Conclusions

Abstract

In contemporary international criminal trials, the most fundamental guiding principles – those of fairness and rights – are divorced both from each other, and from procedural decisions. Indeed, I have shown how fairness has been rhetorically invoked to justify decisions that, nonetheless, have the effect of undermining the rights of the accused. Given the centrality of fairness and rights to international criminal law, this is a profound challenge for the system of law, its institutions, and its processes. In these Conclusions, I examine what this tells us about international criminal law and its structural limitations and conditions of possibility. I make the ultimate normative argument of this book: that there should be a renewed closeness between fairness and rights in the context of procedural decision-making in these trials. However, I also emphasise that even this claim is uncomfortable, given the possibilities and impossibilities of international criminal law, and that perhaps alternatives to this system should be investigated.