INTRODUCTION

Delivering effective, fair and expeditious justice in a multilingual and multicultural context is never an easy task, but for the International Criminal Court (ICC or the Court) the challenge is even greater. The ICC is the only permanent international criminal justice institution in the world and with 123 member states parties to date and the potential for others to be referred by the United Nations (UN) Security Council; its jurisdictional reach spans virtually every country and language. All of the Court's cases are currently from Africa, the most linguistically diverse continent in the world with more than 2,000 different languages. Ensuring that defendants, victims and affected communities are able to fully understand, participate in and follow proceedings has significant time and resource implications, both of which the ICC can ill afford.

The trial of Abdallah Banda Abakaer Nourain (Abdallah Banda) concerning war crimes committed against the African Union (AU) Peacekeeping Mission at the Haskanita Military Group Site in Darfur, Sudan is a case in point. Abdallah Banda speaks and understands only one language – Zaghawa, a little known unwritten language with a limited vocabulary of 5,000 words.5 Taking steps to transliterate evidentiary material for the benefi t of the accused has delayed the trial for several years at significant cost. The Banda challenges are likely to feature in several other cases in the coming years and states parties to the Rome Statute establishing the ICC are already complaining about the mushrooming budget.6 Outside the courtroom, this Hague-based court is also hard-pressed to communicate and connect with affected communities in a language which they understand, a challenge which it dares not ignore.

Delivering justice in a linguistically and culturally diverse context is not peculiar to the ICC. Its predecessor ad hoc tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) also grappled with language-related challenges where the language spoken by the majority of witnesses and accused differed from the Tribunal's working languages, English and French.