4 - The International Criminal Trial

Summary

This chapter examines the third fundamental category of international criminal law, the international criminal trial. It examines the characteristics of the international procedural and evidential system and the ideas of persons and social relations that this model of the international criminal trial assumes. It analyses the procedural and evidential norms and practices in two leading cases on sexual violence evidence to identify the epistemic norms and practices of the legal category of the international criminal trial. The international criminal trial has been crucial for making visible the evidence of conflict-related sexual violence, for establishing the truth of these events, and for including sexual violence in its public narratives of conflict. However, this chapter also shows that the fact-finding process of the international criminal trial presumes a model of bodily and psychic integrity of individual witnesses and shared communities of witnessing and judging of collective violence. These sexual violence cases show that while the international criminal trial claims to produce epistemic justice, it also creates testimonial, hermeneutic, and social injustice through the gendered shaping of legal narratives of fact, victimisation, and perpetration of conflict-related sexual violence.