Surprising plans in The Hague International Criminal Court could replace Microsoft with German software

Germany is not exactly known as the home of major software developments. Now it is said that the International Criminal Court wants to replace applications of the tech giant Microsoft with software from Germany. However, there is a reason behind this other than technical superiority.

According to a media report, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is putting its Microsoft office software to the test and wants to replace it with the German program package OpenDesk. The background is the concern about possible sanctions by the US government under President Donald Trump, reported the “Handelsblatt”.

According to this, the Court is about to sign a contract with the State Centre for Digital Sovereignty (Zendis), which coordinates the development of OpenDesk. “Given the circumstances, we must reduce dependencies and strengthen the technological autonomy of the Court of Justice - even if this is expensive, inefficient and inconvenient in the short term,” Osvaldo Zavala Giler, who is responsible for IT at the ICC, told the newspaper.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a permanent international criminal court outside the United Nations (UN) and has its headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands. Its legal basis is the multilateral Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 17. July 1998. The ICC started its activities on 1. July 2002 and is responsible for more than 120 states - about 60 percent of all states worldwide.

The court is responsible, among other things, for crimes against humanity. In 2023, it had issued an international arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, but it has not yet been executed. Last year, among other things, an arrest warrant was issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and against leaders of the radical Islamic Hamas militia. Especially the arrest warrant against Netanyahu had insturbed Trump.