Chapter 7 explores the application of the individual criminal responsibility rules to the facts of individual cases at the International Criminal Court (ICC). It looks at the facts and evidence presented by the prosecutor, as well as the conclusions of the judges at the pre-trial and trial stages of proceedings, to ask whether the requirements of the Rome Statute’s modes of liability are met. In view of the practices of the UN tribunals, many members of the international criminal justice community expected that the ICC judges would apply the Rome Statute in a manner that would render convictions easier. Instead, this chapter argues that the assessment of criminal responsibility at the Court has followed a different line of legal reasoning: applying the modes of liability in a restrained manner, regardless of the trial outcome. At the ICC the quality of the process has been cherished as the ultimate prerequisite for ‘ending impunity’ for those crimes. While this vision of international criminal law has been contested by some members of the international criminal justice field, such as human rights advocates, it has continued to dominate the ICC approach to assessing criminal responsibility.

Chapter 6 argues that the competition for delivering an authoritative interpretation of the criminal responsibility provisions in Article 25(3), Article 28, and Article 30 Rome Statute continued when the International Criminal Court (ICC) began operation. This chapter shows that the interpretation of Article 25(3) should be understood not only as an indication of the growing influence of civil law norms, as has been often suggested in the legal literature, but also with respect to other important overlapping factors, namely the growing dissatisfaction with joint criminal enterprise and the novel institutional environment of the ICC. Next, Chapter 6 observes that the ICC judges have interpreted in a very restrained manner Article 28 and Article 30, perhaps going beyond the intentions of the Rome Statute drafters. This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the (re)construction of criminal responsibility rules at the ICC over a period of 15 years, including recent developments, which took place in 2020–2021 in the Yekatom and Ngaïssona, Abd-Al-Rahman and Said cases, thus highlighting the dynamic nature of international criminal law norms.

This chapter deals with the effect of an obligor's knowledge that the chose in action to which his obligation pertains has been equitably assigned. It shows that such knowledge is a necessary, but not sufficient, ingredient to generate a form of equitable liability as between the obligor and the assignee should the obligor breach his equitable duty to the assignee not to dishonestly assist the assignor ib breach her duties to her assignee.