Germany has earned international recognition for prosecuting members of ISIS for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against Ezidis. Yet a recent analysis by legal researchers Anna-Julia Egger and Sophie Konrad asks a more uncomfortable question: if these trials are conducted in the name and interest of victims, what do they actually offer the Ezidi survivors who must participate in them?

Their article, International Criminal Proceedings Between Claim and Reality, published by Verfassungsblog on 24 July 2026, examines the proceedings before the Higher Regional Court of Munich that concluded earlier that month. The court sentenced Twana H.S. to life imprisonment and Asia R.A. to nine years and six months under juvenile criminal law for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. According to the court’s findings, two Ezidi girls, aged six and twelve at the time, were enslaved and subjected to severe physical, psychological and sexual abuse in Iraq and Syria between 2015 and 2017.

The judgment was significant. According to Egger and Konrad, it marked the tenth German criminal proceeding dealing with ISIS crimes against Ezidis. During the oral reasoning, the presiding judge emphasised that international law was being enforced in the interests of victims and expressed the hope that the proceedings could contribute both to historical reckoning and to restoring confidence among Ezidis.

Egger and Konrad do not question the importance of the convictions. Their concern is whether the way the proceedings were conducted lived up to those ambitions.

A survivor was heard — but at what cost?

The most troubling part of their analysis concerns one of the Ezidi survivors who participated in the proceedings as a co-plaintiff.

She testified over five days. According to the psychological assessment discussed during the oral reasoning of the judgment, direct eye contact with the accused reminded her of her rape and caused severe fear. Her existing post-traumatic stress disorder deteriorated significantly during the proceedings, and the authors state that she experienced considerable retraumatisation.

German criminal procedure provides mechanisms intended to protect vulnerable witnesses. Depending on the circumstances, defendants can temporarily be removed while a witness gives evidence, or testimony can take place audiovisually rather than through direct confrontation in the courtroom.

According to Egger and Konrad, neither option was used during the survivor’s questioning. They are careful not to claim that the judges acted unlawfully or that they know what considerations guided the court. From outside the proceedings, they acknowledge that it is impossible to reconstruct the full judicial balancing of witness protection against defence rights.

But that does not remove the contradiction they identify.

The same proceedings in which a survivor’s psychological condition reportedly deteriorated ended with an expression of hope from the court that giving testimony might contribute to the psychological processing of what Ezidi witnesses had endured.

That is where the article is at its strongest. It challenges an assumption that appears too easily in international criminal justice: that allowing survivors to testify is inherently empowering or healing.

Sometimes testimony may indeed provide recognition, agency or a sense that a survivor has finally been heard. But that cannot simply be presumed. If a survivor is forced to repeatedly recount sexual violence while facing those accused of abusing her, participation can itself carry a serious psychological cost.

A criminal court exists primarily to determine guilt according to law. It cannot become a therapeutic institution. But once courts themselves describe proceedings as being conducted in the interests of victims, they should also be prepared to examine whether avoidable harm is being imposed on those victims in the process.

Justice that Ezidis cannot easily follow

Egger and Konrad raise a second question that deserves particular attention from Ezidis: who can actually access these proceedings?

Germany has become one of the most important jurisdictions prosecuting ISIS crimes committed against Ezidis, even where those crimes occurred entirely outside German territory. Yet the people whose genocide is being adjudicated may live in Iraq, Armenia, Germany, other parts of Europe or much further abroad. Many do not speak German and cannot travel to Munich simply to sit in a courtroom.

The Munich court did take some steps towards greater accessibility. The authors note that information about the opening of proceedings and hearing dates was published, and that a detailed press release concerning the judgment was made available in German and English.

Their argument, however, is that this remains insufficient if international criminal proceedings are genuinely expected to contribute to historical understanding within the affected population.

They point to alternatives already seen elsewhere in Europe, including multilingual access to proceedings in the Netherlands and archival recording of international criminal cases in France. German law itself also provides possibilities for documentation in proceedings of exceptional contemporary historical significance.

The Munich court, according to their assessment, made only limited use of such mechanisms.

This criticism is particularly relevant in genocide cases. A judgment does not only determine the responsibility of individual defendants. It also creates part of the historical record of what happened. Witness testimony, judicial findings and documentary evidence may become important sources for future generations.

If that record remains largely confined to a German courtroom and German-language legal proceedings, the population whose history is being documented becomes dependent on journalists, lawyers and organisations to interpret the case for them.

There is something fundamentally incomplete about prosecuting genocide committed against Ezidis while making the resulting judicial record difficult for Ezidis themselves to access.

Where the analysis is convincing — and where it remains limited

Egger and Konrad’s article succeeds because it does not treat a genocide conviction as the end of the discussion. The defendants were convicted, international criminal law was applied and serious crimes against Ezidi children were judicially recognised. Those are substantial achievements. The authors nevertheless insist that legal success and survivor-centred justice are not necessarily the same thing.

Their criticism is also more persuasive because it is measured. They repeatedly acknowledge that witness protection must be balanced against defendants’ procedural rights and that judges have discretion. They do not accuse the Munich court of deliberately harming survivors. Instead, they identify a structural problem: taking additional protective or accessibility measures requires courts to justify decisions, weigh competing interests and sometimes enter relatively unfamiliar procedural territory, while doing nothing may appear legally safer and institutionally easier.

There is, however, one limitation to the article from an Ezidi perspective. It remains predominantly a legal analysis written about survivors rather than a piece built substantially around their own reflections on the proceedings. We learn what the psychological assessment recorded, what the court said and what procedural mechanisms existed, but comparatively little about how the Ezidi witnesses themselves understood justice, participation or the experience of testifying.

That does not weaken the legal argument. But it does demonstrate something of the problem the authors themselves are describing: even in discussions centred on victim participation, survivors can remain mediated through courts, experts and legal professionals.

For future research, hearing directly from Ezidi witnesses about what they wanted from these proceedings would add an important dimension. Some may regard giving evidence as unbearable but necessary. Others may feel strengthened by confronting perpetrators. Others may resent having to relive their experiences for institutions far removed from Sinjar. There is unlikely to be one universal survivor experience.

Recognition in court must mean more than recognition on paper

Germany’s international-crimes prosecutions have contributed significantly to the legal recognition of the genocide against Ezidis. They have also demonstrated that perpetrators may face prosecution years later and thousands of kilometres from the place where their crimes were committed.

Egger and Konrad’s article does not diminish that achievement. Instead, it asks Germany to take the next step.

If a court says that proceedings are conducted in the interests of victims, that principle should influence more than the language used when judgment is delivered. It should influence how traumatised witnesses are questioned, how unnecessary confrontation is avoided, how proceedings are communicated and whether the affected population can meaningfully follow the justice being carried out in its name.

The prosecution of genocide cannot undo what happened to Ezidi survivors. Nor can a courtroom provide every form of recognition or healing that survivors may need. But international criminal justice should at minimum ensure that the process of proving atrocities does not impose avoidable suffering on those who survived them.

For Ezidis, the significance of these cases lies not only in seeing ISIS members convicted. It also lies in whether the justice system recognises survivors as people with rights and needs of their own, rather than merely as witnesses required to establish someone else’s guilt.

That is ultimately the most important challenge raised by Egger and Konrad: a genocide conviction may be legally historic while the process that produced it still has room to become more humane.