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How do three international courts – the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the European Court of Human Rights – interpret the concepts of race and ethnicity when it is necessary to do so in order to rule on cases brought before them? While international judges are increasingly uncomfortable with the older, rigid and essentializing visions of these notions, the search for new modes of elucidating them has taken place via a process of trial and error that has been a source of hesitation and ambiguity. The three courts characterize the issue that arises for them as an opposition between objective and subjective approaches to race and ethnicity. Upon examination, this distinction is revealed to be partly misleading as it masks the plurality of competing issues and conflates what are in reality contradictory positions. One further observes certain differences in the approach taken by the European Court, on the one hand, and the two international tribunals, on the other hand, that may partly be explained by the distinct structural constraints that impinge upon them.