Much ink has been spilt criticising the icc’s Ongwen trial judgment for its failure to grasp the cultural context in which the accused Ongwen and the Acholi community were embedded. Some scholars blame this on the poor quality of translation services, others attribute it to the ‘binarism’ of judgments. We offer another explanation for the Ongwen judgment’s deficiencies: its purely textual format. The judgment shows that the continued preference for textual judgments in international criminal law sterilises victims’ experiences, decontextualises evidence, and muffles objectivity. This ties into the historical preference for text over senses, a colonially engineered decision aimed at suppressing non-Western epistemologies. In this paper, we call for the international criminal law judgment to embrace ‘the opportunities of the wider sensory field’. Drawing on the pervasive sensory dimensions of international criminal law, we argue that a sensory reimagination of judgments would better serve international criminal law’s affective potential by empowering survivors and achieving a more reparative and reconstructive justice.

人们对国际刑事法院对翁文的审判判决进行了大量批评，因为它未能掌握被告翁文和阿乔利社区所处的文化背景。一些学者将此归咎于翻译服务质量差，另一些学者则将其归咎于判断的“二元论”。我们对翁文判决的缺陷提供了另一种解释：其纯粹的文本格式。该判决表明，国际刑法中对文本判决的持续偏爱抹杀了受害者的经历，使证据脱节，并压制了客观性。这与历史上对文本而非感官的偏好有关，这是殖民时期设计的决定，旨在压制非西方认识论。在本文中，我们呼吁国际刑法裁判要拥抱“更广阔的感官领域的机遇”。借鉴国际刑法普遍存在的感官维度，我们认为，对判决的感官重新想象将通过赋予幸存者权力并实现更具修复性和重建性的正义，更好地服务于国际刑法的情感潜力。