Sarrah Hammerl
Legal Research Fellow
In June 2026, I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar titled ‘‘Understanding Information Warfare in Sudan”, during which researchers from the organisation Build Up presented findings from their ongoing research. Their presentations highlighted how sophisticated manipulation tactics, weaponised vocabulary, and digital incitement fuel both online and offline violence in the current conflict in Sudan. While the discussion focused on one particular conflict, it also raised broader questions about the relationship between digital technologies and international justice.
What follows in this blog series is a reflection on these digital and global transformations and their implications for access to justice in the context of international crimes. Over the past ten years, a rich body of literature by practitioners as well as scholars has provided insightful perspectives on the impacts of emerging digital technologies on international criminal justice, including in relation to evidence, fact-finding methods, ethical considerations, and legal reasoning. These scholars demonstrate how digitalisation trends fundamentally reconfigure the conditions under which mass violence crimes are committed, investigated, and prosecuted today.
I draw my reflections from existing literature as well as observations from my ongoing research focussing on judicial proceedings at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as well as domestic proceedings in Germany and the Netherlands. These courts, all based in Europe, offer a strategically significant site for examining how digital and global transformations shape access to justice as they serve as key hubs for international and extraterritorial prosecutions and increasingly collaborate in the transnational production and circulation of digitally derived evidence in international crimes cases.
I draw my reflections from existing literature as well as observations from my ongoing research focussing on judicial proceedings at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as well as domestic proceedings in Germany and the Netherlands. These courts, all based in Europe, offer a strategically significant site for examining how digital and global transformations shape access to justice as they serve as key hubs for international and extraterritorial prosecutions and increasingly collaborate in the transnational production and circulation of digitally derived evidence in international crimes cases.
This blog series concretely explores the following questions:
- What forms of harm and responsibility become legally recognisable in digitally mediated and globally interconnected contexts?
- Who can document, interpret, contest, and communicate these harms, and with what forms of agency?
- Through which technological, institutional, and transnational infrastructures can such knowledge and participation be translated into accountability?
These questions focus on three interconnected dimensions rather than separate empirical phenomena. The underlying assumption is that the current digitalisation and globalisation trends do not merely provide new tools and spaces for existing justice processes, but rather transform the forms of harm that law must recognise, the agents who produce legal knowledge, and the institutional infrastructures through which accountability is pursued.
Hence, the first blog focuses on how digitalisation changes the nature and recognition of harm as international crimes under the Rome Statute, drawing on the policy by the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) ‘Cyber-enabled crimes under the Rome Statute’ (2025) (“the Policy”). As the first comprehensive statement of how the ICC intends to interpret and apply existing Rome Statute provisions to digital conduct, this Policy provides a unique lens through which to examine which emerging forms of harm, responsibility, and legal uncertainty international criminal law is likely to confront.
[C]urrent digitalisation and globalisation trends do not merely provide new tools and spaces for existing justice processes, but rather transform the forms of harm that law must recognise, the agents who produce legal knowledge, and the institutional infrastructures through which accountability is pursued.
Digitalisation not only shapes what counts as harm and who can be held accountable, but also who can participate in making harm knowable and legally actionable. Thus, another blog post examines how international crimes become digitally documented and potentially transformed into evidence, focusing on who participates in what capacity in the process. Once the harm has been identified and actors have participated in documenting or contesting it, the final part of the blog series reflects on how accountability for international crimes is realised in the digital age.
However, this should not be understood as an empirical one-way sequence, but as a recursive, mutually constitutive relationship in which justice infrastructures shape the conditions under which harm is recognised, subjects can participate, and accountability becomes possible. For example, the recognition of online hate speech as potential international crime depends on actors who can document and interpret such harms, while the infrastructures through which evidence is collected and processed influence which experiences become legally intelligible and which forms of responsibility can ultimately be established.
This post is a part of a series. Click here to access Part II. Come back next week for Parts III and IV.
Support our work!
We can only do our work thanks to the support of brave, passionate people like you!
Your donation will help us to keep fighting for human rights and access to justice for everyone, everywhere.
