No to Impunity
The Trump administration’s new offensive to dismantle international law “brick by brick” is turning the world into a more dangerous place
When the world woke up to the horrors of World War II, the idea took hold that some crimes should be constituted as attacks against all human beings. That is how the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity came about. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were created to prosecute those responsible for crimes that, until then, had no name, including the Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” realized that impunity for atrocities, such as the Armenian genocide, had led to massacres caused by major totalitarian regimes. The need to create a permanent court that prosecuted those crimes initially took the form of courts dedicated to the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, and then the International Criminal Court, which was created in 2002 and whose jurisdiction is currently recognized by 125 countries.
Today, that very system, in place to protect victims of war and totalitarian regimes, is suffering an unprecedented attack from the U.S. government, which has just announced a plan to dismantle the post-war judicial system “brick by brick.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified this with the bogus argument that the ICC is threatening the existence of the United States as a sovereign and independent nation. In its attack against international law, the global superpower also imposed draconian sanctions on judges and court officials, as well as other measures, including banning them from using credit cards, which will prevent them from leading normal lives and pursuing their careers.
President Donald Trump’s idea that international relations should be governed by the law of the jungle and that no international norm can limit his power takes us back to some dark moments in history. At the start of Trump’s second term, his adviser Stephen Miller stated that, “we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” which he described as “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” The U.S. is not the only democracy opposed to any kind of international justice: Israel, which has several members of government with arrest warrants for the destruction of Gaza, has never hidden its opposition to this court based in The Hague. Neither has Vladmir Putin, another leader subject to an arrest warrant issued by the ICC, and nor does China have any interest in reinforcing it.
International justice — the right to pursue those responsible for these actions in any country when they have no other cases open against them — proved effective in the case of Syrian torturers under Bashar al-Assad’s regime, who were tried for their crimes in recent years in European countries, and in other cases in which national courts have acted against crimes against humanity. However, this cannot replace the work of the ICC, which is in greater need than ever of support from the European Union and other democracies. Impunity does not only concern past crimes, but future ones too.
When the world woke up to the horrors of World War II, the idea took hold that some crimes should be constituted as attacks against all human beings. That is how the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity came about. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were created to prosecute those responsible for crimes that, until then, had no name, including the Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” realized that impunity for atrocities, such as the Armenian genocide, had led to massacres caused by major totalitarian regimes. The need to create a permanent court that prosecuted those crimes initially took the form of courts dedicated to the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, and then the International Criminal Court, which was created in 2002 and whose jurisdiction is currently recognized by 125 countries.
Today, that very system, in place to protect victims of war and totalitarian regimes, is suffering an unprecedented attack from the U.S. government, which has just announced a plan to dismantle the post-war judicial system “brick by brick.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified this with the bogus argument that the ICC is threatening the existence of the United States as a sovereign and independent nation. In its attack against international law, the global superpower also imposed draconian sanctions on judges and court officials, as well as other measures, including banning them from using credit cards, which will prevent them from leading normal lives and pursuing their careers.
President Donald Trump’s idea that international relations should be governed by the law of the jungle and that no international norm can limit his power takes us back to some dark moments in history. At the start of Trump’s second term, his adviser Stephen Miller stated that, “we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” which he described as “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” The U.S. is not the only democracy opposed to any kind of international justice: Israel, which has several members of government with arrest warrants for the destruction of Gaza, has never hidden its opposition to this court based in The Hague. Neither has Vladmir Putin, another leader subject to an arrest warrant issued by the ICC, and nor does China have any interest in reinforcing it.
International justice — the right to pursue those responsible for these actions in any country when they have no other cases open against them — proved effective in the case of Syrian torturers under Bashar al-Assad’s regime, who were tried for their crimes in recent years in European countries, and in other cases in which national courts have acted against crimes against humanity. However, this cannot replace the work of the ICC, which is in greater need than ever of support from the European Union and other democracies. Impunity does not only concern past crimes, but future ones too.
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