On 15 September 2021, the International Criminal Court (ICC) held a Training for Counsel on Legal Tools with the participation of 216 lawyers from 46 States Parties to the Rome Statute and 12 non-States Parties, who are registered on the ICC List of Counsel and the List of Assistants to Counsel, and members of the legal teams currently active before the Court. This training was held online due to COVID-19 restrictions, and was organized with the financial support of the European Commission.
The training allowed participants to learn about the ICC Legal Tools Database (LTD) and its reference tools, making it possible for Counsel and their support staff to efficiently utilize these digital resources in their legal research, while providing for a better understanding of international criminal law and ICC jurisprudence.
The ICC’s Legal Tools collection is comprised of the LTD, together with several legal research and reference tools such as the Case Law Database, Case Matrix, the Elements Digest, and the Means of Proof Digest. The LTD is the leading online resource for retrieval of legal sources in international criminal law. It has several thousand users around the world and has seen more than 5 million annual hits in the past several years.
The database is freely accessible on the internet (https://www.legal-tools.org/). The LTD was created and is maintained with the financial support of the European Commission, and is administered by the Centre for International Law Research and Policy (CILRAP) which has also developed Lexsitus, an open-access digital capacity-development tool drawing on the LTD.
