In contemporary international criminal trials, the most fundamental guiding principles – those of fairness and rights – are divorced both from each other, and from procedural decisions. Indeed, I have shown how fairness has been rhetorically invoked to justify decisions that, nonetheless, have the effect of undermining the rights of the accused. Given the centrality of fairness and rights to international criminal law, this is a profound challenge for the system of law, its institutions and its processes. In these Conclusions, I want to tackle the question of what this tells us about international criminal law and its structural limitations and conditions of possibility. As I set out in the Introduction, this book has aimed to assist in the construction of a critical approach to procedural questions: to examine procedure in the context of international criminal law's biases and its economic, political, and social conditions and limitations. In these Conclusions, I make the ultimate normative argument of this book: that there should be a renewed closeness between fairness and rights in the context of procedural decision-making in these trials. However, I want to also reiterate that even this claim is uncomfortable, given the possibilities and impossibilities of international criminal law.

A. THEMES AND FINDINGS OF THIS BOOK – THE SPACE BETWEEN THE PHOTOCOPIER AND THE ACQUITTAL

This book has interrogated the space where fairness, rights and procedure meet – or fail to do so. I have described this as ‘the space between the photocopier and the acquittal’. The photocopier mentioned in the Introduction represents the problems that arise when fairness, rights and procedure are divergent. The acquittal demonstrates the possibility of what can happen when fairness, rights and procedure are integrated. I have demonstrated that fairness, rights and procedure currently fail to align at two levels: at the conceptual level (as demonstrated in Chapters One, Two and Three) and at the level of procedural decision-making (in Chapters Four, Five and Six). Yet, of course, it is not anticipated or hoped that any renewed association between fairness and rights will lead to an increase in acquittals – which, as I have said, are not always (or even often) the appropriate conclusion in international criminal trials.