state responsibility, criminal accountability, or claims to reparations.  Those legal consequences remain governed by separate bodies of international law.  The principal risk lies in perception: if territorial loss were seen as “ratified,” it could politically suggest that sustained aggression yields results and invite similar tactics elsewhere.

Greta Ramelli, Legal Officer, Program Manager at the Public International Law & Policy Group

Under current Ukrainian law, referenda cannot be held under martial law, creating a significant legal constraint.  Any referendum would therefore be contingent on a ceasefire and linked to broader peace negotiations.  Referenda should not be treated as standalone mechanisms but as part of a larger sequencing strategy.  

Short-term peace achieved through territorial concessions may prove unsustainable in the long term.

3. What Precedents Would a Post-Aggression Referendum Set Beyond Ukraine?

Dr. Paul R. Williams, Rebecca Grazier Professor of Law and International Relations at American University

International law has spent decades delegitimising conquest, and referenda risk reversing that progress.  A model of “invade, hold, vote, legitimise” would erode the prohibition on territorial acquisition by force.  Institutionalising such a mechanism would provide a blueprint for laundering aggression.  Ukraine’s democratic credentials do not exempt it from the constraints of international legal order.

Stephanie Gusching⁩, Associate at White & Case, secondee at the Public International Law and Policy Group

Referenda conducted under duress risk legitimising similar tactics in other geopolitical contexts.  Potential spillover effects include Taiwan, Greenland, and other contested territories.  Ukraine’s decision will shape how democratic processes are perceived in future conflicts involving force.

Ambassador Jorge Lomonaco, former Ambassador of Mexico to the UN Human Rights Council, and to the Organization of American States 

Historical precedents demonstrate how treaties and ratification processes can be shaped by power asymmetries.  The nineteenth-century US–Mexico war illustrates how territorial transfer and ratification can produce enduring legal ambiguities.  Formal validation through legal processes does not eliminate underlying concerns about coercion.

4. Can Referenda Be Used Strategically Without Ratifying Territorial Loss?

Ambassador Ylber Hysa, former diplomat of the Republic of Kosovo 

Referenda may serve purposes other than territorial validation, including domestic cohesion and political legitimacy.  The framing of the question is critical; it should be designed to nullify annexation claims rather than endorse territorial change.  Used carefully, referenda can strengthen Ukraine’s internal unity during negotiations without conceding sovereignty.  

Delayed or postponed referenda may preserve flexibility pending more favourable geopolitical developments.  Interim agreements could include review clauses, though this may require accepting temporary concessions.

Ambassador Jorge Lomonaco, former Ambassador of Mexico to the UN Human Rights Council, and to the Organization of American States 

Referenda can function tactically to gain time and political space rather than to resolve territorial questions.  Strategic delay may allow Ukraine to consolidate international support and military capacity.  Tactical considerations may at times prevail over strictly legal ones, but without crossing red lines on recognition.

Tyler Thompson, Co-Founder and Chief Negotiation Officer of Expeditionary, founding member of the U.S. State Department’s Negotiations Support Unit 

The purpose of the referendum must be clearly defined.  For Russia, an ideal outcome would validate annexation; for Ukraine, only an overwhelming rejection would be beneficial.  A divided or ambiguous result would be strategically dangerous.  Russia would exploit drafting ambiguities and legal grey zones in peace agreements.

5. How Should Voter Inclusion Be Addressed After Occupation and Mass Displacement?

Kateryna Kyrychenko, Head of Ukraine Legal Affairs and Program Management at the Public International Law and Policy Group

Ukrainians from occupied territories and displaced persons are arguably the most directly affected by any territorial outcome.  Excluding these populations undermines substantive justice and democratic legitimacy.  At the same time, differentiated voting schemes raise serious concerns under equal suffrage principles.  Any referendum design must confront the realities of displacement, coercion, and forced transfer, while ensuring that voter inclusion criteria are clearly defined and legally defensible.

Tyler Thompson, Co-Founder and Chief Negotiation Officer of Expeditionary, founding member of the U.S. State Department’s Negotiations Support Unit 

Population movements, forced displacement, and settlement of Russian nationals in occupied territories complicate voter eligibility.  There is no clear precedent for weighted or differentiated voting in such contexts.  Demographic manipulation risks distorting the electorate, and any ambiguous or divided outcome would be strategically harmful for Ukraine.  Russia would likely exploit grey zones in interpretation to advance lawfare narratives.

Ambassador Joachim Rücker, former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and Head of the UN Mission in Kosovo

Referenda must comply with Ukraine’s constitutional framework.  Narrow parliamentary or referendum majorities may be insufficient for decisions of existential national importance; national unity, not procedural minimalism, should guide territorial decisions.  Historical precedents suggest populations in occupied territories should participate once conditions allow genuine and free expression.  Comparative constitutional models, including post-war Germany, illustrate how decisions can be structured when parts of the population are temporarily unable to vote.

6. How Should a Referendum Question Be Designed — or Should It Be Deferred Entirely?

Ambassador Zorica Marić-Djordjević, former Head of the Permanent Mission of Montenegro to the World Trade Organization and Special Representative of Montenegro to the UN Human Rights Council

Referendum questions must be singular, clear, and legally precise.  Bundling multiple issues risks misrepresenting voter intent.  The Cyprus experience demonstrates how rushed or failed referenda can stigmatise rejection as opposition to peace and complicate future negotiation rounds.  Venice Commission involvement and adherence to international electoral standards are essential.  Explicit criteria for voter inclusion should be developed in advance.

Where a peace agreement combines territory, security guarantees, and status arrangements, simplicity and legal clarity are essential.  OSCE and Venice Commission standards require neutral phrasing, prior review, and conditions for informed choice.  Splitting a comprehensive agreement into multiple binding questions risks inconsistent outcomes and an ambiguous mandate, as illustrated by the 2004 Annan Plan referendum.  A cautious model for Ukraine would involve a single principal question approving the agreement “as ratified by the Verkhovna Rada,” prior constitutional review of the wording, and full public dissemination of the agreement under balanced campaigning conditions.  Such safeguards cannot eliminate political risk, but they would reduce legal ambiguity and strengthen procedural legitimacy.

Ambassador Ylber Hysa, former diplomat of the Republic of Kosovo 

Interim arrangements may include review clauses without resolving sovereignty questions immediately.  Postponed referenda may offer a safer path than premature votes under pressure.  Buying time may be preferable to allowing Russia to dictate the pace.  The political costs of delay must be weighed against the irreversible consequences of recognition, and interim arrangements should not prejudice long-term sovereignty claims. International monitoring presence is critical to legitimacy.

Dr. David Crane, Founding Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone and Founder of the Global Accountability Project

Ceasefires and deconfliction arrangements can provide a neutral negotiation platform without resolving territorial questions.  In some circumstances, not holding a referendum is the most democratic and legally responsible choice.  Democracy should not be forced to legitimize outcomes produced by force.

Conclusion

This roundtable underscores a central lesson: democratic mechanisms cannot be used to repair the legal damage caused by aggression.  For Ukraine, restraint in deploying referenda may be as important as democratic participation itself. 

The challenge is not whether Ukrainians should shape peace, but how to ensure that democratic tools strengthen, rather than erode, Ukraine’s sovereignty and the international legal order.

Defending before the International Criminal Court - An Interview with Mylène Dimitri

Defending before the International Criminal Court

An Interview with Mylène Dimitri

Edited by Cailan Cumming, Kate Gibson & Paul Williams

A Note on Defending Justice

This blog is part of the Defending Justice series, an initiative of the Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG) to promote an eclectic array of  voices within the field of international criminal law. 

As part of our broader efforts to strengthen institutions of justice, this series seeks to create space for dialogue around the varied perspectives and concerns that shape these institutions. With that aim in mind, we interviewed a series of defense practitioners working in international criminal law and distilled their experiences and insights into a series of first-person blogs, preserving the spirit and voice of those interviews.

Editor’s Note

This monograph delves into the inner workings of the International Criminal Court (ICC) through the lens of Mylène Dimitri, who has acted as Lead Counsel for an accused before the ICC. By comparing her experiences as Counsel before the ICC and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Dimitri highlights the unique challenges the ICC’s legal framework presents for defense counsel and the pursuit of fair trials. She offers insight into her strategies for working with diverse clients, victims, and witnesses while navigating these challenges and upholding her professional ethos as an officer of the court. Drawing on 23 years of defending cases at international tribunals, Dimitri illustrates that being an effective defense lawyer requires resourcefulness, integrity, and a relentless drive to ensure fair trials. Like many defense lawyers, Dimitri believes deeply in the ICC’s mission to help societies move beyond cycles of conflict and prevent future atrocity crimes. To help realize that mission, she provides readers with a strong vision for the future of the ICC, one in which victims are heard and supported and defendants’ rights are upheld. 

Introduction

The International Criminal Court, established by the 1998 Rome Statute and seated in The Hague, was founded to prosecute individuals for the most serious crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. As the first permanent international court of its kind, the ICC was envisioned to be a symbol of global accountability and the rule of law. Yet, for those working within its system, and especially defense counsel, the Court presents a unique set of structural and procedural challenges that distinguish it from previous ad hoc tribunals that prosecuted the same international crimes.

I entered the field of international criminal law at a time when the ICTR and International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) were still at the center of post-conflict justice efforts. From 2002 to 2006, I moved from intern to full-time legal assistant at a Canadian law firm handling international criminal cases in Arusha, Tanzania, which was the seat of the ICTR. I went on to be Co-Counsel in the first Canadian case tried under the country’s national Genocide Act in 2006. From there, my path took me back to Tanzania, where I worked on another ICTR case until 2015, and then became Co-Counsel for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, before becoming Lead Counsel before the ICC.

Defending Before the ICC vs. Ad Hoc Tribunals

Legal Framework

The ICTR was established through a United Nations Security Council resolution and its procedural framework leaned more heavily on common law practices. This offered a certain clarity and predictability to the courtroom proceedings and trial procedures followed an ordered process familiar to adversarial systems. By contrast, the ICC was created through a multilateral treaty—the Rome Statute—and incorporates elements from both common law and civil law traditions, resulting in a hybrid legal system that is both ambitious and, at times, unwieldy. While this is intended to serve as a more representative international legal model, it has, in practice, introduced considerable complexity and challenges into legal proceedings. 

The mixture of legal traditions at the ICC gives rise to interpretative uncertainty, as judges and counsel must navigate conflicting procedural presumptions—an issue not typically encountered in tribunals grounded in a single legal system. Civil law and common law systems on their own each have consistency and safeguards, but when combined, the logic of the procedure and the procedural safeguards of the system can diminish. For example, drafters from Romano-Germanic legal systems insisted on including a confirmation phase at the ICC, akin to the procedure conducted by an investigating judge in civil law systems. There, the investigating judge plays an active role in collecting all relevant evidence and questioning witnesses before deciding whether a case should proceed to trial. That process is thorough, but also linear and contained. 

At the ICC, Article 61 of the Rome Statute introduced a process for confirmation hearings that were intended to serve a similar function of screening cases before trial. However, the ICC’s version lacks the necessary tools and powers that make the civil law procedure effective. For instance, the Pre-Trial Chamber does not call or question witnesses, and the defense is not allowed to cross-examine them at this stage. Instead, the prosecution simply submits written witness statements, and the Chamber bases its decision on these documents alone.

In theory, the confirmation hearing is supposed to allow the defense to challenge the charges. In practice, this is nearly impossible. Without the ability to question witnesses or assess the credibility of the individuals whose testimony underpins the case, the defense is forced to respond to serious allegations based solely on untested paper statements. This strips the confirmation hearing of its intended value and makes it performative rather than substantive. 

In civil law systems, once a case is confirmed for trial, the investigating judge continues to play an active role in collecting evidence, gathering documents, and questioning witnesses. In contrast, common law systems rely on adversarial trials where it is crucial to determine which pieces of evidence are admitted during the trial in order for the defense to test the evidence and present their case. At the ICC, however, these two systems are blended in a way that creates procedural confusion. Evidence may be collected and submitted during the trial phase, yet decisions on admissibility are frequently deferred until the judgment stage, leaving the defense uncertain as to which material will ultimately be considered by the judges. In cases arising from conflicts that occurred within the last decade, the magnitude of available evidence—driven by the widespread use of smartphones and social media—is unprecedented. In this context, the submission regime, which permits the large-scale submission of material while postponing admissibility determinations, creates an immense burden on the defense and generates significant uncertainty in the development of defense strategy, particularly with respect to how specific pieces of evidence should be addressed, challenged, or prioritised.

The ability to call witnesses or rely on documents during trial often hinges on whether those materials are formally admitted. At the ICC, the defense may not know what has been admitted until late in the proceedings, hindering trial preparation and strategy. Ultimately, the combination of a civil law–style pre-trial investigation phase led by an investigative judge and a common law–style adversarial courtroom process creates procedural tensions that can be fundamentally incompatible, to the detriment of the suspect or accused.

This tension also becomes visible in the ICC’s treatment of witness statements. In civil law systems, an investigating judge conducts witness interviews and records both the questions and the answers in detail. The defense has access to the full record, which provides essential context and allows the defense to assess credibility and prepare informed questions if the witness is later called to testify at trial. The opportunity to examine the witness on their statement is a key procedural safeguard. At the ICC, however, the defense may receive only a sanitized statement of the witness's statement prepared by the investigator. Without access to the actual questions asked, the ability to effectively cross-examine the witness is significantly diminished, undermining a key procedural safeguard.

The framework of criminal proceedings in the civil law tradition works, as does the framework in the common law tradition. The mixture, however, has created procedural difficulties to the detriment of the judicial certainty for a suspect or an accused. The ICC’s hybrid system, while well-intentioned, often gives rise to significant challenges that strike at the heart of the procedural safeguards designed to protect the rights of the accused.

Length

I participated in a roundtable hosted by the Nuremberg Academy on one of the most pressing issues facing the ICC today: the length of its proceedings. During the discussion, I raised two central factors that, in my view, significantly contribute to these delays—the confirmation of charges process and the redaction regime.

As mentioned, the confirmation of charges hearing relies on the prosecution’s written statements. In reality, the prosecution frequently asks to delay proceedings so that it can continue investigating and strengthen its case. It is easy to see how months, if not years, can pass before a trial even starts. The ICC’s three-stage burden of proof structure compounds this issue. The procedure moves from a warrant of arrest based on “reasonable grounds to believe,” to confirmation of charges based on “substantial grounds to believe,” and finally to trial, where the standard for a factual finding is “beyond reasonable doubt.” This means in practical terms that the same evidence can be assessed at each stage, but is assessed in accordance to the different standard of proof, greatly lengthening the process. Each of these stages introduces a layer of delay, particularly where procedural design choices made at the outset contribute to the overall length and complexity of the proceedings.

Although perhaps less obvious, the second major issue contributing to lengthy trials is redactions. Each ICC Pre-Trial Chamber will adopt a redaction protocol, which governs the parties’ ability to apply redactions to the evidence. However, witness statements often arrive from the prosecution heavily redacted because the prosecution is permitted to apply "standard redactions" to witness statements in order to protect what it defines as innocent third parties, family members, or witness locations. However, in many cases, these redactions hinder the defense's ability to investigate the case. For example, if a witness is alleged to have been a child soldier, redacting the names of family members makes it impossible for the defense to verify his background—such as where he went to school, when he was born, or whether he was indeed associated with an armed group. A witness might claim that their house was burned down and that a neighbor witnessed it, yet the neighbor’s name is redacted and we are left unable to verify even the most basic facts of the case. 

These are core components of the allegations against an accused, and where the defense is prevented from conducting meaningful investigations, the right to a fair trial is undermined. The lifting of redactions can require months of iterative correspondence with the prosecution, during which time the defense remains unable to assess or act upon key material. This redaction regime is resource-intensive and time-consuming, generates extensive litigation, and places a significant burden on the defense, thereby contributing to delays, procedural inefficiencies, and inequality of arms.

These concerns have been raised repeatedly before the Chambers, in particular Trial Chambers, which have on numerous occasions recognized the legitimacy of defense requests and granted appropriate relief. Nevertheless, the issue remains recurrent, as the prosecution has not consistently adapted its redaction practices to reflect the applicable jurisprudence and the principles it sets out. As a result, similar disputes continue to arise, leading not only to delays for the defense but also to further postponements of proceedings, including requests by the prosecution for extensions of time or adjournments of confirmation hearings due to the protracted and complex redaction process. In this context, witnesses to crimes who are central to the allegations should not automatically be treated as “innocent third parties.”

The cumulative effect of redactions is staggering. A single witness statement might have dozens of redactions. Multiply that by hundreds of statements, and you have a defense team forced to write constant requests to the prosecution just to access the basic information necessary to perform our duties as defense counsel—information that is not for public access, but for our own use as officers of the court, bound by confidentiality and strict codes of conduct. Each request leads to further delay, more litigation, and a heavier administrative burden on everyone involved.

By contrast, at the ICTR, defense teams were trusted. We received full disclosure with few to no redactions, which allowed us to begin our investigations right away. The ability to act promptly had a direct impact on the overall length of proceedings, as defense teams could prepare for trial as soon as the arrest was made, corroborating or challenging witness accounts without delay. While some ICTR trials were long, particularly in multi-accused cases, the overall structure allowed for a much more efficient judicial process. At the ICC, the path from arrest to final judgment is markedly longer, which again interferes with the rights of the accused to trial without undue delay. 

Location and Access

At the ICTR, the Court’s proximity to the field brought it closer to the realities of the conflict—the people, the terrain, the culture, and the challenges of building a defense case. This translated into a hands-on, pragmatic approach by defense counsel that tried to compensate for the very real obstacles to investigating in post-genocide Rwanda. These obstacles ranged from witness’s inability to cross borders from Arusha to Kigali or Goma due to fear of retaliation, or losing access to key witnesses during the rainy season, for example. Importantly, the Tribunal recognized these challenges, and facilitated sauf-conduits for refugee witnesses living in exile and arranged for defense witnesses to travel discreetly through Uganda or Kenya before flying to Arusha, knowing the risks that many witnesses cooperating with the defense could face. 

This pragmatism extended to the structure of the Tribunal itself. Sections of the ICTR Registry, such as the External Relations and Cooperation Section, worked directly with defense teams and did not require that all communication be funneled through the defense section, which reduced the lengthy bureaucracy often faced by defense teams at other courts. I was able to send all of my cooperation requests necessary for investigations, whether for immigration records, telecoms data, passports, or border entries, directly to this office. They acted as my voice in communication with foreign authorities, and the process worked efficiently. This enabled more direct communication, faster responses to cooperation requests, immediate visibility into the status of requests, and fewer errors caused by intermediary delays in reaching out to organizations or states. 

At the ICC, however, a multilayered and opaque system has restricted this direct access. As defense counsel, I am required to submit cooperation requests to the Counsel Support Section, which then forwards them to the External Relations Section. That office, in turn, transmits the request to the relevant country office. At no stage am I copied on the correspondence or allowed to follow up directly. This lack of trust in defense counsel creates unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and delay, and leads to duplication of effort. The result is a process that wastes valuable ICC resources and slows the defense’s ability to conduct timely investigations. These inefficiencies could be significantly reduced if the defense were trusted with direct access and support, as was the case at the ICTR.

Jurisprudence

When I compare my experience at the ICTR with what I have seen at the ICC, one of the most striking differences lies in the coherence and authority of jurisprudence. At the ICTR, appellate jurisprudence provided a clear legal roadmap. The ICTR Appeals Chamber judges were elected for four-year terms, but many were re-elected and remained for many years. As a result, there was consistency in how they approached the law. You knew where the judges stood on key points of law, on their interpretations, for example, of modes of liability, the chapeau elements of international crimes, defects of an indictment, or evidentiary provisions like hearsay or Rule 92 bis, which allows the admission of certain written testimony. These legal standards were clearly articulated and repeated over several decisions or judgments, and appellate jurisprudence was binding on the Trial Chambers. The principle of stare decisis, or reliance on precedent, was effective and applied, giving defense teams, the prosecution, and the judges a clear framework within which to operate.

This is not the case at the ICC. Trial Chambers are not formally bound by prior decisions of the Appeals Chamber, and the Court’s jurisprudence has developed in a manner that reflects a more case-by-case approach. The composition of Chambers evolves over time, as judges are elected for fixed nine-year terms and bring with them diverse legal backgrounds, professional experiences, and judicial traditions. These factors inevitably influence interpretative approaches and the weight accorded to prior decisions.

As a result, jurisprudence on key legal and procedural issues may vary between cases and across Chambers, even within the same situation. This diversity contributes to trials that can differ significantly in structure and approach, and to legal standards that may evolve differently depending on the composition of the Chamber seized of the matter. For example, I have seen completely different approaches taken to witness preparation, submission of prior recorded testimony under Rule 68(3) of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence, and the submission of evidence. In some cases, the same witness can testify in two different trials of the same situation, but the rulings on how their statements are treated will vary. This kind of inconsistency creates a lack of continuity and coherence in ICC case law and procedure, weakening the clarity of the judgements and rules that come out of the ICC, and undermining the certainty of the law for suspects and accused.

Powers

The ICTR was backed by the authority of the United Nations Security Council and Resolution 955. That gave the Tribunal real enforcement power. The Registry and the Office of the Prosecutor had the capacity to launch large-scale operations to apprehend the accused, and the Trial Chambers could issue binding decisions reminding states of their obligations under international law. That same power extended to the defense. We could request cooperation from states, and if a state failed to comply, the chambers could issue decisions of non-compliance. These mechanisms actually worked.

At the ICC, however, the Court must constantly negotiate with states as the powers of the Office of the Prosecutor and the Registry are significantly weaker. Whether it is the Prosecutor trying to secure the execution of an arrest warrant or the defense trying to obtain critical documents, everything depends on the political will of the state in question. When it is in a state’s political interests to protect a suspect, they often refuse to surrender them, regardless of the outstanding warrants or orders issued by the Court. Conversely, when a state sees an opportunity to dispose of an opponent, they will cooperate. That opens the door for politics to influence the administration of justice, creating the perception that the Court’s rules and decisions are applied inconsistently depending on the individuals involved, which ultimately affects the credibility of the ICC institution as a whole.

We have seen this play out in numerous situations. The Central African Republic, for example, has several outstanding arrest warrants that remain unexecuted, mainly because of political alliances between the accused and the current government. The current situation in Palestine has also laid bare the double standards at play. Many states have publicly stated that they will not arrest certain Israeli officials subject to ICC warrants if they enter their territory, despite having previously taken the opposite position regarding Russian officials under similar ICC warrants. Ultimately, this dynamic has contributed to one of the ICC’s most persistent criticisms—that it has focused only on African suspects. 

Beyond earlier examples, divergent state practice has become increasingly visible in the execution, or non-execution, of ICC arrest warrants. Recent developments involving Libya illustrate this inconsistency, with differing responses by States Parties to suspects subject to ICC warrants. Similar tensions have arisen in relation to the arrest warrant issued against the Russian President, notably in the differing approaches taken by States Parties such as Hungary and Mongolia. These developments echo earlier patterns observed in other contexts and have contributed to perceptions of selectivity and double standards in the enforcement of the Court’s decisions.

Such inconsistencies have inevitably affected the public image and perceived authority of the International Criminal Court. This is so despite the fact that those working within the institution are broadly committed to strengthening its legitimacy and effectiveness. Ultimately, however, the Court’s authority depends on state cooperation, and the political realities shaping that cooperation are closely linked to the ICC’s institutional design—particularly when contrasted with the ad hoc tribunals such as the ICTY and ICTR, which operated within a markedly different enforcement and political framework.

Tools

As defense counsel, we often have different tools at our disposal depending on the court in which we practice. At the ICTR almost everything was done on paper. It was slow but straightforward. We were not expected to manage large volumes of electronic data. While some digital tools did exist, like basic research software, they were clunky and often inefficient. For example, it would take a significant amount of time just to find a name within the prosecution’s disclosure documents. There was no easy way to search through material, which made building a case incredibly time-consuming.

The ICC, by contrast, is fully electronic. Everything from filing submissions to reviewing disclosure is done through digital platforms. On one hand, this makes things far more efficient, especially for teams working remotely. On the other, the systems are significantly more complex. There is a steep learning curve when you are new to the Court. But once you have adapted, the tools do help streamline some aspects of the work.

That being said, the real challenge today is not just adapting to new technology—it is the sheer volume of electronic evidence we now face. The volume of electronic evidence collected by the prosecution, or available for the defense to collect, has reached levels never seen before. The situation in the Central African Republic (CAR) serves as a telling example: the prosecution has described it as the largest collection of evidence it has ever handled. Now consider the scale of evidence in contexts such as Palestine-Israel, or Ukraine-Russia. The volume of videos posted online, social media data, and call data records is staggering—almost unimaginable. This explosion of digital evidence demands urgent procedural and technological adaptations by the ICC to ensure fair trial rights and equality of arms.

To maintain fairness, the ICC must swiftly adopt measures similar to those implemented at the ICTR and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. For example, the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC has acquired a new e-discovery and data analysis tool capable of managing and analyzing massive volumes of electronic evidence. It allows them to search, filter, and organize vast amounts of digital data before it is even disclosed. It is critical that this tool also be made available to the defense, in line with jurisprudence from both the ICTR and STL, which have both recognized the importance of equal access to technological tools used in the preparation of cases.

The Practice of Defense in International Tribunals

Cultural Considerations in Building a Defense Team

In an international setting the relevant cultural context does not only apply to the location of the tribunal and the state in which the accused is from, but also refers to the culture and backgrounds of Judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and local authorities. Culture shapes how witnesses answer questions, how judges interpret the law, how prosecutors present their cases, and how local authorities respond to defense requests. In order to successfully navigate this cultural context, defense counsel must be extremely adaptable, build a diverse defense team, and work to understand people from a variety of backgrounds. I myself have had to rewire some of the ways in which I was trained. What worked in my own legal culture did not always translate, and I had to be willing to listen and step outside that framework. Often, this meant relying on others and learning from colleagues from the situation country, and passing that knowledge down to others.

A strong defense team must reflect the diversity of the international environment in which we operate. It is not just about legal skill, but also about having a range of perspectives. Defense teams need to include people from different legal traditions, cultural backgrounds, nationalities, and genders. But beyond that, you want people who do not think exactly like you do. You want your biases checked, ideas challenged, and defense strategies tested. 

Having someone from the situation country is absolutely essential. They bring contextual knowledge and instinctive understanding that you simply cannot get from books or reports. For example, defense counsel does not approach a witness or navigate a courtroom the same way in different places and team members from the situation country can advise on culturally appropriate conduct, such as what gestures or language are considered respectful, and what should be avoided. Failing to understand local customs can unintentionally offend a witness and risk undermining their willingness to cooperate. 

At the ICTR, a Rwandan lawyer always sat beside the senior trial attorney of the prosecution during hearings. They communicated constantly, clarifying terms, explaining references, and helping ensure that testimony was understood in its proper context. On the defense side, having someone assist or check the defense’s interpretation helped to verify facts the witness mentioned in real time: who a public figure was, where a town was located, how many daily prayers occur in a particular region, etc. At the ICC, I have not seen the same kind of support. In cases from the Central African Republic or Democratic Republic of the Congo, there was no equivalent counterpart with deep local knowledge and authority alongside counsel.

Cultural Considerations for Witnesses, Judges, and National Authorities

Before working with a witness, I gather information about their background such as their gender, religion, education level, occupation, literacy, or social position. For example, I may assess whether they are a vulnerable witness or if there are religious sensitivities that should be respected. In cases involving allegations of sexual or gender-based violence, I consider what approach would ensure sensitivity and care. In some contexts, this may mean seeking the husband’s permission to speak with a woman or ensuring that a female team member is present during an interview. I also learn basic words and greetings in the local language which is a simple but meaningful sign of respect that often helps put the witness at ease from the outset.

In some places, witnesses perceive and relate to the world differently, such as in their perceptions of time and distance. A witness might say an event happened "during the rainy season" or refer to a local event, crop, or natural phenomenon to indicate a time period. They might refer to a location that was "a 15-minute walk away" rather than describe that location in terms of meters or kilometers. Importantly, insisting on rigid formats like exact dates or quantified distances might make someone uncomfortable, or even ashamed if they feel they are not answering “correctly,” which is not only unhelpful but can also affect the quality of testimony.

Culture not only influences witnesses, but can extend to judges as well. When preparing a defense strategy, I always research the bench. Where does each judge come from? What legal tradition shapes their thinking? What positions have they taken in the past? Knowing whether a judge comes from a common law or civil law background, and what issues they tend to be firm on, helps determine both legal arguments and courtroom advocacy. When preparing a point of law motion, I often reach out to a Judge from the same home jurisdiction as the presiding judge to ask how that issue is typically treated within their home jurisdiction and how the law might be interpreted. 

Dealing with national authorities, in particular, requires patience, perseverance, and a nuanced understanding of local dynamics. When I submit a cooperation request or seek to obtain documents from state authorities, I tailor my approach to what is needed within that local environment. Do I need to make an appointment? Wait in a hallway for hours? Should I express urgency or remain quiet? Each environment demands something different, and being an effective lawyer means knowing how to read those signals and adapt accordingly.

Building Relationships with Clients

Cultural differences also impact the client. Clients are diverse. One day you may represent someone who grew up in a rural village with little formal education, and the next, someone highly educated and part of their country’s elite. No two clients are alike. I adapt my communication style to their level of knowledge, their background, their personality, and their behavior. In some cases, that may also mean adjusting how I communicate with the client’s family. 

My job is not just to defend, but to inform. A client must be empowered to make decisions based on an informed understanding of the law, the strategy, and the risks as you are ultimately working under their instruction. Sometimes a client understands everything quickly. Other times, it takes hours of conversation, explaining the law in simpler or more familiar terms, or debriefing them extensively after a decision. There is also a psychological dimension to this work and engaging with the client. These are individuals under an immense amount of stress. Even when I know a particular decision or negotiation is in their best interest, I have to choose the right moment to bring it to them. You have to know when they are ready to engage in that conversation. 

Some of our clients come from civil law systems where cross-examination does not exist. When they enter the courtroom, they are confronted with an adversarial model they have never seen before. The disorientation they feel can affect how they testify, how they engage with the court, and how they understand the process. At the beginning, defense counsel does not automatically have the client’s trust. In fact, we expect the opposite. Most clients come into this process with deep suspicion. They have been arrested in their home country, flown to Europe, imprisoned, and brought into a courtroom full of foreigners. From their perspective, we are all part of the same institution that is trying to convict them, including the defense team. That perception does not go away just because I tell them I am acting in their interests. Trust is built slowly and through action. When a client sees me stand up in court and argue forcefully on their behalf—arguing with the Judge, arguing with the Prosecution, and taking every opportunity to object—that is when they begin to believe that you are truly working for them. 

I have seen how hard it can be to overcome these suspicions. At the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, for instance, Hezbollah told its members and supporters not to cooperate with the defense teams because we were seen as part of the court established to convict them. Even though we fought hard against this and even secured an acquittal the first time around, conducting investigations in Lebanon under those conditions was practically impossible.

As the relationship with the client builds, I listen carefully to assess whether trust is growing. I never hide anything from my client. As defense counsel you must be transparent. You tell him why you are negotiating something, and every time you are filing something. Then the client will understand why you are doing the things that you are doing and why it is in the client’s best interest. That is how you gain the client’s trust. Honesty, transparency, and patience are the three words I would use for building this relationship. 

Victim Participation at the ICC

One of the most distinctive aspects of practicing before the ICC is navigating the framework for victim participation. Unlike traditional adversarial systems, where only the prosecution and defense have roles in trial, the Rome Statute allows for victims, through their legal representatives, to present their views and concerns. Victims are not abstract characters, but are individuals who have suffered, and their experiences deserve to be acknowledged and interests represented. However, the extent to which victim participation serves its intended purpose depends on how the legal representative understands and approaches their role.

Under the Rome Statute, the role of victims’ counsel is to assist their clients in expressing how they have suffered and to communicate their concerns to the Court. Many victims’ representatives respect these boundaries and do not place their clients on the stand as factual witnesses, instructing them to refrain from commenting on the accused. Their statements focus on the impact of the crimes on their own lives, not on the guilt or innocence of the accused. In such cases, victim participation can contribute meaningfully to the accountability process without compromising its integrity. But in some other cases, victims’ representatives see themselves as a second prosecutor, actively seeking a conviction and demanding one. They encourage their clients to testify against the accused and pursue lines of questioning related to the charges, rather than limiting their role to presenting views and concerns. 

The defense is already entering cases years after the prosecution has begun its investigations. Our resources and time are limited. We plan our trial strategy based on the prosecution’s case and the evidence it presents. But when a victims’ legal representative decides to call their client as a factual witness, we are notified very late in the proceedings—after we have already done our fieldwork, made strategic choices, and submitted evidence. Suddenly you can have new witnesses, new allegations, new evidence, and new crime scenes that are introduced after the prosecution closes. In an adversarial system, there is no safeguard for this because in common law we do not have ‘two prosecutors’. 

No one denies that victims have suffered—many defense lawyers, myself included, believe deeply in the work of the ICC and other international tribunals in breaking cycles of conflict and ensuring that atrocity crimes are never repeated. Recognizing the victim’s voice helps to achieve this by restoring a sense of humanity to the accountability process. But accountability must be achieved through a fair process, and not at the expense of the rights of the accused. Victims’ voices should be heard, but always within the clearly defined limits of the Rome Statute. 

The appropriate venue for compensation for victims is at the reparations phase, supported by mechanisms like the Trust Fund for Victims. That is where recognition and redress can be meaningfully provided by a proper and fair reparation system. This is a critical stage, and I have seen firsthand what happens when there is no proper follow-through on reparations. At the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, even after a conviction, victims felt little closure. There was no compensation, no support, no material acknowledgment of their suffering. The trial may have ended, but nothing was repaired.

The current system for reparations at the ICC faces significant challenges in assessing and qualifying victim participation, particularly in complex, conflict-affected contexts. The ICC, NGOs, and UN programs offer benefits to those who qualify as a victim and some people apply because they are desperate—because their families are hungry, their homes are gone, and their livelihoods destroyed. In many situations, victims have suffered profoundly, because of the conflict itself and, in some cases, as a result of the acts of alleged perpetrators. However, while the harm experienced is real and often acute, the causal link to a specific suspect or accused is not always straightforward. Their suffering and need for financial support is real, even though their qualification as a victim in a particular case may not be. 

At the same time, the ICC has become a focal point of hope for many affected communities. Expectations have been created, sometimes understandably so, that recognition as a victim before the Court will translate into tangible assistance or financial support. These expectations have contributed to reparations proceedings involving extremely large numbers of victims. In the case against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, for example, the number of former child soldiers assessed in the reparations phase reached into the hundreds of thousands. This situation is completely unmanageable and unrealistic.

Similar dynamics can be observed in other cases. Despite the very substantial reparations awards ordered in the cases of Bosco Ntaganda and Dominic Ongwen, it is my understanding that, to date, no reparations have yet been effectively distributed to victims. The process appears highly complex and lengthy, and the gap between judicial decisions and their concrete implementation risks deepening frustration among victims whose hopes and expectations remain unmet.

This situation suggests that reparations mechanisms may benefit from a more focused approach, one that prioritises direct victims with a clearer nexus to the crimes for which an accused has been convicted, while still recognizing the broader suffering caused by conflict. There must be a way to reconcile legal precision with the humanitarian realities faced by affected populations. The challenges are compounded by the limited resources available to the external teams of legal representatives of victims during the reparations phase, which often restricts their ability to conduct field missions, consult meaningfully with clients, and follow up on implementation. This, in turn, affects both the expeditiousness of proceedings and the depth and quality of the reparations debate.

The problem is compounded by the limited transparency afforded to the defense. Unless a participating victim also appears as a witness, the defense has no access to the victim’s identity and little to no information regarding who is participating in the proceedings. In the absence of identities or basic factual information, the defense is unable to verify whether the legal criteria for victim participation are met. This lack of disclosure affects not only the fairness of the proceedings but also the integrity of the reparations process as a whole. Defense counsel are officers of the Court, bound by strict confidentiality obligations and professional codes of conduct. Disclosure of victim identities to the defense, subject to appropriate protective measures, would not place victims at risk but would instead enable meaningful verification and contribute to a more balanced process.

Importantly, these limitations also have consequences for genuine victims, including indirect victims. Experience has shown that instances of fraudulent participation have come to light only where victims also held witness status or otherwise had a dual role in the proceedings. In other cases, where the defense does not receive the victim application forms or sufficient underlying information, it is simply not in a position to carry out comparable verification. The presence of fraudulent or ineligible participants inevitably affects the allocation of limited reparations and risks diluting the relief available to those victims who are directly and legitimately entitled to it.

We do not distribute or disclose the identities of prosecution witnesses, who benefit from protective measures, and in the same way will never disclose the identities of victims. But when someone is described as a child soldier and later turns out to have been 20 years old at the time of recruitment, or when a person claims to be displaced but has in fact always lived in the same home, it reveals a serious gap in the verification process. Such errors damage the credibility of the Court and dilute the meaning of victim participation. If a conviction occurs, the reparations should be directed to genuine victims, not to individuals who do not meet the criteria of the process.

The current approach also delays justice for genuine victims. Because the bar for inclusion is so low, many applications are not properly checked at the outset and many non-qualifying victims participate. Only during the reparations phase does the Registry filter the list of victims based on the criteria to determine who should receive the benefits. This wastes time, doubles the workload, and drains resources that could be better used to support actual victims. Eligibility should be properly assessed at the start, not the end. In addition, I believe that reparations should not be tied exclusively to convictions. Conflict always produces victims, regardless of who is eventually found guilty. There must be a way to acknowledge and support those individuals without victims having to rely solely on convictions.

Future of the ICC

If the ICC’s mission is to fight impunity, it must remain above political pressure. Yet recent developments have raised serious concerns about the Court’s independence. In the Palestine situation, the ICC Prosecutor announced his application for arrest warrants publicly—before the warrants had been granted, confirmed, or published by the Court. This was a clear departure from the approach taken in the Ukraine situation, where the names of high-ranking officials subject to warrants were only disclosed after the Pre-Trial Chamber had issued the warrants under seal.

The public announcement in the Palestine situation sparked a wave of external pressure, including from non-State Parties and some State Parties. The situation escalated to the point where the United States sanctioned four ICC judges, undermining the Court’s perceived independence and eroding the Court’s institutional resilience. Normally, applications for arrest warrants are filed under seal to preserve the integrity of the judicial process. This allows judges in the Pre-Trial Chamber to assess the evidence and deliberate independently on whether to confirm the arrest warrant, free from outside influence or pressure. While there may be exceptional circumstances where public disclosure of an application is justified—for example, to facilitate cooperation or enhance the collection of evidence—this must remain the exception, not the rule.

The turmoil generated by the premature publicity surrounding certain arrest warrant applications demonstrated the very real risks associated with departing from this approach. In response, ICC judges themselves acknowledged these concerns and subsequently amended the applicable framework governing the publicity of arrest warrants, reaffirming that confidentiality is the default and that publicity must be carefully circumscribed. This evolution underscores the recognition that undue disclosure opens the door to political interference. When external actors are drawn into the process before an application is properly assessed, or when amicus curiae submissions are entertained without access to the underlying evidentiary materials, the proceedings risk becoming politicized. Such developments threaten to undermine the Court’s independence and, ultimately, its legitimacy.

Conclusion

Defending before the ICC requires navigating a complex and evolving legal terrain. The Court’s hybrid procedural framework, drawing from both civil and common law traditions, was conceived as an inclusive model, yet in practice it has generated significant operational challenges. These include lengthy proceedings, procedural fragmentation, and heavy administrative demands, all of which affect the pace and efficiency of trials. Beyond these structural features, a persistent lack of institutional trust in the defense has contributed to layers of bureaucracy and resource-intensive processes that could, with greater confidence in defense teams as officers of the Court, be substantially streamlined. Reducing the number of formal communication channels through which defense counsel must operate would alone alleviate unnecessary delays and administrative burdens, without compromising fairness or transparency.

Importantly, the way defense counsel operate at the ICC extends well beyond legal strategy. Defense teams engage daily with profoundly human realities: clients facing life-altering charges, witnesses and victims shaped by conflict, and field investigations conducted under difficult and often dangerous conditions. Professionalism, adaptability, and ethical responsibility remain central to this work, particularly in politically sensitive and high-profile cases.

One structural issue nevertheless warrants reflection: the enduring mistrust of the defense, which continues to shape institutional practices and perceptions. This mistrust has tangible consequences. In some instances, it has resulted in extensive redactions, restricted access to materials, and heightened scrutiny of defense activities, sometimes linked to Article 70 proceedings against defense team members—such as in the Bemba et al. case, or investigations touching defense teams or accused in Ngaïssona and Ntaganda. While accountability mechanisms are essential, their selective visibility risks distorting the institutional narrative surrounding defense conduct.

This imbalance becomes more apparent when contrasted with the treatment of other actors. In Lubanga, despite judicial findings that intermediaries had participated in the fabrication of evidence, no Article 70 proceedings were initiated against them. Similarly, in the Yekatom case, the defense raised and substantiated allegations of evidence fabrication involving intermediaries and alleged child soldier witnesses and participating victims. These arguments led the Prosecution to withdraw reliance on certain witnesses and ultimately contributed to the acquittal of Mr. Yekatom on all charges related to child soldiering. Yet, to date, no known proceedings were initiated against those who allegedly falsified age or group affiliation. The absence of equivalent scrutiny across actors inevitably shapes perceptions of fairness and fuels the very mistrust that the system seeks to prevent.

Had the ICC adopted an institutional model providing for an independent prosecutorial mechanism for Article 70 investigations, similar to those employed at the ICTR or the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the focus of such proceedings might have been more evenly distributed. Instead, the recurrent association of Article 70 investigations with defense teams risks reinforcing a narrative that undermines confidence in the defense as a pillar of the justice process.

Looking ahead, meaningful progress will depend not on diminishing the role of victims or their representatives, but on recalibrating institutional trust. Greater confidence in defense counsel, more proportionate administrative controls, improved disclosure practices, and streamlined procedural pathways would enhance both efficiency and fairness. Ensuring that all actors—prosecution, defense, intermediaries, and witnesses—are equally accountable for interference with the administration of justice is equally essential. In doing so, the Court would strengthen its legitimacy and better align its practices with the principles that underpinned its creation. Defense counsel will continue to safeguard due process and fair trial rights, ensuring that the promise of international justice is fulfilled not only in outcomes, but in the integrity of the procedures themselves.