Two Worlds of Justice. Time to Connect Them.

Two worlds

I spent years in two different worlds of justice - and they barely talk to each other. The first world: international criminal tribunals. The Yugoslav Tribunal. The early days of the ICC. A community of people doing genuinely important work, holding perpetrators of atrocity crimes to account. I was proud to be part of it. The second world: national justice systems. The everyday disputes over land, family, debt, and safety that shape the lives of billions of people, most of whom will never see the inside of a courtroom, let alone an international one. I moved into this world when I set up the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law, and I found myself in a different universe. The two tribes had stopped talking. I never fully understood why. And I still think it is a problem - not just for coordination, but for outcomes.

What people actually need

I have written about it before: over the past decade, a different way of thinking about justice has taken hold. It goes by the name people-centred justice, or PCJ. Instead of asking “how do we make the courts work better?”, it asks “what are the justice needs of the people, and how can these needs be prevented, or, of they occur, resolved?

I spent years in two different worlds of justice - and they barely talk to each other. The first world: international criminal tribunals. The Yugoslav Tribunal. The early days of the ICC. A community of people doing genuinely important work, holding perpetrators of atrocity crimes to account. I was proud to be part of it. The second world: national justice systems. The everyday disputes over land, family, debt, and safety that shape the lives of billions of people, most of whom will never see the inside of a courtroom, let alone an international one. I moved into this world when I set up the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law, and I found myself in a different universe. The two tribes had stopped talking. I never fully understood why. And I still think it is a problem - not just for coordination, but for outcomes.

What people actually need

I have written about it before: over the past decade, a different way of thinking about justice has taken hold. It goes by the name people-centred justice, or PCJ. Instead of asking “how do we make the courts work better?”, it asks “what are the justice needs of the people, and how can those needs be prevented or, if they occur, resolved?” The approach rests on four pillars. It puts outcomes first: people do not want courts, they want their problems solved. It takes a systems view: justice is an ecosystem of formal and informal actors, all of which matter. It is innovation-driven: one cannot keep relying on past-century laws and practices.

Our world is constantly changing, and with it the justice needs change as well; moreover, effective ways to deliver justice are more available than ever. And it is data-driven: rigorous, large-scale empirical research on what people actually experience, what they do to resolve it, and whether it works. It is increasingly being applied. And it is directly relevant for the international criminal justice world, especially when difficult decisions need to be made about how different justice needs should be prioritised, and how they relate to other needs. This is a time of more conflict than ever. Which makes what follows more likely to happen.

Take any of the many conflicts as example. A prosecutor and the judges of an international criminal tribunal face a decision to issue an indictment or arrest warrant for one or more leaders of an organisation involved in war crimes. At the same time, an expert team from a state is negotiating a ceasefire to stop the fighting. The timing of such an indictment has direct impact on those peace efforts. Indicting regardless of consequences is very likely to disrupt negotiations. Why should a negotiator sign a ceasefire, only to immediately end up in jail? We have seen concrete examples of well meant but, in retrospect, unfortunate timing of indictments. In Sierra Leone among others, where fighting continued, as did harm to civililans. At the same time, impunity for the sake of peace is not likely to work either in the longer term. So, in each case, a careful weighing of factors or needed - in a way that goes beyond the oversimplified dychtomy of peace versus justice. People-centred justice may help in making these judgment calls (there will always be more than one, I suspect).

HiiL, where I used to work, has now conducted Justice Needs and Satisfaction surveys in almost thirty countries, including some of the world’s most fragile environments: Nigeria, Ukraine, Yemen, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia. The surveys ask ordinary people, in ordinary language, whether they experienced a legal problem in the past four years, what they did about it, and what it cost them. Some of the findings are striking and relevant (but remember, these surveys were not speficially designed to produce data to help make these judgement calls).

In conflict and fragile settings, the justice needs that people rate as most urgent are not what international tribunals focus on. They are more connected with immediate needs: housing, land, and property disputes; access to identity documents, marriage and death certificates, financial entitlements; family issues; everyday crime. Addressing international crimes barely features. Support for international courts varies enormously by context.

In Ukraine, just over half of respondents support recourse to international courts. In Mali, only 19%. And within Mali, support is lowest in the regions closest to the conflict. In that same country, between 2014 and 2018, support for forgiveness and reconciliation declined sharply - from around 50% to 37%. What is that telling us? What I also experienced when working in Mali, strengthening the justice system alongside an impressive team of national leaders during the same period the ICC was engaged there, was that the ICC universe seemed entirely separate from ours. The national justice actors we worked with were navigating broken structures, huge demands, and minimal capacity. The ICC cases barely featured in the news, let alone in their conversations. It felt like a high-altitude operation, disconnected from the terrain below.

Another approach was taken in Syria, where HiiL helped establish the Syria Justice Innovation Process in 2018, a Syrian-led initiative bringing together thirty respected Syrians: judges, lawyers, civil society actors, entrepreneurs, academics. They met regularly, analysed justice needs data, agreed on shared priorities. The need for international criminal prosecutions never emerged as a high priority. It is now becoming one, and national courts are emerging as the places to do this.

Security first

The most illuminating research I have encountered on this difficult space comes from Vera Mironova, who collects data in active conflict zones. Her work in Mosul after the battle against ISIS reveals something that disrupts simple narratives about justice and accountability. Civilians who had lived under ISIS rule were more willing to support rough justice against ISIS suspects – not, apparently, because they were vengeful, but because they wanted security restored quickly.

The demand for punishment, she argues, is not really about revenge. It is about safety. When people believe someone can safely reintegrate, they are open to rehabilitation. When they do not, they want the threat removed. She also found that legitimacy is competitive. In parts of Syria, some civilians preferred ISIS courts for everyday disputes because decisions were fast and enforced, while state courts were slow and corrupt. If formal institutions cannot deliver fair, timely justice, people will turn to whoever can.

The lesson that emerges is uncomfortable but important: in (post-)conflict settings, what people seem to want first is for the fighting to stop. To go home. To restart their lives. Everything else, including accountability for large-scale crimes, is assessed in relation to that.

One country that is innovatively weaving a way through this complex set of forces using a people centered lens is Colombia, with its Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace). It is outcome-oriented (restoration, reparation, non-recurrence - not just conviction). It is victim-centred. It has become something of a benchmark because of its ability to offer innovative approaches through a justice mechanism that enables negotiated solutions to armed conflicts, guaranteeing justice and the centrality of victims. And critically, it operates within the country - connected to the communities affected - rather than as a high-altitude process.

Whose community?

The first prosecutor of the ICC once said something to me I have thought about ever since: “A prosecutor always acts on behalf of a community.” Then he added, almost as an aside: “But there is no such thing as the international community.”

I disagree - partially. There is an international community. But it is a community of national communities. And if international criminal tribunals operate in a country, they primarily serve the community in that country. To serve that community, they must know what its justice needs are, how those needs evolve, and how their work relates to everything else happening in the justice ecosystem around them. This is not an argument against accountability. The ICC and other international tribunals should pursue perpetrators of atrocity crimes. The question is whether it can do so without deeply understanding the terrain, and without working in sync with the other mechanisms trying to deliver justice to the same people.

The Rome Statute frames prosecution not merely as a legal objective but as a means of protecting peace, security, and future generations. Peace starts on the ground, in the communities where people live. Global peace is the sum of many national peaceful places.

A different approach

The people-centred justice framework offers a way forward. Applied to international criminal justice, it would mean:

• Defining outcomes that connect to the lived experience of people in affected communities, not just legal outputs.

• Collecting rigorous data on what those communities need, how their views evolve, and how the tribunal’s work is perceived and experienced. • Embedding that data into decision-making on investigations, indictments, timing, and complementarity.

• Connecting, deliberately and structurally, to the national and local justice actors working on the downstream problems that are, in many cases, both a cause and a consequence of large-scale violence.

HiiL, the World Justice Project, and other organisations have the tools to do this kind of data collection. A feasibility study for benchmarks in international criminal justice, completed in 2020 by HiiL and the Nuremberg Academy, concluded it was not only possible but badly needed.

Several Assembly of States Parties countries bring deep peacemaking and peacebuilding experience: Switzerland, Norway, Kenya, South Africa, Colombia, Chile. The Netherlands hosts one of the world’s most significant rule of law and justice ecosystems.

There is an opportunity - and an argument - for these countries to work more deliberately on integrating international criminal justice, peacemaking, and people-centred approaches.

The two tribes have been in separate universes for too long. The people they both claim to serve would benefit enormously if they started talking.

Originally published on https://www.justicecompassadvisers.com/ Email: sam.muller@justicecompasadvisers.com