Central to the study of international law in international relations is whether it and the legal institutions through which its practice flows can address or stem the worst kinds of human rights abuses. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been one such attempt made by the international community to do just that. This paper analyses whether the ICC has had a deterrent effect on grievous human rights abuses in a context, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where those abuses have been rife because of the ongoing civil conflicts that have spanned decades. Using time-series analysis and qualitative process tracing, this paper looked at the domestic institutional changes and trends in deliberate killings of civilians by both government and rebel forces to see if the ICC’s actions led to declines in violence. This paper finds support that certain ICC actions, specifically arrests and convictions, led to declines in violence by rebel groups, and that implementation of complementarity and social deterrence contributed to a decline in government forces killing of civilians. The implications of this paper are that future research should look at the effects of specific ICC actions in other contexts rather than dismissing or lumping them together generally.