Whose Stories Count?

Abstract This article examines how the International Criminal Court (ICC) mediates the epistemic value of victims’ narratives. While victims are formally recognized through testimony or the ‘views and concerns’ mechanism, their accounts are filtered by prosecutorial discretion, evidentiary rules, representational practices, and judicial gatekeeping. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s theory of testimonial injustice and Shannon Fyfe’s adaptation to international criminal justice, this article reframes the analysis from questions of access to questions of reception: who is treated as a credible knower, which narrative forms are privileged, and how courtroom hierarchies organize recognition. Empirically, the study is based on 17 semi-structured interviews with ICC professionals, mapping the institutional mechanisms that translate lived experiences into legally cognisable knowledge. Findings show that concise, individualized, fact-centred accounts are more readily incorporated, whereas collective, affective, or culturally framed narratives face structural constraints and are recognized only inconsistently across institutional contexts. This article concludes that the epistemic reception of victims’ narratives is vital to the legitimacy of international criminal justice and suggests both pragmatic reforms and avenues for future research, with a focus on involving victims themselves to strengthen this dimension of the ICC’s work.