The Elements Digest offers you excerpts from select international court decisions on the elements of the crimes in Articles 6, 7 and 8 and on legal requirements of modes of liability in Articles 25 and 28 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court. It is a case-law resource on subject-matter international criminal law, supplementing the immediate access that Lexsitus gives you to the ICC Statute, Rules of Procedure and Evidence, Elements of Crime document, preparatory works, commentary and videothek.

You find the list of judgments by clicking on ‘Decisions’ in the banner of the mustard-coloured Menu on your left. The judgments can be sorted by date or jurisdiction (ICC, ICTY, ICTR, ECCC or SCSL).

The Menu is first structured into four sections: Articles 6, 7, 8, and 25 and 28. Sections 6, 7 and 8 present common elements separately from the crime-specific elements (for Article 8, the common elements are displayed for each of the letters (a) through (e)). When you click on the dark hook in front of the common elements or crime that you are interested in, a list of elements will appear in the Menu. As opposed to the Elements of Crime document, the Digest also includes the mental elements of each crime or mode of liability.

When you click on an element, the Lexsitus page (with a unique URL) containing the digest for that element – the element page – will open in the central field (where you are now), from where you can read or copy the relevant part of the text. By using the plus-button in the mustard-coloured banner above the document, you can also add it to your reading list (for which you need to log-in in the upper-right corner of Lexsitus). The button to the immediate left in the same mustard-coloured banner allows you to copy the citation of this page of the Elements Digest (including its persistent URL in the ICC Legal Tools Database). You can paste it directly into the notes field on the right or your own document.

The element pages have three main sections: ‘Table of contents’, ‘Element’ and ‘Footnotes’. The ‘Table of contents’ section is hyperlinked to the contents of that element page. The ‘Element’ section gives you the extracts from decisions under relevant headings, with a hyperlink to the decision itself in the ICC Legal Tools Database. The ‘Footnotes’ section provides source information.

Both the ‘Table of contents’ and the ‘Element’ sections display the colour-coding used by the two Digests in Lexsitus:

• Green is the colour of the specific element to which the Lexsitus-page in question is dedicated. There are more than 800 such pages in each of the two Digests. This illustrates how comprehensive these two Lexsitus resources are.
• Red is the colour of one or more components of that element, as crystallized through case-law. If you like, the components concern more detailed parts of an element
• Orange is the colour of clusters or groups of means of proof.
• Purple is the colour of specific means of proof, understood as factors or categories that can serve as a source of proof relevant to a specific legal requirement. Such factors are either taken from judgments, other expressions of practice of international criminal jurisdictions, publications, or proposed on the basis of either of these.
• Grey is the colour of specific types of proof.

The taxonomy or information-structure of the two Digests was originally created for the ICC Case Matrix in the Legal Advisory Section of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor in 2004-05. The universities of Göttingen, Laval and Oslo have subsequently contributed to their enhancement. Among the individuals who have contributed are Fathi A.R. Ahmed, Kai Ambos, Antonio Angotti, Enrique Carnero-Rojo, Alejandro Chehtman, Julia Grignon, Alexander Heinze, Vickie Iacobellis, Kiki A. Japutra, Sangkul Kim, Fannie Lafontaine, Justine Levasseur, Maria Luisa Pique, Christian Ranheim, Saurabh Sachan, Aleksandra Sidorenko, Alain-Guy Tachou Sipowo, Érick Sullivan and Ilia Utmelidze. Morten Bergsmo is the creator and overall editor of the Digests. We owe these colleagues a debt of gratitude.

The Lexsitus Team thanks the European Commission for support to the work on the Elements Digest and the Means of Proof Digest.

The Elements Digest exists in English, Arabic, French and Spanish.

Above you find a tutorial by Antonio Angotti on how to use the Elements Digest resource in Lexsitus.