Introduction
International human rights and criminal courts, such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), are uniquely positioned to address issues related to war and peace. Their mandates require them to pursue accountability for the ugliest sides of war: torture, inhumane treatment, crimes against humanity, conflict-related sexual violence, and the suspension or usurpation of the rule of law, among other violations. International human rights and criminal courts provide capacity, legitimacy, and political cover for pursuing accountability for perpetrators and justice for victims, and they position themselves as deterrents to future abuse.
As the mantra of “no peace without justice” emerged as a guiding principle of conflict resolution in the 20th century, international human rights and criminal courts grew to become key actors in ending war and brokering peace. The Colombian experience is paradigmatic; both the ICC and the IACtHRs were engaged in addressing violations committed during the Colombian conflict and in shaping the 2016 peace process. These courts sought to shape the way the parties negotiated peace, addressed questions of accountability, and provided reparations to victims.
As the stature of international human rights and criminal courts grew, so, too, did the backlash they faced. When international courts insert themselves into the type of contentious politics that threatens to unseat leaders, undermine peace agreements by imposing new, costly, and complicated demands on the negotiating parties, and provide costly reparations to victims, they expose themselves to additional risk. Implicated actors and their allies can turn their ire on the courts themselves, undermining their authority and perceived legitimacy. Again, here, the experience in Colombia was instructive, as the ICC’s expectations for accountability and reparations sometimes exceeded what the negotiating parties were willing to give, at times casting a shadow on the prospect of peace and on the ICC itself.
The pattern of opportunities and challenges international human rights and criminal courts face when engaged with questions of war and peace, and justice and accountability, is best understood by acknowledging the inescapable reality of international adjudication: international courts are only as effective as their stakeholders allow them to be. These institutions present, by their very nature, design, and intent, a challenge to State sovereignty. At the same time, they rely on States for their funding, legitimacy, and basic functioning as courts. They cannot act as judicial bodies without State cooperation in the form of participation, access to witnesses and evidence, and a good faith effort toward compliance. International courts thus face clear and irreconcilable limits to their authority.
The paradoxical relationship between international courts and States shapes the ways in which they intervene in conflicts to provide accountability, the roles they can play in building peace, and their own susceptibility to backlash.
Distinct Courts, Divergent Opportunities, Common Challenges
Although international human rights and criminal courts face similar challenges related to ending war and brokering peace, they have distinct remits and, as such, intersect with conflict termination and peace processes differently. Briefly, international human rights courts, like the African, European, and Inter-American courts of human rights, are designed to hold States accountable for a range of human rights abuses that includes, but also extends far beyond, conflict-related behavior. International criminal tribunals, such as the International Criminal Court and the (now-closed) International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, have a different and narrower substantive remit, focusing on war crimes (including torture and inhumane treatment), crimes against humanity, genocide, and, possibly, the crime of aggression. Unlike the human rights courts, which center on State responsibility, international criminal tribunals focus on individual accountability.
In the regional human rights court system, only States can be found in violation of human rights law. Human rights courts impose significant financial and political costs on States by asking them to undertake a range of compliance orders, from paying reparations to individual victims and issuing public apologies to overturning amnesty laws and holding perpetrators accountable in domestic courts. In contrast, regional human rights courts cannot hold non-State actors, including guerrilla or insurgent forces, directly accountable, creating opportunities for non-State actors to advocate for the strategic use of the human rights regime, rather than the international criminal law regime, in bringing an end to war.
International criminal courts, for their part, focus on high-level perpetrators, from both State and non-State parties. These courts can — and do — target a range of actors, including sitting heads of State (who do not enjoy head of State immunity before international criminal tribunals), leaders of insurgencies, and opposition leaders. Both the individual perpetrator and the State bear the costs of international criminal adjudication. Individual perpetrators face the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in exile or prison, while States bear the costs of leader turnover and instability. Although the research is mixed on the extent to which the threat of prosecution encourages leaders to change their wartime behavior, it is not a stretch to imagine that the threat of an international trial and potential imprisonment is an omnipresent shadow over both State and non-State parties involved in armed conflict. As Alyssa Prorok shows, the more responsibility leaders have for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international humanitarian and criminal law, the higher the likelihood they will face consequences. Unsurprisingly, then, leaders’ concern over accountability through international criminal adjudication is a driving cause of backlash against international criminal tribunals.
Accountability — But for Whom? And When?
Although the primary focus of international human rights and criminal courts is accountability, their record of successfully holding States and individual perpetrators to account for wartime behavior is, at best, variable. Accountability resulting from international court involvement is almost never complete and is almost always partial and politicized.
Regional human rights courts, such as the IACtHR, cannot hold perpetrators directly accountable because they are not criminal tribunals. Their compliance orders thus often include mandates both for domestic courts to hold individual perpetrators accountable and for States to overturn blanket amnesty laws, particularly in cases related to ongoing conflicts. Such compliance orders present challenges, especially in conflict or post-conflict States, because they demand prosecution of some of the most powerful political elites and military officers and require coordination across the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government.
When States do comply with these compliance mandates, they generally do so after a change in government or after a significant amount of time has elapsed. For example, in Argentina, two amnesty laws and a series of pardons smoothed the transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. As Argentina consolidated democracy throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the IACtHR offered it a tool to address the legacy of military rule. In Barrios Altos v. Peru (2001), the IACtHR ruled that amnesty laws violate the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, a ruling that applied to all member States. Peru avoided compliance, but Argentina moved forward to implement the ruling. In 2005, the Supreme Court of Argentina struck down two amnesty laws that provided immunity from crimes committed during the country’s so-called Dirty War. Accountability for abuses perpetrated during the Dirty War took decades, not days or even years, and was only possible because the political conditions in Argentina changed over time as it further democratized.
Conflict-related accountability at the ICC and other criminal tribunals is similarly partial and politicized. In theory, accountability at the ICC takes the shape of investigations, arrest warrants, trials, and appeals processes, with convicted perpetrators serving time in a Dutch prison. In practice, however, the ICC has struggled at each of these stages to hold perpetrators accountable. State actors, and particularly leaders, decide if and when they will allow ICC investigators into the country or hand in accused under their jurisdiction to sit for trial. They similarly determine the quality and quantity of evidence the ICC can access, as well as if and when they execute the ICC’s arrest warrants. Other international or hybrid international-domestic courts, like the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), have faced similar procedural challenges and threats to their legitimacy.
It should be no surprise, then, that the ICC is better able to provide accountability when the suspected perpetrators are not sitting in the executive mansion, but instead are political opponents or unlucky rebels. Incumbents rely on the “international legal lasso” to remove their domestic opponents. This catchphrase refers to the mechanism by which incumbents refer cases against their opponents to the ICC, offering them a one-way ticket to The Hague and years of entanglement in international judicial proceedings — physically and politically removing potential spoilers to the peace and also offering a form of (highly politicized) accountability. The international legal lasso might help end the war, but should not be conflated with the realization of justice.
Backlash Politics and Questions of Hope or Despair
Although the role of international human rights and criminal courts in ending conflicts and brokering peace has grown over the past three decades, their efficacy is always conditional on who is in power, whom they are investigating, and when accountability processes unfold. In other words, justice and accountability are always conditional on politics.
International courts are most successful in securing justice and accountability in the aftermath of conflict when they can induce States, particularly incumbents, to cooperate as a means of advancing their own domestic objectives. The flip side, however, is that international human rights and criminal courts are most likely to experience backlash when powerful political elites view them as threats, rather than tools. For example, consider Russian backlash against the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Moscow and Strasbourg have long had a contentious relationship, but Russia’s war in Ukraine brought that relationship to the brink. On March 15, 2022, Russia withdrew from the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe. It left, in its wake, 17,000 pending applications against the Russian Federation and walked away from several inter-state complaints, including regarding its invasion of Ukraine. Although the European Court of Human Rights contends that it can still adjudicate on those cases, no Russians are there to hear the judgments. Although the ECtHR and its supporters view those judgments as both normatively legitimate and legally binding, on December 9, 2025, the Russian Supreme Court voided its commitments to the European Convention on Human Rights and the ECtHR under domestic law, thereby delegitimizing all ECtHR cases in Russia and removing the ECtHR, at least for now, as one tool in efforts to bring the war to an end.
These challenges, however, do not mean that there is no place for international human rights and criminal courts in ending conflict. In addition to their roles in promoting accountability and providing reparations to victims, international courts help document the historical record, provide a space for witnesses and victims to share their experiences, and shed light on past abuses with the goal of preventing future atrocities. They also demonstrate a commitment to the rule of law, even and especially at times when it is at its most fragile. As Ben Ferencz, who served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals at 27 years old, said throughout his illustrious career: “I prefer law to war under all circumstances.”
