Toward Cybersecurity Standards for Digital Evidence at the ICC

James Robert Quick

I. International Criminal Justice Has Entered the Digital Evidence Era Without Digital Forensics Standards

The International Criminal Court has modernized the collection of evidence faster than it has modernized the authentication of evidence. That gap, between enthusiastic embrace of digital submission infrastructure and an underdeveloped framework for forensic-grade verification, has become one of the most consequential unresolved problems in contemporary international criminal procedure. Wars are now documented through smartphones, satellite imagery, Telegram channels, and open-source investigations of a sophistication unimaginable a decade ago; the Office of the Prosecutor receives hundreds of thousands of digital submissions annually through platforms built for the task. And, working with Eurojust, the Office of the Prosecutor has issued guidance to civil society organizations for documenting those crimes. The evidentiary framework governing those submissions, however, remains substantially anchored in assumptions developed for an analog world.

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The “Impunity Clause” by Another Name: Article 46A bis of the Malabo Protocol and the Crisis of Accountability in Africa

Bonita Ayuko  

Few provisions in African international law have attracted as much critical attention, or as blunt a nickname, as Article 46A bis of the Malabo Protocol. This post takes that nickname seriously. It asks whether the label “impunity clause” is legally earned, politically inevitable, or simply unavoidable given the way African states have approached the ICC. Drawing on the contrast with Article 27 of the Rome Statute and the 2019 Al-Bashir Appeals Chamber judgment, it argues that Africa’s recent trajectory, from Malabo’s immunity clause to the Sahel’s exit from the ICC, is less about rejecting accountability than about a deeply contested struggle over who gets to define it.

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Code of War: How AI Firms Are Rewriting the Rules of War and what that means for International Criminal Law


Efthimia (Mariefaye) Bechrakis, Esq.

On March 26, 2026, a federal judge blocked the Pentagon from branding Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” The ruling does more than grant an early legal victory for Anthropic. It exposes a deeper structural shift in how the boundaries of military power are being negotiated at a moment when contemporary warfare is increasingly mediated by Artificial intelligence.  For International Criminal Law (ICL), this shift raises a more fundamental question: who bears responsibility when the conditions under which force is exercised are shaped, not on the battlefield, but upstream, through privately designed systems?

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Synthetic Abuse, Real Harm: Closing the International Law Gap on AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material

By Mariefaye (Efthimia) Bechrakis, Esq.

Introduction

Generative AI is often praised for its many transformative benefits across various fields, including that of law and human rights. The dual -use nature of the technology, however, has produced urgent harms, most notably the rapid rise of AI-generated synthetic child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Reports of AI generated images sexualizing children skyrocketed from roughly 4,700 in 2023 to 440,000 in the first half of 2025, while confirmed illegal AI-generated videos jumped from just two to over 1,200 in the same period. According to UNICEF, at least 1.2 million children across 11 countries disclosed having their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes in the past year.

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Beyond Military Responsibility: Corporate and Digital Complicity in the Rohingya Crisis

Deekshita Mathe

Introduction: The Multi-Layered Architecture of Atrocity

The persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar has been widely recognised by the international community as one of the most severe human rights crises of the twenty-first century. Investigations conducted by the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (FFM) documented mass killings, forced displacement, widespread sexual violence, and the systematic destruction of Rohingya villages, concluding that there were reasonable grounds to believe that acts amounting to genocide had been committed [1].

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