It’s all coming along very nicely—the recent efforts to arrest war criminals and the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Who would have thought during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, or in the midst of the dark days of the Rwandan genocide that the hand of international justice would be reaching out to arrest the patrons of criminal activity, trying and imprisoning them? At some point, we may even see the architects of torture in the recent U.S. administration of George W. Bush investigated.
Global recognition of the importance of international criminal justice has been marred by fits and starts throughout most of the twentieth century, gaining momentum only recently. After the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in 1945 and 1946, there was a hiatus in the pursuit of international justice–a lapse that was finally broken when, in 1975, most of the world signed the Convention Against Torture. Twenty years later, the world community went even further, crafting the Convention Against War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in June 1998. More commonly known as the Rome Statute, the Convention Against War Crimes is indeed a momentous document, the first of its kind to take as its mission the need to “to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators” of the world’s most serious crimes, “and thus to contribute to the prevention of such crimes.”
The aftershocks of this latest convention were immediately felt by the world’s worst dictators, its principles being invoked by domestic courts throughout the world. A few months after the Rome convention, for example, Scotland Yard arrested the former dictator of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, in London. After long court hearings, for the first time anywhere a high court declared that sovereign immunity must not be allowed to become sovereign impunity. Alas, he was released on humanitarian grounds two years later, and died of a heart attack in 2006 without ever being brought to justice.
Since that time, the ball has only rolled with gathering speed. Just last month, a London judge issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, the former prime minister of Israel and a current leader in the Knesset. She was indicted for her role in last year’s Operation Cast Lead, which authorized the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip. Ms Livni avoided arrest by cancelling a pending trip to Britain. The British government was embarrassed, but could do nothing.
In Africa, the pressure of international justice is perhaps most pronounced, given the International Criminal Court’s determined pursuit of warlords and governments across the continent. The ICC was born out of the Rome Statute, and represents the most determined effort to date in the campaign to institutionalize the global pursuit of criminal justice. Last month, Kenya’s president and prime minister stopped a list of politicians implicated in Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence from being sent to the ICC by agreeing to set up a tribunal to try them at home. (This is always the first choice of the court.) The envelope containing the names of those implicated was drawn up the UN mediator, its former secretary-general, Kofi Annan.
Just north of Kenya, in Sudan, the aftermath of the ICC’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in March 2009 has yielded ripe fruit. Sudan’s autocracy has begun to acquiesce to international demands for better governance, reaffirming just two weeks ago its intent to go ahead with a promised referendum on the status of the country’s southern provinces (where, for two decades, a civil war challenged the central authority of the Sudanese government in Khartoum). Government leaders have been prevaricating lately, but it seems as if the threat of the ICC arrest warrant, together with a decline in oil revenues, has made its leaders more cooperative.
It is true that more war criminals from Africa have been charged by the ICC and its affiliates in Arusha and Sierra Leone than from any other continent. This is not, as some charge, because of a racial bias in the courts or because of the ease in seeking out perpetrators in weak countries. Rather, it reflects the fact that during the 1980s and 1990s, Africa was the site of some of the world’s bloodiest wars. Now many of its wars have abated, but the mess remains to be cleaned up if future perpetrators are to be deterred and the families of those tortured, raped, and killed are to be given some peace of mind.
As for the United States, it is quite possible that President Barack Obama will lead the country into joining the Rome Treaty, but probably not for awhile. The Senate will be tough on the treaty, even though the military has softened its opposition in the wake of numerous bilateral agreements between the United States and various countries not to refer each others’ citizens to the ICC. In any case, if the United States does decide to sign the pact, the world’s other holdouts may not be far behind.
On the domestic front, the United States—thanks to its Alien Torts Act of 1789—is proceeding with a lawsuit alleging that the oil conglomerate, Shell, was complicit in the death of the Nigerian poet, novelist, and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged by Nigeria’s former military junta thirteen years ago. This is only one of a number of prosecutions involving big multinationals (the others include pharmaceutical and banking corporations), whose alleged crimes reach as far back as the days of apartheid.
Indeed, the ball rolls on, building momentum in the battle to raise the standards of human rights practices throughout the world.
Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine in London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).
Want to know more about the International Criminal Court? Check out Belinda Cooper’s essay, “The Limits of International Justice,” in the Fall 2009 issue of World Policy Journal.