The International Criminal Court has been making headlines lately--from the October conviction in the Darfur case for war crimes and crimes against humanity to ongoing debates about arrest warrants and state cooperation.
If you're researching the ICC-- the permanent court prosecuting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes--or international criminal law more broadly, there's a valuable free resource to check out: the ICC Legal Tools Database.
While many researchers head straight to the ICC's official website for case documents, the Legal Tools Database (maintained by the ICC) goes far beyond what the main ICC site offers. In addition to ICC cases, the Legal Tools Database includes materials from international criminal tribunals dating back decades, including the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and others.
The Legal Tools Database contains over 50,000 documents--everything from court judgments and trial transcripts to legal briefs and tribunal statutes.
You can search by keyword, case name, and file name/number. Filters let you narrow results by document type (like judgments, decisions, or transcripts), phase of case, specific organization/tribunal, and other criteria.
Once you click on a particular case, you will get detailed metadata--such as document type, case phase, and page count—making it easier to evaluate your document's relevance before downloading it.
If you're new to the database, there are helpful tutorial films covering basic searching, navigating search results, and advanced features like persistent URLs for citation.
In brief, whether researching war crimes, genocide, or crimes against humanity, the Legal Tools Database offers essential judgments, decisions, and other documents in international criminal law. For further questions on international criminal law research, contact Sunil Rao, Foreign and International Law Librarian at the UW Law Library.
Submitted by Sunil Rao, on November 5, 2025
This article appears in the categories: Law Library
