Why do international criminal trials exist? In this chapter, I examine the aims of international criminal law in order to better understand the system of international criminal law, its institutions and its processes. Identifying the aspirations, values and underpinnings of international criminal law is key to analysing its achievements: does international criminal law do what it says it aims to? We can then move to a space of critical engagement and of examining structural causes for success and limitation. Analysing these aims is also crucial to securing a strong examination of international criminal procedure: without understanding the rationales behind international criminal law and its trials, it is difficult to understand their operation.

Given the centrality of aims to these questions of achievement and limitation, discussions around the aims of international criminal law have been persistent – and have only increased in recent years with the ‘critical turn’ of international criminal law scholarship. However, as I show, this discourse regarding the aims of international criminal law and procedure suffers from a lack of clarity. In the first part of this chapter, I argue that there has been a conflation of three levels of analysis: the system of law, its institutions of courts and tribunals, and its trial processes. I argue that it is important to understand these as three separate levels of analysis – capable of supporting different aims or of supporting the same aims in different ways. This division into three levels of analysis (the system of law, its institutions and its trials), and sorting the aims against these levels, is a new way of understanding how international criminal law, and its aims, interact.

However, several of the aims that have been placed on the level of the trial are problematic; and in the second part of this chapter, I demonstrate this with reference to three aims: ending impunity, giving a meaningful voice to victims, and the search for the truth. In the final section of this chapter, I then argue that a recalibration of the aims of international criminal trials is needed and that the aims of the trial should properly emphasise the aim of a forensic determination of the accused's guilt or innocence.