Crimes under international criminal law (icl) are complex and are necessarily committed by complex nets of perpetrators with different degrees of responsibility. Claims have been raised against icl as a mechanism overly focused on the legal fiction of an individual perpetrator, obscuring the true collective dimension of the crimes. Despite these criticisms, icl has incorporated a mechanism to address this collective dimension, at least on the side of the victims: collective reparations. However, the emerging use of collective reparations faces important challenges in an avenue based on an individual-perpetrator logic. Here, I identify current difficulties in the early practice of collective reparations in international criminal justice. These difficulties relate mainly with procedural issues and the role of the ‘adjunct mechanisms’ such as the Trust Fund for Victims (tfv). I submit that these difficulties reflect the inherent tensions present in the asymmetrical treatment of the collective dimension of the crimes

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In this article, I focus on the work of the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (Movice) in Colombia. The work of Movice, I suggest, is an example of how the category of "victim" from international law discourse is adopted and used from below by victims of mass atrocities. I show that, through this category, Movice attempts to introduce an alternative narrative of the internal armed conflict in which the state is a perpetrator of violence against civilian population as part of a practice of elimination of political opposition through violent means. To do this, I focus on three political opportunities in which Movice deployed the category of victim between 2005 and 2016. I suggest that Movice is an example of how a movement of victims can adopt categories of international law to frame their struggles and, in doing so, infuse them with new contents.

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