Why being there mattered : staged transparency at the International Criminal Court

Abstract

The International Criminal Court (ICC) represents a criminal justice setting exceptionally welcoming to discourse scholars. The court website provides ample information about ongoing cases, hearings are livestreamed, and transcripts, video footage, and other relevant documents are available online. Against this background of comprehensive transparency, this paper explores the additional value of physically attending ICC trial hearings. An auto-ethnography of how the ICC court landscape structures the visitor's path to the courtroom gallery, it is claimed, brings out the staged nature of the Court's projection of transparency. The ensuing discussion explicates the implications of these staging practices for the hearing transcripts published on the ICC website. It is argued that these transcripts contribute to this projection of transparency by obfuscating the processes through which the Court constitutes its audiences, both the ‘physical’ gallery audience as well as its ‘virtual’ counterpart browsing through the materials on the ICC website. In this sense, the paper enhances our understanding of ICC hearing transcripts as ethnographic objects, because it shows that their sociocultural entanglements also extend to the ways in which they are disseminated and the role they play in staging the ICC as a transparent institution.