It has been said of the redemptive quality of procedural reform that it is “about nine parts myth and one part coconut oil.” Yet, as the recent history of the United Nations shows, failure to enact adequate procedural reform can have damaging consequences for an organization and its activities. In the targeted-sanctions context, litigation in over thirty national and regional courts over due process deficiencies has had a “significant impact on the regime,” placing it “at a legal crossroads.” In the peacekeeping context, the United Nations’ position that claims in the ongoing Haiti cholera controversy are “not receivable” has been described in extensive and uniformly critical press coverage as the United Nations’ “Watergate, except with far fewer consequences for the people responsible.” Complacency in the face of allegations of sexual abuse by UN blue helmets led to the unprecedented ousting of a special representative to the secretary-general in the Central African Republic. Economizing on due process standards is proving to be a false economy.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) have sentenced over 130 perpetrators for genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, or war crimes. Sentencing judgments discuss the factors considered by the judges and impose a term of imprisonment. We regressed the sentence length meted out for each perpetrator on the doctrinal factors said to explain the term of imprisonment and on other factors rumored to affect sentencing. We find that the gravity of the crime and aggravating factors declared by the Tribunals as sentencing factors are significantly related to sentence length but that the mitigating factors proclaimed by the tribunals—all but one of which are associated with diplomatic and policy objectives—are not significantly related to the term of imprisonment. We conclude that international criminal sentences prioritize punishment of the individual based on the seriousness of the crime over the other diplomatic and policy goals that the judges claim to be pursuing. We conjecture that this discrepancy is based on functional differences: the sentencing judgment discussion seeks to advance the many policy objectives of the Tribunals, while the declared term of imprisonment is largely an expressive act of retributive justice, which might also facilitate deterrence and reconciliation.

Twenty-five years ago, in this Journal, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright argued that the structures of international law “privilege men.” As shown in Table 1, which summarizes data from a forthcoming article, on nine of twelve international courts of varied size, subject-matter jurisdiction, and global and regional membership, women made up 20 percent or less of the bench in mid 2015. On many of these courts, the percentage of women on the bench has stayed constant, vacillated, or even declined over time. Women made up a lower percentage of the bench in mid 2015 than in previous years on two-thirds of the courts surveyed.