The International Criminal Court is the Antithesis of Justice
Tuesday August 22, 2017
If there was a prize for the world’s most ineffective institution, the International Criminal Court would win hands down.
Consider this: The court has been in operation for fifteen years, has spent over a billion Euros, and has convicted just four war criminals. Yes, that's correct. In a decade and a half, an institution proclaiming itself the world’s first permanent war crimes court has jailed just four war criminals.
In any other justice system that kind of abysmal conviction rate would get its chiefs sacked. But not the ICC. They continue to have a comfortable luxurious life in The Hague, ruling on the handful of cases that come their way, while the world’s wars rage fiercer than ever.
One reason the ICC is such a disaster is the paradox at the heart of its existence.
The ICC is not part of the United Nations. Instead, it has authority over the 124 states that have joined it. But most states likely to commit war crimes don’t join the ICC. The result? A court full of states that don’t commit war crimes.
The big three powers, the United States, China, and Russia have have all refused to join, concerned about accountability. The US State Department puts it best, saying there are "insufficient checks and balances on the authority of the ICC prosecutor and judges," and the court has "insufficient protection against politicized prosecutions or other abuses.”
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