The court should avoid all considerations of deterrence and instead focus on creating a credible and legitimate normative environment in which serious crimes are not tolerated

The prevention of serious international crimes is unquestionably one of the Court's ancillary objectives. However, this goal should not be confused with the ideas of specific and general deterrence. Specific deterrence is the concept whereby the threat of criminal punishment will discourage a particular potential and actual criminal from committing specific future criminal acts. General deterrence is the idea that the punishment of criminals will deter others from committing crimes. For the Court, the notion of deterrence as a component of the prevention of international crimes would be a misguided goal for several reasons. First, most clearly, specific and general deterrence are empirically intangible-in the international criminal realm they can neither be proved nor disproved in a methodologically meaningful manner, beyond conjecture. Deterrence, therefore, cannot, and should not, serve as an appreciable objective to be achieved by the Court. Second, deterrence seems to assume that perpetrators of the most serious crimes can be deterred by the threat of punishment. There are very good reasons to suspect that this is in fact not the case. Many perpetrators are socially and psychologically undeterrable. This does not mean that criminal justice in general and the work of the Court in particular have no preventive impact-only that specific and general deterrence constitute an unsound purpose. Third, a deterrence perspective is morally flawed because it adopts a rationalistic approach to crime that implicitly signals to potential serious criminals that their acts, however appalling, might somehow be absolved through future punishment-that is, that the crimes they will commit have, in the worst case, a predefined price tag of a prison sentence-permitting them to take the risk of punishment while pursuing their despicable ambitions. Fourth, specific and general deterrence cannot rest exclusively on the shoulders of a single institution, especially not a judicial one. Prevention should be viewed in a much broader, systemic, and long-term manner, demanding more from nonjudicial institutions.