International Criminal Law♦ Spring 2026

Performing Publicity: Secrecy and Transparency in International Criminal Judgments

Gianluca Pantaleo & Timothy William Waters

International courts place a priority on rendering public judgment. Often their statutes require them to make judgments public. More generally, these courts rely on publicity for their authority—but they also rely, more than any other court system, on secrecy for their effectiveness. So how do these courts deal with the consequences of their own reliance on secrecy when rendering final judgment? This Article examines the complete corpus of final judgments from all the principal modern international criminal tribunals, deducing evidence of their classification, redactions in their text, and other indications of secrecy in their construction.