A long struggle to create a global rule set on justice

ARTICLE: “Rules Dispute Imperils Khmer Rouge Trial: A long struggle to bring justice to the victims of genocide,” by Seth Mydans, New York Times, 26 January 2007, p. A3.

The global approach to war criminals has historically been rather haphazard: sometimes a local trial, sometimes an international one, sometimes the intervening powers conduct it, sometimes it’s a court shared between the nation and the international community, sometimes the UN is involved and sometimes not.

The creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002 was supposed to put a stop to that--sort of--by providing an internationally-credentialed court of last resort for conflicts and “nations” (typically failed) where local court systems proved insufficient. Although the ICC has never presented itself as THE alternative to global mash-ups, the goal was clearly in place to build up--over time--a sort of global case law on such matters, if for no other reason than avoiding the usual lengthy delays typically associated with the one-off approach employed in most of these cases.

The supremely delayed trial of the last surviving leaders of Khmer Rouge (we’re talking a genocide from over two decades ago) is a case in point: foreign and local judges locked in a never-ending argument. But look at the complex hybrid that was dreamed up: 17 Cambodian judges and 12 international ones, in a UN-sponsored mess “that mixes Cambodian law with international standards of justice.”:

It is an awkward formula made more questionable by the meager qualifications of the Cambodian judges, who are seen as poorly trained and subject to political manipulation.

Typical of the UN, it bends over backwards to respect local sovereignty, achieving its usual suboptimal outcome.

The UN-associated-but-not-sponsored ICC is supposed to be a bit more bold than that: simply proceeding on the notion that the local system was flawed in the first place, thus the war criminality needed to be judged by a wider community of states.

But because the main executioner of “hard” justice, the United States in the form of its military interventions, has essentially opted out of the ICC by signing all those bilat exclusionary treaties, the ICC remains a global rule set that’s largely unactualized.

And that’s a shame, because by connecting our toppling of dictators and rounding up of terrorists to that larger rule set, we’d go a long way toward effectively contextualizing the use of U.S. military power, thus we’d be freed to use it more--not less as our continued unilateralist tendencies have limited us through the reduction of allies and the increasing of enemies/opponents.

To me, this is a great example of the plethora of missed opportunities associated with George Bush’s presidency. I think history will judge him as having achieved virtually nothing in reshaping the global security environment for the long haul of the Long War. Instead, he’ll be judged primarily for Iraq and how he initiated the Big Bang there with no apparent plans for either local or regional follow-through.

And to me, that’s a stunning incompetence that history will condemn, overwhelming any good Bush might have accomplished previously and--amazingly--erasing all the global goodwill that was ours for the exploiting after 9/11.