Legal Futures of the International Criminal Court

The Strategic Studies Team of Amnesty International Netherlands commissioned HiiL to deliver future scenarios for the ICC.

The Dutch Section of Amnesty International has supported the ICC from its inception and wants the court to become increasingly successful in achieving its aims. Therefore, they set out to test how a dialogue on the future of the ICC might be organized. They commissioned HiiL to devise a consultative process.

At the core of our study is the scenario method – an exploratory tool in which a possible set of future conditions are described. These scenarios facilitate thinking about policy and structural responses. Scenarios are not predictions: they are closer to simulations in which multiple trends converge. They can provide a rich set of stimuli for thinking about consequences, impacts, and responses. An organization can thus be better prepared to meet the unforeseeable future by learning to be prepared for foreseeable variations.

We interviewed leading experts and academics about political, economic, social and technological developments. We then compared them with a database of trends relevant to the justice sector. We identified more than 24 relevant trends, indicating both a complexity of impacts and a high degree of future uncertainty.

Download the report here.