2026 Theses Master's

Coherence, Consistency, and Accountability: Crime Classification, Modes of Liability, and Sentencing in Final Convictions of the International Criminal Court

Deshmukh, Alisha

This thesis provides the first systematic comparative doctrinal analysis of all final International Criminal Court (ICC) core crime convictions, examining patterns across three parameters of criminal accountability under the Rome Statute: crime classification, modes of liability, and sentencing.

Employing the Comparative Analytical Matrix of ICC Convictions (CAMIC), a purpose-built analytical tool developed from the systematic review of over 70 primary ICC documents, the thesis analyzes the six Category A final convictions through the dual lenses of coherence and consistency. The findings reveal a clear hierarchy across the three parameters. Crime classification produces the most coherent and consistent outcomes, governed by the Rome Statute's precise definitional provisions and the Elements of Crimes. Sentencing occupies an intermediate position, coherent in its gravity-based structure but inconsistent in its transparent application. Modes of liability produce the least coherent and consistent outcomes, where the Statute's interpretive openness has generated doctrinal instability.

Critically, the three parameters form an interconnected accountability system in which instability in one cascades into the others, illustrated most starkly by the Katanga Regulation 55 reclassification and the Bemba acquittal. Underlying these patterns is a systemic transparency gap. The ICC's approach is broadly coherent in principle, but Chambers systematically fail to articulate the comparative reasoning that would make outcomes predictable, replicable, and meaningful to victims and future defendants. This gap is not an inevitable feature of international law but a correctable structural deficit in ICC jurisprudence.

The findings demonstrate that the concerns of Holá et al., Drumbl, and Werle and Jessberger regarding sentencing variation and doctrinal instability are not isolated problems but symptoms of this systemic transparency deficit, representing a contribution beyond Koskenniemi's inter-regime fragmentation thesis. The thesis concludes that the ICC largely achieves formal legal accountability but falls short of substantive accountability, which requires outcomes that are transparent, predictable, and meaningful. International criminal accountability is legally achievable; closing the gap between the Rome Statute's coherent framework in principle and the transparent, consistent jurisprudence needed to make that accountability meaningful in practice remains the challenge ahead.