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An increasing number of commissions and investigative mechanisms have emerged at the United Nations, entrusted with a collaborative mandate to collect and preserve evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and to assist fair trials in national or international courts.

This thesis asks whether international law enables such UN investigations to fulfill their justice-facilitating functions. It analyzes enabling and constraining elements in the legal space for collaboration with key categories of actors: Individuals, States, other international organizations and UN entities, and non-State actors.

The thesis finds that UN investigations possess broad authority to collect information from willing sources, but that legal constraints on collaboration generally prevent them from fully realizing the functions and expectations placed upon them. If UN investigations are to realize the promise they embody of moving closer to justice, this dissonance between expectations and law should be addressed. The thesis invites a discussion of a recalibration of their functions, roles and legal spaces for collaboration, grounded in their increasingly consolidated relational practices.