Chapter 6 starts from the insight that, despite international criminal law’s focus on individual responsibility, atrocity crimes are often a result of structural violence and ditto injustices: discrimination, social exclusion, exploitation, and so on. If the violence is structural, the suffering becomes social, that is, inherent in societal structures. The question remains how the legal order can respond to structural injustice and social suffering. The chapter argues that these forms of injustice register as ‘silent claims’ at the brink of the legal order, questioning its boundaries.

Existing scholarship has generally examined international law in public debates for how it helps to explain other phenomena, in particular decision-making by governments. This book gives a different account of international law in public debates by investigating the uses of that language for what it can tell us about the development of international law itself. I argue that there has been a move from the use of international legal language as part of collective justifications to the use of international law as an autonomous justification for state actions. This move is a central characteristic of a popular international law that I attempt to unravel in this book. This chapter presents the first step in that unravelling by describing two events that arose out of the 2003 Iraq War: the release of the Report of Iraq Inquiry in the UK and the outcomes of the World Tribunal on Iraq.