“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance,” advised political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Advocates of the new International Criminal Court have sought to halt international human rights abuse through the application of judicial power. The alternative view-subtly implied in American objections to the court-recognized that military victory is (ironically, I admit) the key to peace. Despite well-meaning efforts by ICC advocates, the court is doomed to failure from its own flaws or abuse from its failure to properly recognize the role of military power.
The ICC, a United Nations body charged with prosecuting the world’s worst war criminals, will suffer from a lack of clarity in its purpose. The ICC statute grants the court jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression.
While the first three of these crimes are relatively well defined in the statute, the last, unfortunately, is not. At best this omission-made for a variety of political and logistical reasons-renders the court’s influence moot on all but the most grievous of international crimes. At worst it proffers chances that overzealous prosecutors or nations will attempt to prosecute American military members.
ICC proponents have bristled at this latter objection, which has been cited by the United States. as the primary reason for its withdrawal of support for the court. ICC advocates are quite correct that under present day circumstances chances of action by rogue prosecutors is minimal.
However, their rebuttals myopically see America’s current power as permanent. The day may very well come where the United Nations isn’t essentially controlled by the United States. Americans, moreover, are not the court’s only possible victims. A body with no definition of one of its primary goals offers ample chances for political games.
Perhaps the ICC’s greatest flaw is precisely that it fails to take the realities of power politics into account. If international politics is eternally anarchical (or even just largely anarchical), “judicial” power is inseparable from the military power that makes it possible.
Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic now faces prosecution from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, not because the ICTY came and nabbed him, but rather because American bombs and non-violent revolution in Serbia forced him out of power and into residence in the Netherlands’ Scheveningan Penitentiary Complex.
How, pray tell, does the ICC plan to prosecute its defendants if soldiers (probably American) don’t intervene in conflicts?
The United States has offered a solution to these flaws: Let the Security Council grant permission for each ICC prosecution. Doing so subjects the court to a degree of democratic control and more closely ties prosecutions to the military actions that make them possible. ICC advocates have failed to accept this compromise, however.
Apparently the supposedly unilateralist United States is the only nation with a responsibility to compromise.
Smith Lilley is a senior political science major.