Restorative Justice at the International Criminal Court

AuthorSara Kendall
PositionSara Kendall is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Law and Co-Director for Centre for Critical International Law at the University of Kent. Before joining Kent Law School, she was a Researcher in Public International Law at Leiden University and Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Amsterdam. PhD, ...
Pages217-221
REDI, vol. 70 (2018), 2
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AT THE INTERNATIONAL
CRIMINAL COURT
Sara KendaLL *
With the twentieth anniversary of the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court (ICC) approaching in July of 2018, the ICC has announced its
intention to «mark this milestone» throughout the year, inviting visitors to its
website to do the same. An accompanying film commemorating the anniver-
sary opens with scenes of atrocity crimes throughout the world flashing in
sequence. Interspersed throughout this account of the Court’s establishment
are images of victims of crimes that could possibly fall under the court’s juris-
diction, whilst the film narrates the subject matter that the ICC is empowered
to adjudicate: the use of child soldiers, destruction of cultural property, and
sexual violence, among other forms of war crimes, crimes against humanity
and genocide. Following a clip of testimony of a survivor of sexual violence
crimes, the film introduces the Court’s Trust Fund for Victims, which was es-
tablished through the Rome Statute to provide «support to victims, survivors,
their families and community». It closes with the claim that the pursuit of
security «starts with justice for everyone». While a familiar genre of institu-
tional self-representation, the film is remarkable for the way in which it fore-
grounds the figure of the victim of international crimes within a retributive
legal field.
I begin from this film as an artefact of commemoration that may reveal
how the ICC regards itself twenty years on from its founding through the
Rome Statute. In 2022 we will face another Court anniversary, twenty years
from when the treaty-based statute came into effect with the required amount
of state signatories. While the current anniversary marks the importance of
the ICC’s formal legal foundation, the latter marks the significance of state
support for its mandate, illustrating the longstanding divide in international
Revista Española de Derecho Internacional
Sección FORO
20.º Aniversario del Estatuto de Roma
Vol. 70/2, julio-diciembre 2018, Madrid, pp. 217-221
http://dx.doi.org/10.17103/redi.70.2.2018.2a.02
© 2018 Asociación de Profesores
de Derecho Internacional
y Relaciones Internacionales
ISSN: 0034-9380; E-ISSN: 2387-1253
* Sara Kendall is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Law and Co-Director for
Centre for Critical International Law at the University of Kent. Before joining Kent Law School, she
was a Researcher in Public International Law at Leiden University and Lecturer in International Rela-
tions at the University of Amsterdam. PhD, University of California at Berkeley (S.Kendall@kent.ac.uk).

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