The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2002 under the Rome Statute, creating the first permanent international court with jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The court developed sophisticated evidence-gathering protocols for situations where evidence must be collected in active conflict zones — including satellite imagery, survivor testimony, mass grave forensics, and digital evidence. It represented a new frontier in the internationalisation of criminal evidence gathering.

The establishment of the ICC represented a globalisation of the Nuremberg evidence principles and generated substantial literary and poetic engagement with international justice. Poets writing about conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East increasingly referenced ICC investigations and the role of evidence in prosecuting atrocity. The court's evidence-gathering procedures — particularly the use of survivor testimony — intersected with traditions of testimonial and documentary poetry about political violence that flourished in the early twenty-first century.