The International Criminal Court’s ‘Accessible Victim’

This article explores how efforts to promote efficiency have shaped the range of victims that participate in proceedings before the International Criminal Court (ICC). It shows how the Court’s implementation of victim participation, shaped by external constraints, produces an ‘accessible victim’ that is not representative of the range of individuals harmed through the commission of international crime. The accessible victim, who is legally accommodated, locally represented, centrally located, interested, and otherwise unobstructed, is less likely to represent groups that are marginalised within society on the basis of characteristics such as age, gender, sexuality, disability and socio-economic status. The article sets out the implications of the accessible victim in terms of the expressive capacity of the ICC and the harm that marginalisation can cause through secondary victimisation and epistemic injustice. It highlights the significance of strategic expressivism in the Court’s work as a harm reduction tool in this context.