The article offers a comprehensive examination of the current crisis in the architecture of international criminal justice built around the International Criminal Court (ICC) and ad hoc international criminal tribunals. It identifies the conceptual flaws inherent in the ICC’s model of functional permanence and traces their impact on the Court’s legitimacy and ability to fulfil its mandate. Particular attention is paid to the political and legal drivers of the ICC’s delegitimization, including the refusal of key states to recognize its jurisdiction, the imposition of sanctions by the United States, and sustained criticism from states of the Global South. Within a broader theoretical framework, the article engages with the emerging “bloc-based” structure of international law and the tension between two competing paradigms – jus cogens and the socalled “rules-based order” – and assesses how this clash constrains the prospects for establishing a genuinely universal institution of international criminal justice. Against this background, the author articulates and substantiates three potential pathways for reforming the existing architecture of international criminal justice. Methodologically, the article combines formal legal, systemic and comparative approaches with historical legal analysis, enabling the author to relate current institutional models to their doctrinal and politico-legal foundations. The study draws extensively on treaty law, practice of international organizations and domestic judicial decisions. The article’s originality lies in linking a doctrinal critique of the ICC’s functional permanence to the broader hypothesis of a fragmented, bloc-based international legal order and the competition between two normative paradigms, thereby offering a fresh perspective on the limits of universalizing international criminal justice. It argues that, given the profound divergence between the positions of Russia and a number of Global South states, on the one hand, and those of the “collective West”, on the other, the creation of a truly universal international criminal court is not a realistic prospect in the near term. As an alternative, the article advances three institutional reform scenarios: transforming the ICC into an organically permanent court, abandoning the permanentcourt model in favour of a renewed system of ad hoc tribunals, and embedding international criminal justice within the structure of the International Court of Justice. The author concludes that the architecture of international criminal justice must be rethought as a coherent system grounded in effective accountability mechanisms for offences against the administration of justice. Special emphasis is placed on the proposition that the Russian Federation, as the custodian of the Nuremberg legacy and a jurisdiction with a well-developed doctrine of international and criminal law, is uniquely positioned to shape the future reform agenda in this field.
Ekaterina Alekseevna Kopylova (Sun,) studied this question.