Between nomos and nature: The International Criminal Court's garden as a critical legal topos

Abstract

This article studies the architectural design of the new ICC courthouse complex thatwas constructed in The Hague in 2015. It focuses on the design’s defining element:a hanging garden that contains seedlings from all of the Court’s member states.It analyses the garden as a topos that establishes a powerful and paradoxicalrelation between nature and culture, physis, and nomos. UsingGiorgio Agamben’s critique of sovereignty, it evaluates the constitution of theInternational Criminal Court. The article combines existing theories of thegarden as a space that mediates power (Aben and de Wit 2001) and as a criticalspace (Foucault 1986) in an analysis of legal institutions. It finds that thegarden defining the ICC’s courthouse architecture is both a sign of theradically democratic potential of its jurisdiction and where that potentialsadly falters and sovereign violence is reintroduced into the ICC’s order.