In transitional justice, numerous studies have been carried out on victims of international crimes and on populations who have experienced war. To our knowledge, no study has integrated perceptions of sanction and legal procedure by individuals convicted by international criminal justice in their analysis. Yet, this perception is important to know if international criminal law manages to protect human rights.
People evaluate justice and the legitimacy of a legal decision according to their perception of procedural justice and of the legal outcome. Individuals consider their trial as fair and satisfactory to the extent that they consider having had the opportunity to express fully their point of view and that the decision-makers heard them and took them into consideration. Thus, the accused individual’s satisfaction does not only depend on the degree of harshness of the imposed sentence, but also on the type of sanction and the relationship between the expected or anticipated result and the actual sentence received. In this view, the process appears to be more decisive than the outcome. The international justice focuses on the objective of criminal law itself, namely, judging the accused. The realization of this goal however depends on the acceptance of the legitimacy of justice and its related sanctions by the convicted people.
So, based on interviews with individuals accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, we can assume that the realization of the objectives is not reached. We can already assume that some criteria have consequences on the perception of international criminal justice, i.e. level of responsibility of the person, the context in which the crime has been committed, and the nature of this crime itself.
