The International Criminal Court in a nutshell

Imagine for a moment that you have a beef with your neighbors. But this is no ordinary beef. It’s a long-standing one because the houses and properties where you and your respective families live have been part of your heritage for generations, from your grandparents or great-grandparents down. There have been attempts at reconciliation, mediation, lawsuits, and so on down through the generations, and nothing has worked.

In the meantime, the enmity has quit being about property lines or privacy fences and has gotten personal. Those on both sides of the feud—because, by now, it’s a feud—have decided the problem isn’t the original one (by now it’s hard to remember what that actually was), but that your neighbors are simply enemies, with whom you have nothing in common and never will. You don’t share the same race, religion or creed. You’re not of the same ethnic or national background. Your politics are diametrically opposed. You figure that there is no basis for negotiation between you and you’re tired of futile negotiations and ineffective legal actions. So you decide to take matters into your own hands. You decide that you’re not only justified in using violence to settle your score, but also that, indeed, neither your next door neighbors nor anyone like them have a right to exist, period. Because as long as they’re alive, you presume, there will be trouble.

Problem is, from their house to the east on your block, everybody’s like them. Luckily, everybody from your property west is like you. So you talk to your like-minded neighbors to the west and solicit their help getting rid of everybody that’s not like all of you living on “your block”—because, by now, you’ve decided the block is indeed yours and should only be for people like you. Your arguments are convincing to people who think just like you and suddenly you find you have power. You are the leader on your block, or at least your half-block, but very soon to be your whole block…with a little help from your friends.

So you take charge and lay out a battle plan—more than a battle plan, actually, an extermination plan. You and your like-minded neighbors chip in and buy arms, jugs and lots of gasoline for the whole half-neighborhood. And one fine day, you and your followers meet at your place and, in a mob-like wave, take the other half of the block by storm, tossing your jugs of gasoline with flaming wicks in through windows, clubbing and slashing the unwanted neighbors as they flee their burning homes, shooting down the ones who stand their ground, killing even some of the fleeing women and children to make an example of them, to ensure that they get the message, that this is your block and that they will never again be welcome here.

Now, you and your like-minded followers level the charred ruins of your former neighbors’ homes, bulldoze away the debris and spread out to comfortably populate the entire block with only the most like-minded people you can invite and you even put a fence around your block and set up a neighborhood guard 24/7 to ensure your neighborhood remains ethnically and politically cleansed. But in order to make sure this never happens again, you set up an armed gang—a sort of Neighborhood Watch and Beyond—and send them out into other surrounding neighborhoods to seek out people like the ones who used to be your neighbors and to kill them in the most horrific ways you can think of, while terrorizing other members of their ethnic-political group, making sure they “get the message” to stay away.

Meanwhile, the rest of the town stands around watching, arms folded. Or perhaps they just shut themselves in their houses and ignore the noise and screaming completely.

Why? Because they have no jurisdiction over you. Long ago, your little corner of the world decided that each neighborhood would administer itself, make its own rules, mete out its own justice. So you’re not the slightest bit worried that anyone will be coming after you for heading up the mass murder and ethnic cleansing you’ve orchestrated. On your block, you’re the law. There’s no other law higher than yours to be appealed to. Basically, you can do whatever you want to whomever you want on your block.

Now, within the urban complex of which your block, your neighborhood, forms part, there is indeed a universal forum for justice, a court instituted to administer justice to the community as a whole. It is based on the fundamental tenets of the rule of law and has the mission of ensuring basic human and civil rights to every person within its jurisdiction. The only thing is, the neighborhoods and district to which it is supposed to administer justice are the same ones to which it owes its jurisdictional power. And as such, it is the neighborhoods that decide how effective that power is, not because they can cherry pick what the court can and can’t investigate, but because they have the power to accept or reject the court’s jurisdiction once established for the area.

You, as the leader of your neighborhood, have decided you don’t want the court meddling in your affairs (i.e., trying you and your cohorts for crimes against humanity and genocide, among other things), so when you were asked to sign a charter giving the court its jurisdiction, you simply refused. So, simple as that, the court has no jurisdiction over you and you, therefore, can get away with murder…mass murder.

Meanwhile, if your old neighbors—the ones you tortured, murdered and pursued into exile—should decide to use the same methods against you in order to take their old neighborhood back, they would be subject to criminal proceedings for the very same crimes against humanity that you can’t be tried for. Why? Because they signed the charter giving the central court its jurisdiction, since they believed in the rule of law, rather than in barbarism. So, yes, they will be held accountable.

Well…unless, that is, the court says it’s about to bring proceedings against them and they, therefore, decide to renege on the signing of the charter and say they now have decided to no longer recognize the jurisdiction of the central court. In that case, the court will no longer be able to try them for their heinous crimes either. In neighborhoods that don’t recognize the court, local law, even if it’s dispensed from the barrel of a gun, is the only law and the people in those neighborhoods are at its mercy.

In other words, the court can only try criminals if, and only if, the criminals themselves give their permission to be tried. If not, the court has no jurisdiction.

Does this sound surreal to you? If it doesn’t, it should, because it is surreal. It is the height of absolute nonsense, but it is the dilemma faced, since its founding, by the International Criminal Court (ICC), due to a series of intentional roadblocks thrown up within the United Nations, apparently to give the illusion of international justice without providing the tools necessary to make it a truly effective means of investigating and punishing wars of aggression, genocide, war crimes and other human rights violations throughout the world.

Resistance to the creation of an independent, fully functional ICC is, unfortunately, fostered by the bad example of the United States and other major nations, which fear that a truly effective ICC might eventually place their own leaders in the defendant’s dock.

In the days to come, I will be talking in more detail about the current state of the ICC, but for the time being, this is its dilemma in a nutshell.