The term 'Legal Tools' refers to online legal-information services developed by the ICC Legal Tools Project since 2006, primarily with support from the European Union. The main services are the Legal Tools Database ('LTD'), the Legal Tools Website, and the Case Matrix. The anthology ''Active Complementarity: Legal Information Transfer'' provides comprehensive information about the ICC Legal Tools Project and its open access value-base. The ''Legal Tools Database'' is an online

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

international criminal law International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetrat ...

. It provides legal practitioners, researchers, students and the general public with

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

to all relevant legal sources in international criminal law, including information on the core international crimes (

genocide Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people. Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term, defined genocide as "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" by ...

crimes against humanity Crimes against humanity are certain serious crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as ...

war crimes A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hos ...

and the

crime of aggression The crime of aggression was conceived by Soviet jurist Aron Trainin in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. Pictured: Stalingrad in ruins, December 1942 A crime of aggression or crime against peace is the p ...

). Being a tool of

computer-assisted legal research Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machine ...

, the LTD provides access to all relevant

case law Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is a law that is based on precedents, that is the judicial decisions from previous cases, rather than law based on constitutions, statutes, or regulations. Case law uses the detailed facts of ...

, legislation (

statute A statute is a law or formal written enactment of a legislature. Statutes typically declare, command or prohibit something. Statutes are distinguished from court law and unwritten law (also known as common law) in that they are the expressed wil ...

s and

treaties A treaty is a formal, legally binding written agreement between sovereign states and/or international organizations that is governed by international law. A treaty may also be known as an international agreement, protocol, covenant, convention ...

), preparatory works as well as academic writings. All resources are stored under persistent URLs (so-called PURLs). As a consequence, courts, publishers (for example, the Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher) and other online services (such as Lexsitus and the CMN Knowledge Hub) hyperlink to the LTD-PURLs. The International Criminal Court links in its main public decisions to the LTD. For example, the judgement of the trial chamber in the case of Germain Katanga included 538

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to Data (computing), data by a user (computing), user's point and click, clicking or touchscreen, tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to ...

s. The LTD saw more than 6 million hits in 2018. As of 1 May 2019, it contained some 145,000 documents. The ''Case Matrix'' is another service of the ICC Legal Tools Project. It is a software that provides a matrix of the legal requirements of international crimes and modes of liability, on the one hand, and potential evidence or evidence, on the other. It has two digests of international case law quotations implemented at the level of elements of crime. The digests are also available in Lexsitus. There are online versions in English, Arabic and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. The Centre for International Law and Research (CILRAP) has hosted and serviced the Case Matrix since 2012. The creators of the Case Matrix, Morten Bergsmo and Ralph Hecksteden, won the 2008 Dieter Meurer Prize for Legal Informatics for its innovative qualities. The Case Matrix has motivated and informed the development of software such as I-DOC. The Case Matrix application has also inspired the name of the 'Case Matrix Network' which is the department of the Centre for International Law Research and Policy that is responsible for knowledge transfer and capacity development activities. The ''ICC Legal Tools Projec''t ('LTP') has led the development of the Legal Tools since their start in 2003. Morten Bergsmo founded the Project when he served as the Senior Legal Adviser of the Office of the Prosecutor of the

International Criminal Court The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an intergovernmental organization and International court, international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute ...

(2002-2005), and he has been the LTP Co-ordinator since. Devasheesh Bais is the Deputy Co-ordinator. Ralph Hecksteden has been the technical developer of the Project since 2005. The Project is supported by more than a dozen academic institutions and

non-governmental organization A non-governmental organization (NGO) is an independent, typically nonprofit organization that operates outside government control, though it may get a significant percentage of its funding from government or corporate sources. NGOs often focus ...

s from all continents, as well as by more than 40 CMN Fellows offered ''pro bono'' to the Project by the Centre for International Law Research and Policy (CILRAP). The European Union and Finland have been the main donors to the ICC Legal Tools Project. The institutional partners in the project have received support from other donors, such as Norway.

Contents of the Legal Tools Database

As of 1 May 2019, the Legal Tools Database contained more than 145,000 documents. The documents can be accessed in a tree-structure, where they are organized in nine main collections. Each collection has multiple sub-collections, and responsibility to update the collections is assigned to partners or CMN Fellows according to a detailed table of responsibilities.See https://www.legal-tools.org/en/status-of-work-on-the-tools/table-of-responsibilities/. These are the nine main collections of documents in the Legal Tools Database: * International Criminal Court Documents * Other International(ised) Criminal Jurisdictions * International Legal Instruments *

Human Rights Law International human rights law (IHRL) is the body of international law designed to promote human rights on social, regional, and domestic levels. As a form of international law, international human rights law is primarily made up of treaties, ag ...

Decisions and Documents * Other International Law Decisions and Documents * National Criminal Jurisdictions * Publications * United Nations War Crimes Commission * International(ised) Fact-Finding Mandates

References

External links

Official Website of the Legal Tools Project

Building a public commons of legal sources in international criminal law
(Leaflet on the Legal Tools-Database, PDF-File, 974KB)
Video: How to use the ICC Legal Tools
(English, Centre for International Law Research and Policy) *Official web site for the Case Matrix: https://www.casematrixnetwork.org/icc-case-matrix/. *Official web site of Lexsitus: https://cilrap-lexsitus.org/. *Official web site of the CMN Knowledge Hub: https://www.casematrixnetwork.org/cmn-knowledge-hub/. {{International Criminal Court, state=collapsed International Criminal Court Online law databases Legal research