How goes the International Criminal Court?

Economist editorial and article.

As usual, the mag argues that the court, despite low expectations for effectiveness and high expectations for useless meddling in the superpower affairs of America, "has not done too badly."

The ICC has laid bare important facts about forgotten wars (all Gap).  It has issued 13 indictments (all Gap). No, it hasn't nabbed Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, but it has put him on notice, and yeah, that counts when you're trying to build up new rules.  111 countries have signed up, and most have signed some sort of immunity agreement with the U.S., in effect acknowledging our sheriff role and the credibility of US military justice.

America signed the treaty but did not ratify--a rare achievement.  Most non-members, like India, Indonesia and China, simply never signed.

The Economist laments an upcoming review of the ICC being held in Uganda, because on the agenda sits some promised exploration of the notion of punishing state-on-state aggression (the old League of Nations dream) instead of just remaining focused on the crimes against humanity.  If the notion should be explicitly expanded in any direction, it should be about terrorism, which is on the rise, instead of state-on-state wars, which are going the way of the dinosaur.

Pinning down a definition of all war as crime was denounced most elegantly, says the editorial, by Sir Austen Chamberlain in 1928 (Brit Foreign Secretary) when he said that such an effort would end up creating a "trap for the innocent and a signpost for the guilty."

In other words, by circumscribing the limits of criminal aggression, the world would seem to be permitting all that lay outside those limits.

In other words, the ICC would effectively undo everything it's done, which is highlight government crimes against their own peoples.

We live in a world of transnational terrorism and civil strife; the ICC should focus on both and not the past.