When I was twelve, I sat in a tall courtroom, testifying to a judge about my child abduction case under the Hague convention. I was born in the United States but moved to Singapore as a child. When I was twelve years old, my mother fled Singapore, bringing me and my brother to the US. We were returned under Hague Convention Statutes.
My story isn’t one from war-torn Gaza. Or bombed out buildings in Kiev. But it still received due attention in time to make a difference in my life.
In 2025, the International Criminal Court (ICC) failed to amend the Rome Statute but instead held a Special Session to discuss proposed amendments regarding the crime of aggression. During this session, which took place from July 7-9 in New York, states postponed a decision on a proposal to harmonize the Court’s jurisdiction over aggression with other core crimes, pushing further consideration to 2029.
The ICC could have addressed what Isabelle Haßfurther, a senior legal advisor in the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) called “a glaring accountability gap in international criminal law: namely the one resulting from the ICC’s fragmented jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.”
If the ICC had amended the Rome Statute, the court would be allowed to act when at least one member involved in a conflict had ratified the change.
The last time the Rome Statute was amended was 2010. During those fifteen years of deliberation, wars of aggression continued unabated. Millions died while the international community debated jurisdictional technicalities. And now it will continue for another four years, so that the analysis—focused obsessively on procedural minutiae—can continue, while delaying meaningful action and failing to prevent ongoing violence.
Discussions of international legal frameworks—the ICC, the International Court of Justice, the various Hague institutions—typically revolve around metrics of efficacy, jurisdiction, and enforcement mechanisms. Scholars debate procedural reforms. Politicians invoke “strengthening institutions” in language so abstract it provokes nothing. Students learn to evaluate these structures through frameworks of state compliance and treaty ratifications.
What consistently vanishes from these conversations? The people these systems purport to serve. The children caught between warring nations. The families waiting years for resolution. The individuals whose entire futures hinge on whether these institutions function as promised. They are analyzed as data points, if they appear at all.
This disconnect isn’t merely an academic oversight—it fundamentally distorts how we evaluate success and failure in international justice. When we measure institutions solely through conviction rates, compliance statistics, and treaty signatures, we miss dimensions that actually matter. Dimensions like me and my brother.
Does a judgment have value if the affected parties never feel heard? Can we call an outcome successful if it alienated the very people it meant to serve? Because the answers to these questions resist the kind of quantification and technicality that these institutions broker in, no one poses them — except people like me.
The deeper problem is that we’ve normalized discussing international structures as if they exist independently of the people they affect. We treat them as self-justifying systems rather than tools in service of human dignity.
For sure, legal systems require structure and formality to function—objectivity serves crucial purposes. But when technical details dominate every conversation, when process eclipses purpose, we lose sight of why these institutions exist at all. International justice systems don’t exist to generate case studies or manufacture diplomatic consensus. They exist to serve real people in moments of crisis.
When a twelve-year-old like me testifies about atrocities. When asylum seekers wait in border camps for months. When populations wait years—sometimes decades—for acknowledgment of injustices they’ve suffered. These aren’t hypothetical scenarios for thought experiments. They’re the actual purpose of international justice, even when we forget it.
The Kampala Amendments exemplify this problem. This set of changes adopted during the 2010 Review Conference of the Rome Statute in Kampala, Uganda, — they added legal definitions and jurisdictional procedures for the crime of aggression to the International Criminal Court (ICC) framework — marked the first time a permanent, independent international court could hold national leaders personally accountable for the illegal use of force—acts considered the “supreme international crime” since the Nuremberg Trials.
Eight years elapsed between their adoption in 2010 and implementation in 2018. Eight years of institutional processes while the human urgency went unaddressed. If justice delayed is justice denied as former British Prime Minister William Gladstone said, our institutions are structured to guarantee delay — and denial.
International processes require formality to command the respect they need. Careful policymaking is essential.
But we cannot allow that formality to supersede its own justification.
We can maintain integrity while centering these institutions on the people they serve. This requires uncomfortable trade-offs—moments where urgent pragmatism must override procedural perfection.
What would it mean to genuinely prioritize humanity in international justice?
It means balancing procedural analysis with sustained attention to human impact. It means insisting that reform discussions include those directly affected, not just those who theorize about them from university offices and diplomatic chambers. It means recognizing that systems can function impeccably by their internal metrics while catastrophically failing the people who need them most.
Until our conversations reflect this reality, we will continue building impressive structures that fundamentally miss the point. We will create systems that work beautifully on paper but fail in practice. We will write reports about institutional success while people suffer preventable, sometimes life-ending failure.
The question isn’t whether international justice systems should exist. It’s whether we have the courage to measure them by whether they actually deliver justice—not to states, not to abstract principles, but to human beings whose lives depend on them.