Big news from the ICC today,
Appeals judges at the International Criminal Court have ordered the chamber to reconsider its decision to omit genocide from an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president.
The ruling in The Hague on Wednesday follows an appeal by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), to charge al-Bashir with genocide.
Moreno-Ocampo, who has implicated al-Bashir in the deaths of 35,000 people, said a genocide charge would ensure “the world knows what happened” to victims of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region.
“I believe it is important for the victims. That is why I am pursuing these charges,” he told the AFP news agency.
Erkki Kourula, an ICC judge, said the pre-trial chamber’s decision to not include genocide was based on an “erroneous standard of proof”.
I know that the very idea of the ICC is a somewhat controversial one in the non-signatory US. There are questions about what jurisdiction such an entity has and how much its actions infringe on the soverignty of independent nation-states. There is also the complaint that the ICC, like the UN, is too much a conceptual organization, that in a practical sense it doesn’t work and, in fact, couldn’t ever work.
Those concerns/complaints are fair and it is precisely because of them that I see the ICC’s pursuing of al-Bashir to be incredibly important. The blood curdling situation in Sudan is precisely why I can never bring myself to a place of true and unyielding isolationism or full-throated pacifism.
There are events and actions in the world that demand our attention and demand action — some times forceful action — to avert needless and discriminatory suffering and bloodshed. But there has to be a system in place, some kind of means of determining a burden of proof, a dispassionate and disinterested path of due process, and an increasingly established set of laws that ensure fairness as well as justice.
That the process of indictment, arrest, trial, and sentencing of those implicated in war crims and crimes against humanity is long, challenging, and arduous is entirely by necessity. These are the most heinous of accusations that can be leveld against an individual or government, so the process of determining the truth to the best of our ability ought to be an involved process. But pushing the process through to a successful conclusion — whatever that might be — helps to offset the impulse towards unilkateral action of the kind that has so negatively shapred our world vis-a-vis Iraq.
There needs to be an alternative.
That al-Bashir is a sitting President and the first elected official to be sought by the ICC does little to phase me, personally. Elected status ought not to absolve one from punishment for the most horrendous of crimes, if it can be proven, as seems to be the general consensus in regards to al-Bashir, that one is guilty.
And that there is a subset of nations who are grasping at their soverignty like a magic charm as defense against the grinding process of the ICC is, in some senses, a good thing, frankly. Hiding behind the invaluable notion of soverignty as justification for abbhorent crimes is not only cowardly and preciusly thin as a deflective maneuver, it also fundamentally erodes the very value of the concepot itself. An unwilingness to challenge such flimsy claims for fear of offense only adds fuel to that erosion.
But, again, the entire movement needs to take place under hospices of acceptable framework of due process to turn back the tide of “might equals right” that seems to have resurfaced in terms of explanatory prevalence and power. And that is in part why the ICC’s actions vis-a-vis Suden and al-Bashir are so important. It would seem that today we saw another painstakingly slow but necessary step in the right direction.
(h/t: CBC)
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I don’t know. I’m sympathetic to the idea but the ICC, indeed the UN itself and also the strange new administrative web of the EU always worries me. Who exactly appoints these people? What are their terms in office? Who do they answer to and who does that person answer to? What methods are in place that constrain their behavior? Who/What watchdogs them? In order for the kind of transnational organizations you’re talking about to command the support outside of the ranks of the idealists and dreamers that they would need to have the impact you want them to have these questions would have to be answered (and answered well).
And even if they were answered well, if they were responsible and accountable… wouldn’t they start looking an awful lot like some kind of supra-planetary government?
New World Order.
Alex Jones has proven to be amazingly prescient.
I just hope it takes GWB’s war of aggression in Iraq to trail.
I’m going to be a squish here, but Scott, quite honestly what makes the ICC arrest warrant for Bashir, so different from the Iraq situation?
With respect to Iraq, Saddam was a member of the UN, violated its resolutions, and however flimsy they may have been our initial legal reasoning for invading Iraq was to enforce previously holding and passed UN resolutions.
With respect to the ICC, Bashir’s Sudan is not a signatory (they unsigned) to the ICC and rejects the authority of the court, which has determined it has enough evidence to call for his arrest. Moreover, the membership of the ICC represents a cadre of European, South American, and African countries a minority of global population and significantly less than the UN’s.
I’m glad you point out the jurisdictional issues surrounding the ICC but when China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Israel and the US, along with much of the Islamic world hasn’t signed onto the court we’re looking at a global organization that excludes the majority of the world’s population and a significant number of adherents to the world’s major religions. Though it is a secular institution, how does that lack of diversity affect the scope or range of the ICC?
I opposed the Iraq War but it seems to me that the international justification here seems flimsier and the main difference is that it’s a different group of countries leading the charge.
Hey, if Bashir doesn’t accept that he’s a member of our global society and that we have laws, he can move to Somalia.
Almost a solid minute of laughter for that. Nice one, Jay.
Good Lord, that argument drives me nuts.
But the neocons do have a point. I’ll try to channel my inner one for a few minutes.
Look, we know that Bashir is a crook. We know that he’s awful. Genocide. We know that he’s murdered a buncha people and that there is a pretty decent pile of bodies. The debate over genocide isn’t one of “has he killed anybody” but “is the pile of bodies *THIS* high yet or is it still only *THAT* high?”
Looking at what he’s done/doing makes the stomach turn. This is wrong. Something ought to be done.
But the problem is that if we start going after dragons to slay, we have multiple problems. Why this one rather than that one? Why this one when everyone complained about us going after one just like him? How responsible will we be for the peasants he was genociding after we remove him from power? Hey, say what you will about genocide, you aren’t responsible for feeding them after you’ve imposed your will. After we impose our will on him, won’t we have to be in charge of Sudan for a year or five? Don’t we have a responsibility to these people after we dismantle their head of state?
The ICC diffuses the responsibility for these questions away from any one country. When the US goes in and kills a dictator, the US broke it, the US bought it. When the ICC goes in… hey, they just extracted a guy and put him on trial. It’s not Denmark’s fault. It’s not Britain’s fault. It’s not France’s fault. It allows something to be done without having to answer the tougher questions.
Now I need to go waterboard my inner neocon again. He talks too much sometimes.
Well the other issue I forgot to bring up is that the ICC is kind of like the President’s terror trials. Have you noticed that they tend to indict people whose guilt is widely known/suspected? Lately, I’ve questioned how much of it is a fair judicial process and how much of it is an elaborate show trial meant to provide justification for something nobody really doubted existed in the first place.
Why should we care if Omar al-Bashir kills his own people? What happened to the liberal respect for a country and its autonomy? If you are going to start interfering in other countries affairs, why not start with the beloved North Korean leader?
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