Sarrah Hammerl
Legal Research Fellow
This final post of the series takes a step back and explores how digitalisation and globalisation trends intersect and reorganise the governance of justice infrastructures. As I argued in the previous parts, fact-finding of international crimes is increasingly distributed across multiple actors and forums. What follows from this is an understanding of justice not as processes within fixed institutions, but as assemblages of various practices through which information about violent events is transformed into legal facts.
From Institutions to Global Justice Assemblages
While much of the literature on networks in the field of human rights focuses on transnational alliances of civil society organisations and social movements united by shared interests, values, and advocacy goals, I am interested in the broader and more heterogeneous ‘global justice assemblages‘ involved in contemporary fact-finding.
These assemblages bring together individual and collective actors from different geographic locations and professional fields, including witnesses, activists, journalists, civil society, State bodies, experts, technology companies, and even algorithms, all of which contribute to the production, processing, and interpretation of information related to international crimes.
[N]o single institution possesses all the necessary evidence, expertise, technical capacity, or authority to prosecute international crimes in the digital age successfully and effectively, making collaboration between countries and organisations indispensable.
Rather than being united by shared values, these actors frequently operate according to divergent, and at times conflicting, objectives, commitments, strategies, and forms of expertise. As a result, these assemblages create distinct ways of proving and narrating harms that interact with local memory and the affective worlds of victim communities, with significant implications for how accountability is pursued.
Transnational Cooperation
In one of my previous blog posts, I noted that digitalisation complicates questions of jurisdiction because the perpetrator may be in one country, the victim in another, the server hosting the harmful content in a third, and the consequences may be felt somewhere else entirely, while the underlying data infrastructure may span multiple countries. Another result is that no single institution possesses all the necessary evidence, expertise, technical capacity, or authority to prosecute international crimes in the digital age successfully and effectively, making collaboration between countries and organisations indispensable.
The OTP´s response to these trends is largely operational, involving the creation of specialised units within the Court, such as the Cyber Unit and the Information Fusion Centre within the OTP, and forging partnerships with relevant actors, including via private sector secondments. Such partnerships can either be temporary, for instance collaborations with technology companies for a specific investigation, or structural, becoming integrated into the operational infrastructure as was the case between the ICC and Microsoft in the course of Project Harmony. While these technology partnerships enable the Court to harness emerging technologies for evidence management and investigations, they also expose it to the effects of external political and legal decisions, creating a form of infrastructural vulnerability, particularly in the context of the current US sanctions against Court officials.
Increasing cooperation among States and between States and international judicial bodies such as the ICC is another emerging response, particularly in relation to evidence gathering and the execution of arrest warrants. In addition to the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding between the ICC and Eurojust, the Court has utilised networks like Europol’s SIENA and Interpol’s I-24/7 for the rapid, secure exchange of digital records between jurisdictions since 2024. Furthermore, the ICC has intensified its cooperation with the so-called Joint Investigation Teams (JITs), which temporarily pool resources and expertise across borders to coordinate common lines of inquiry.
Once signed between the parties, these joint investigations allow for the exchange of information and evidence, and joint operational activities. Examples include the MH17 JIT, the Ukraine JIT which the OTP joined in 2022, as well as the JIT Libya, which involve national authorities of multiple countries with support by Eurojust, Europol, and Interpol.
Crucially, these partnerships are reciprocal, and State parties can also request assistance from the ICC. This is particularly relevant where domestic and international prosecutions are each examining different but interconnected aspects of the same events, as illustrated by Libya. Here, a Dutch domestic prosecution of Eritrean national Walid focused on human smuggling from Libya while overlapping with the broader patterns of crimes against migrants examined in the ICC’s forthcoming case against El Hishri.
The Importance of Accountability Intermediaries and Third-party fact-finding
Beyond state actors, investigations undertaken by journalists, human rights organisations, or specialised UN mechanisms increasingly serve as vital accountability intermediaries that collect, verify, and repose information to be used specifically in legal forums.
Situating digitalisation trends at the intersection with the ‘accountability turn’, D’Alessandra & Sutherland (2021) describe the evolution of UN fact-finding mechanisms like the International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism for Syria (IIIM), the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), and the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD), which for the first time mandated administrative UN entities to investigate, collect, and preserve evidence specifically for use in criminal proceedings.
In addition, findings from open-source investigations by organisations like Bellingcat or Human Rights Watch are used to support legal research, case-building, or even to corroborate evidence at trials. These organisations have also been instrumental in developing tools and methodologies to collect, verify, and preserve digital content, which are essential for maintaining the chain of custody and ensuring the admissibility of such evidence in legal proceedings.
Beyond state actors, investigations undertaken by journalists, human rights organisations, or specialised UN mechanisms increasingly serve as vital accountability intermediaries that collect, verify, and repose information to be used specifically in legal forums.
Furthermore, legal organisations such as the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), TRIAL, or the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) make use of these factual findings in strategic litigation in multiple European jurisdictions, including by submitting communications and complaints to judicial authorities, alongside serving as representatives for victims and witnesses in criminal proceedings.
As such, these organisations function as intermediaries that gather, contextualise, and frame digital content within advocacy, documentation, and legal processes. While courts increasingly rely on this type of third-party fact-finding, it is often afforded considerably less weight by courts than official judicial processes. Yet, their conclusions nevertheless shape the legal framing of a conflict and help to substantiate potential claims, both of which influence what legal accountability avenues might be pursued.
Multi-forum Litigation and the ‘Fragmentation of Truth-telling”
Another growing feature of human rights fact-finding is multi-forum litigation, in which different institutions examine only particular legal dimensions of the same conflict rather than deciding it as a whole, each with a distinct mandate or jurisdiction. The scholar Michael Becker attributes this development, in part, to the rise of strategic litigation by public interest actors who pursue accountability through multiple legal forums.
Prominent examples include universal jurisdiction cases concerning crimes committed under the Assad regime in Syria across several European States, the parallel proceedings relating to Myanmar and Palestine before both the ICC and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and Ukraine, where accountability efforts span domestic courts, the ICC, the ICJ, and the soon-to-be operational Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine.
While multi-forum litigation can respond to the fact that no single court has the capacity to address an entire conflict situation, differing mandates, standards, and procedures can also result in divergent factual accounts and legal classifications that not only shape individual accountability but also how the broader conflict becomes legally knowable. According to Becker, this might give rise to the ‘fragmentation in truth-telling’, whereby legal institutions might produce not only different but competing narratives, each carrying institutional authority and legitimacy.
Although this phenomenon is not itself a consequence of digitalisation, the growing reliance on digitally derived evidence—often collected, reused, and interpreted by different actors across multiple proceedings and jurisdictions—further amplifies the potential for divergent factual interpretations.
[D]iffering mandates, standards, and procedures can also result in divergent factual accounts and legal classifications that not only shape individual accountability but also how the broader conflict becomes legally knowable.
Transforming Access to Justice Infrastructure
Over the past decade, international justice has transformed from an institution-centred process into one distributed across global socio-technical networks involving both human actors and technological agents. Participation in these global justice assemblages extends beyond courtroom actors to include technology companies, international organisations, journalists, open-source investigators, human rights CSOs, specialised UN mechanisms, algorithms, and cross-border investigative networks. In particular, non-State, third-party fact-finding organisations have become influential accountability intermediaries whose investigations shape legal strategies and the framing of conflicts across multiple jurisdictions.
Accountability for international crimes thus depends on the collaboration between these diverse actors that collect, verify, preserve, exchange, and interpret digital materials. This is facilitated by the digitalisation of evidence which enables extensive transnational cooperation between Joint Investigation Teams, Europol, Interpol, and third-party fact-finding organisations, while it also allows multiple domestic and international institutions to address the same conflict simultaneously.
Realising justice therefore becomes increasingly dependent on access to digital infrastructure, technical expertise, and transnational partnerships to translate digital traces into legally meaningful evidence. So, for victims to effectively participate in and benefit from international justice in the future, potential socio-technical barriers need to be identified and actively addressed.
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