JUSTICE INFO: We know the International Criminal Court is now using the German operating system openDesk. How far has that migration gone?
BENJAMIN THORNE: If you check their website, you can see openDesk was created within the German government in 2003 following an analysis identifying “critical dependencies on individual technology providers”. It's kind of an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. The court – in the little it has said – has confirmed is that it is moving to that system. So that would be things like calendars and online conferences similar to Zoom or Teams. OpenDesk has email provisions and it has cloud storage capabilities. I'm not saying this is precisely what the ICC is using it for, but this is some of what openDesk offers. But it’s not clear yet whether they have moved everything or are moving.
This is in the context of a wake-up call within the court that they needed to think about the implications of being beholden to one part of the world, the US, when that part of the world has vowed to dismantle the ICC. But why don’t we know whether they have fully migrated or not?
When I ask, it's really off limits. It's not a topic my sources will discuss. Also, when we talk about technologies and the court, it is easy to focus on what the prosecutor's office is doing in terms of technology, and tech alternatives, but we should also think about the court as an institution and how it is embedded in specific technologies. Because court-wide sanctions have implications well beyond the Office of the Prosecutor.
Is the unwillingness to talk qualitatively different now from how it used to be? Is it in the context of US sanctions that they don't want to be specific?
I think there is an idea that they don't want to say what they're doing because they need to protect the court while it is under attack. At this particular moment you can understand why some people wouldn't want to talk about where they are in terms of the details of migrating. But it's also the more common veil of secrecy around the ICC. This is a continuation of what we've seen since the court's creation – various issues around transparency.
Is migrating all the materials that the ICC must have straightforward to do? What are the dangers of mismatched systems and losing clarity with compressing details?
From my conversations with those people responsible, though I am not an expert on the specific technology requirements of migrating, it's never straightforward. Some of the alternatives like openDesk may be suitable, but they are untested at scale. So, some of the risk is potentially around the fact that these are relatively new companies and new systems. It is a calculated risk I suppose, but we just don't know how robust these systems are going to be. As we move into the somewhat slightly less tested European options, this highlights that this is not the ICC in isolation; it's a much bigger and wider conversation around digital sovereignty and digital resilience and resistance and the idea that technology in its variety of forms has really become central to geopolitics, and the court is not in any way protected from that kind of geopolitics. We need to understand both what's happening in the ICC in relation to the imminent risk of sanctions and their potential effects on the current technologies, but also in the much bigger terrain of geopolitics and technology as well.
So you see the ICC’s tech moves as one part of the bigger geopolitical picture?
Some have argued that that bigger picture is why what happens at the ICC is so important and how state parties respond to the pressures particularly if the whole court is sanctioned. Potentially the US administration sees the ICC as an institutional pilot to see how it will respond to such attacks and this might have implications for how the US attacks other institutions in the future that either it dislikes or sees as a threat to US interests.
I'm not saying that the US administration intends to destroy a number of international institutions, but they have certainly been very aggressive in how they try to bring about change that they want. They're not doing it through more conventional traditional diplomatic means. Again, I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it is important how the court as an institution responds and whether that could then be a tool or a model for other institutions.
Another element of the bigger picture is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Do we have a sense of what the court is using, how and what it plans to do?
Yes, there are technologies that are being used by the Office of the Prosecutor, absolutely. Under [former ICC prosecutor] Karim Khan “Project Harmony” is the term to describe the AI-integrated and cloud-based evidence management platform which integrates Microsoft cloud alongside AI and eDiscovery tools like RelativityOne to process tens of thousands of evidentiary submissions. But there are technologies that are embedded throughout the court that could be directly affected because of the sanctions. Those everyday administrative technologies, the court has already started to migrate, apparently, to openDesk. Depending on who's talking about it, there's a framing that the court has dropped Microsoft. But there is likely still some overlap. In particular, we don't know how far the court is still embedded with Microsoft because of some of the AI technologies it uses. It may no longer use Microsoft Office, but the court’s cloud storage and other technologies have been reliant on Microsoft Azure. I'd be very surprised if there were not still Microsoft elements embedded with some of the technologies that the Office of the Prosecutor uses. The Office has a contract with Relativity for their product RelativityOne. That contract started in 2022. It's due to expire end of June 2027. RelativityOne is their e-discovery platform for analysis of evidence. It can be used to analyse video, and audio. It is a widely used e-discovery platform used within the legal industry (Relativity have rebranded RelativityOne to Relativity aiR very recently). Relativity, from my understanding, is directly reliant and embedded within Azure Cloud Storage, which is Microsoft. And my understanding is that that has not changed, because that is a Relativity infrastructure architecture.
Could openDesk be connected to Relativity?
Whether openDesk have the capacity and capabilities for their own cloud storage to integrate into that, and whether Relativity would be on board with that, I don't know. I’ve looked back at the last couple of years of ICC procurement announcements, and I haven't seen anything to replace Relativity. I may have missed something, but what you are asking is whether there are AI alternatives available to the court. Some of that is shaped by the ICC's own procurement rules based on value for money, fairness and transparency. It's not just ‘the OTP decides we need to move away from any e-discovery that is either directly or indirectly tied into to US tech or which can be affected by US control of the cloud’. They have to go through the institution’s procurement, which has its own particularities. So they're not entirely free.
Currently the Office of the Prosecutor has two deputies. Are you wondering whether they would feel able to make that big decision?
They might need to because we don’t know when the new chief prosecutor is going to be elected. But it also depends what experience they have previously had that could potentially shape their views on a new e-discovery platform. We know that Karim Khan came from his time at UNITAD with a good, strong relationship with Microsoft. So that was already the likely direction of the Office of the Prosecutor. My sense is that when he came, he knew the usefulness of Microsoft, even though apparently, he was warned against overreliance on one tech company. That might be quite different now because that need to be flexible must be in your thinking when you are considering what new tech might be needed at the court. But I‘m not sure whether it can be a technology that is necessarily completely detached from US.
Is Relativity the only e-discovery AI platform the Office of the Prosecutor uses as part of Project Harmony?
Project Harmony, from my understanding, is not a smooth set of platforms that goes across all the analysis and work within the Office of the Prosecutor. Some of it is fragmented; they use Relativity for some of it, but then there's also CaseMap+, which is a LexisNexis product, that's not currently integrated into Relativity. I've heard conversations that they might be looking for something going forward that is more integrated because, from a prosecutor's perspective using the different systems can be a bit clunky. If the data doesn't always go across each platform, the analysis can be limited.
Are there alternatives at the moment that the court is looking into?
From informal conversations I had there are ongoing discussions within the Office of the prosecutor around how they can make the different platforms they use and may need to use more integrated. Then obviously you might be tying yourself more into one provider which might then bring its own problems. NUIX, the Australian based e-discovery is being used as the cross-court e-discovery system in preparation and during trial. It is now integrated into the court’s judicial evidence management system and is heavily used by the registry, prosecution, and defence teams to process, analyse, and review massive volumes of digital evidence and legal records for complex international trials.
I’ve only started to come across it via the Duterte case. The defence made a submission recently complaining about the amount of evidence – thousands of pieces – being “dumped” and “in addition to its quantity, the quality of this material is abysmal,” they said. It said because of “unreadable and poorly-scanned [sic] items, blank documents, and documents that have been disclosed in a format unsupported by NUIX” it can’t do the evidence review, “meaning these items then cannot be coded or linked to other items in the record”. In addition, they said that it looks like “the Prosecution has not even read the AI summaries,” before sharing them, because some bolster their client’s defence. The judges though have refused the defence request for expert verification of evidence. This may be the first time we are seeing what issues the huge volume of evidence the court is gathering – maybe without sufficient integrated analysis – could cause. Back to the main issue: is NUIX not US technology?
My understanding is that its architecture was built with limited reliance on US tech. So that would potentially be useful. Other e-discovery systems you can find emerging very fast are called things like Reveal, Everlaw and Disco. They are often related to each other combining different elements. The extent to which they have no US reliance though is very limited.
What about the costs for all these new systems?
The costs and the contracts for Project Harmony went beyond the regular budget for the Office of the Prosecutor. These figures are from the Budget and Finance Committee. It says the Prosecutor’s Trust Fund had been pledged €40.27 million by states, of which not everything has come through. Its full name is the OTP Trust Fund for Advanced Technology and Specialized Capacity. Technological tools got the lion’s share with 66 per cent. That budget committee refers to “the current threat environment” and says they had to assess the spending “from an operational-resilience perspective, including the extent to which they depend on specific suppliers, jurisdictions, service providers or technical architecture. The Committee underlined that resilience-driven changes to such arrangements may require replacement, migration, duplication or reconfiguration of existing capabilities, and may therefore generate both one-off and recurrent implications for the regular budget,” which is a way to say they may have to spend more to move away from the US.
And the whole court and technology? There was a big extra budget for cyber security for the whole court last year…
The increased budget for cyber security stems largely from the 2023 cyberattack against the court, which reportedly cost the court €3.2 Million. Following this, a ring-fenced 3-year framework worth a total of €8.3 million was approved by the Assembly of States Parties, €3.4 million of which was approved in the 2025 budget, and a further €2.4 million in 2026 for non-recurrent investments to contribute towards the implantation of the Court’s Cybersecurity Blueprint which is scheduled to be completed in 2027.
Dr Benjamin Thorne is an Assistant Professor in Criminal Law at the University of Reading. His research expertise and interests focus on international criminal law and justice, transitional justice, the relationship between atrocity crime accountability-AI-digital evidence and investigation processes, and the role of witnesses in international justice.
