Eventually, the first cases before the ICC and the ECCC reached the adjudication stage. Based on a review of the court’s voluminous legal records and in-depth interviews with those involved, this chapter identifies the ICC’s main adjudicative practices regarding reparations. The goal is to understand how reparations were conceived through these practices, and how these practices shaped the reparations outcomes decided by the judges. Chapter 6 examines the first two reparations cases before the ICC, namely the cases concerning Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga. In 2012, the ICC delivered its first reparations decision in Lubanga. This decision was amended by the ICC Appeals Chamber in 2015. The account ends with a second reparations decision by the Appeal Chamber in 2019. The second ICC case to reach the reparations phase was Katanga, where a reparations order at first instance was rendered in 2017 and an appeals judgment in 2018.

This chapter examines the contribution of the Special Court for Sierra Leone caselaw on the prosecution of child recruitment as a war crime under international law. The Sierra Leone conflict was widely known for its conscriptions of children as child soldiers, who under the influence of fear, drugs, and hallucinogens committed grave atrocities across Sierra Leone. Although the crime of child recruitment and conscription was recognized in 1998 when the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court was adopted, the Special Court was the first court to successfully charge and prosecute this particular war crime. In analyzing this novel prosecution, this chapter first addresses the creation and recognition of the war crime of child recruitment within the Rome Statute. Second, it examines the reasoning of the Appeals Chamber in holding that child recruitment is a crime recognized under customary international law. Third, it assesses the impact of the Special Court’s work on prosecuting child recruitment in developing the actus reus and mens rea of the crime. Finally, this chapter examines the impact of the Special Court on the International Criminal Court’s prosecutions of child recruitment in the recent cases of Lubanga and Ongwen.

Chapter 3 focuses entirely on the reparation system at the ICC. The purpose of this chapter is to engage in an in-depth discussion of the development of reparative justice at the ICC, from theory to practice. This chapter analyzes some of the key challenges that the court is facing or will likely encounter in dealing with reparative justice within the context of international criminal prosecutions and trials. This chapter is devoted to fully engaging with the issues emerging from adding a reparative dimension in a primarily criminal process and how the criminal and civil dimension are intertwined, since reparations are dependent upon criminal conviction, and how both dimensions are reconciled in practice by the court and how they should be reconciled in the future. It also aims to provide a timely and original in-depth discussion of the first four cases dealing with reparations, which will pave the way and lay the foundation for the reparation system at the ICC for years to come. These cases are: the first case before the ICC (The Prosecutor v. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo), which established principles of reparations, and its concrete impact for the development of reparations at the court; the case of the The Prosecutor v. Germain Katanga, which presented a unique set of issues, including individual reparations of a modest amount; the case of the The Prosecutor v. Al Mahdi, which presented original questions such as the concept of victims of cultural heritage; and the case of the The Prosecutor v. Jean-Pierre Bemba, which is close to being decided at the time of writing, and will present unique challenges for the adjudication of reparations by the ICC considering the high number of victims authorized to participate in proceedings (more than 5,000). This in-depth analysis of cases is original and precisely one of the factors that distinguishes this volume from previous books in the field. A comparison of this ground-breaking jurisprudence informs how the decisions of the court align and diverge on key issues, shed light on unique challenges the court is facing and provides room for some recommendations for future development, based on concrete experiences.