ICC`s ``accusateur publique`` Moreno-Ocampo (a new Robespierre) condemns many Darfur victims to death

12 posts / 0 new

Tue, 2009-03-10 12:08

Rikardo

What real authority has this zealous Tribunal anyway ?? It`s already cost $400 million in good salaries and travel, mostly for lawyers. (That`s a lot of anti-AIDS medicine) Sure 100 countries signed the treaty.

Our national courts have a real more-or-less democratic government behind them. Our judges are, in a sense, judged. To many in the Third World and especially Africa, it is a Western kangaroo court, set up after after centuries of intervention and pillage, to go for African badguys.

Impunity for those who finance the wars and supply the arms. That not criminal. Reminds me of those vigilantees, citizens`courts in the South, that lynched the poor `darkìes`

These NGO`s, expelled from Sudan, were saving lives.

Tue, 2009-03-10 12:21

Who expelled the NGOs?

Tue, 2009-03-10 13:19

Benjamin

Rikardo wrote:

What real authority has this zealous Tribunal anyway ??

Oh I don't know, only the authority of conventional and customary international law, but that isn't really authority is it?

Rikardo wrote:

It`s already cost $400 million in good salaries and travel, mostly for lawyers. (That`s a lot of anti-AIDS medicine) Sure 100 countries signed the treaty.

Would you rather a country/world without lawyers? $400 million seems like a smittance for the cause of global justice.

Rikardo wrote:

Our national courts have a real more-or-less democratic government behind them. Our judges are, in a sense, judged. To many in the Third World and especially Africa, it is a Western kangaroo court, set up after after centuries of intervention and pillage, to go for African badguys.

Our courts get their authority from the constitution, and not the government structure of Canada. The ICC may in fact overcome some of the procedural shortcomings of the ad-hoc courts that have emerged in various post-conflict settings. While you can critique the ICC on the so-called selectivity of its prosecutions, it cannot procedurally be likened to a kangaroo court.

Rikardo wrote:

Impunity for those who finance the wars and supply the arms. That not criminal. Reminds me of those vigilantees, citizens`courts in the South, that lynched the poor `darkìes`

These NGO`s, expelled from Sudan, were saving lives.

The ICC has limited jurisdiction; this is in part what gives it legitimacy. The Court cannot, and should not, be faulted for its limited jurisdiction vis-a-vis all the other elements that contribute to wars, nor can the Court be faulted for the Sudanese decision to expel NGOs.

Tue, 2009-03-10 13:46

Slumberjack

Benjamin wrote:
The ICC has limited jurisdiction; this is in part what gives it legitimacy. The Court cannot, and should not, be faulted for its limited jurisdiction vis-a-vis all the other elements that contribute to wars, nor can the Court be faulted for the Sudanese decision to expel NGOs.

Who limited it's jurisdiction, but supremacy nations in crafting the exceptions, through which they continue to shield their own criminal actions? This is completely the reason why it has little legitimacy in they eyes of non-colonial nations. The vigour that it displayed when meticulously compiling evidence to support charges against the Sudanese leader will never be undertaken to deal with Western initiated atrocities and crimes against humanity, monstrous crimes that cry out for global justice.

Tue, 2009-03-10 14:24

Benjamin

Slumberjack wrote:

Who limited it's jurisdiction, but supremacy nations in crafting the exceptions, through which they continue to shield their own criminal actions? This is completely the reason why it has little legitimacy in they eyes of non-colonial nations. The vigour that it displayed when meticulously compiling evidence to support charges against the Sudanese leader will never be undertaken to deal with Western initiated atrocities and crimes against humanity, monstrous crimes that cry out for global justice.

For sure, the US (and others) played a significant role in limiting the scope of the ICC. However, it is far to simplistic to view the limited jurisdiction of the ICC as completely driven by supremacy nations, or as a final endpoint in what is an emerging area of law. The treaty making process is an exercise in compromise, but it is part of the evolution of international legal principles. Looking back, for example, at the formation of the Geneva Conventions, it would have been quite possible to cast the same spurious accusations at those treaties. Yet, over time the GCs became a central part of the international legal order, and do influence even supremacy powers. I think (and hope) that the same will happen for the ICC. Our world is better with an ICC than without it, and we should work toward transparency and legitimacy in the prosecution selection process, so that it is not viewed (even by elites in certain developing countries) as illegitimate.

Tue, 2009-03-10 14:43

Slumberjack

Eventually yes, the world will become better off as the ICC mandate and jurisdiction evolves. At present though, it is largely the blind justice of the north western hemisphere.

Tue, 2009-03-10 16:06

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

The ICC has no jurisdiction whatsoever with respect to the biggest criminals on the planet.

The countries that are part of the ICC and subject to its jurisdiction are a minority of the world's population; the court has no jurisdiction with regard to nationals of the USA, Israel, China, Pakistan, India, and several other countries that have not ratified the Treaty of Rome.

It's no surprise that the court has only ever gone after Africans.

Tue, 2009-03-10 17:42

Rikardo

Even Nuremburg was not necessarily the great triumph many take as gospel. The Allies had all but defeated Germany well before May 1945 and had retaken almost all of Japan's conquests. But their insistance on unconditional surrender (total defeat) prolonged the war and the terror (criminal?) bombings and hundreds of thousands of addition deaths. Perhaps Nuremburg just gave the Allies (the West) an exaggerated sense of their own virtue.

Wed, 2009-03-11 02:13

So the ICC threw NGO's out of Sudan?

Sat, 2009-03-14 22:34

#10

Rikardo

The ICC and Moreno-Campo were advised by people who know the current situation in Sudan and who are looking for compromises and a solution, NOT to intervene. But career judges need to judicialize. The ICC has provoked the expulsion pf the NGOs but its the Sudanese government who threw them out.

If the Sudanese know their history they remember previous Western interventions, Omdurman (1898) and the Maxim guns of the British and more recently Clinton's bombing (1998?) of a pharmaceutical plant depriving thousands of life-saving medicines. Clinton lied on that one but Michael Moore has forgiven him.

I heard this Moreno-Campo on the CBC. A real Fouquier-Tinville (accusateur publique during the French Revolution). He went back to the "appeasement of Hitler" in the late 30s. We know now that politically Chamberlain feared Stalin more than Hitler, but for M-C it was a judicial failure.

I'm all for international laws, like laws against bombing civilians, or against global warming (Kyoto) Some international jurists do criticize the idea of this Court. John Laughland (Paris) has written "Le tribunal P

Sat, 2009-03-14 22:48

#11

So the Sudanese government is not in fact helpless puppets of the ICC, they expelled the NGOs themselves. Thanks.

Thu, 2009-04-02 20:32

#12

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

Where does the assumption come from that NGOs are saintly organizations that can do no wrong? Most of them are beholden to western governments and many are actively involved in co-operation with the CIA and its many front organizations.

Quote:

Any government in the world that believes it has been targeted for regime change by the United States and its allies would be foolish to allow western-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to operate freely in its territory. When Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir evicted 13 western NGOs from his country last month, he was responding quite rationally to the clear threat of so-called "humanitarian" military intervention by the U.S. under the pretext of "rescuing" Sudanese in the war-torn Darfur region.

Under the Obama administration, a military interventionist doctrine is rapidly crystallizing around the concept of "Responsibility to Protect," or R2P, which holds that nations have a responsibility to forcibly intervene when a state is judged to be unwilling or unable to protect or otherwise fulfill its responsibilities to its people - responsibilities that can be broadly or narrowly defined....

States will do whatever is necessary to preserve themselves, and in Sudan's case, that meant the western echo-operatives in the "aid" industry in Darfur had to go. The U.S. knew full well that its destabilization campaign against Sudan would ultimately achieve just such a result.

The United Nations has also adopted a form of R2P, which authorizes the UN Security Council to intervene in the affairs of individual states when "national authorities [are] manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity." But the United States cannot count on manipulating the UN Security Council, which includes China and Russia, to achieve its narrow imperialist goals - in this case, regime change in Sudan. The Americans are unilateralists. They can't even bring themselves to join the International Criminal Court - although they revel in its indictments of Africans. Obama has not broken the American mold, but rather, appears to be fine-tuning a "humanitarian" interventionist doctrine that is applicable to any point on the planet where crises can be exploited to create chaos worthy of the Lone Ranger's armed attentions.

Call it Disaster Imperialism.

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