International Criminal Court

The ICC has issued its first arrest warrant against a ruling head of state. Sudanese president Omar Hassan al Bashir faces charges war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC is one of those noble ideas that have been subverted by powerful vested interests. The idea of the ICC is to ensure that tyrannical regimes do not get away with visiting crimes on their people by claiming national sovereignty.

Unfortunately, the ICC is likely to remain a paper tiger because it has not been ratified by and cannot operate against several countries including the US. Indeed, the US allowed the ICC to come into being on the understanding that its own forces operating abroad would be exempt fro the purview of the ICC.

In an article in TOI, Ramesh Thakur places the ICC's verdict against the Sudanese head of state in perspective (the four verdicts given so far are all against Africans). One cannot but conclude that the ICC merely reinforces what we already know about the rule of law: one set for the rules for the powerful and another set for the powerless:

Yet, no senior US general or cabinet member is likely to face international criminal prosecution for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or other abuses. Does the world not eserve an honest accounting of what happened in Fallujah in April 2004 how many were killed, and whether any criminality was involved, including the use of chemical weapons prohibited under international humanitarian law? Nuremberg was supposedly about who started the war, not who lost; we know who started the Iraq war and we know they have not been called to account for the crime. What of charges of war crimes by Hamas and Israelis in Gaza earlier this year?

Unlike Bashir or any of the other Africans in the dock, whose alleged atrocities were limited to national jurisdictions, the George W Bush administration asserted and exercised the right to kidnap suspected enemies in the war on terror anywhere in the world and take them anywhere else, including countries known to torture suspects. Many western allies colluded in this distasteful practice of rendition. No westerner has faced criminal trial for it. In a surreal twist worthy of Kafka, western governments send terror suspects to be tortured to countries which they then brand as human rights abusers. Consider the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. It has tried several Serbs, but no NATO national. Might it have something to do with the tribunal being located in a NATO country, its budget being paid mostly by NATO countries and its reliance on NATO for collection of evidence and enforcement of warrants.