The United States revoked the visa of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, for her attempts to open an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. In Afghanistan. A week later, judges on the ICC rejected Bensouda’s request to open a probe into U.S. Involvement in Afghanistan.
While rights advocates condemned this as amounting to U.S. Interference in the workings of the ICC, it’s greater alarming than mere obstruction, and is rooted in the pre-existing hierarchy and embedded colonial structures in the worldwide criminal order.
Bensouda’s visa revocation underscores the present systematic inequality in the international prison order. This is rooted within the presumed hierarchy via a group of elite countries that have dominated the international order from assumed racial, cultural, political, ancient, cloth, monetary, and criminal superiority.
These tendencies come in light of remarks made by the Trump administration’s national security advisor, John Bolton, who delegitimized the function of the ICC in a speech he delivered in September 2018. He stated that “the U.S. will take any approach necessary” to conquer “unjust prosecution by using this illegitimate Court.”
Countries just like the U.S. have constantly sought dominance through this presumed superiority, enabling them to suggest different nations are like-minded when it comes to the global criminal order.
The U.S. and other powerful nations have not been most effective been a success in keeping the status quo of imbalance inherent in global law. However, they have additionally been instrumental in establishing the regulations governing that legal order.
With tectonic political shifts the world over, the ICC’s representatives — and jurists like Bensouda — constitute some of the remaining vestiges of resisting the dominant worldwide legal order by trying to keep the West liable for transgressions within the worldwide South.
Unfortunately, however, the Court’s unwillingness to transport past its imperial roots is evident from the selection to reject Bensouda’s request. Instead, the ICC has blatantly redefined the perception of “justice” and has been preoccupied with African states, even as it turns a blind eye to equally severe crimes committed by the U.S.
Meddling is ordinary
Needless to say, U.S. Interference and intervention in dozens of sovereign nation-states is not unusual. Meddling with the functioning of one of the highest judicial bodies within the world is consequently an acquainted pattern of American supremacy within the global felony order.
The flow utilizing the U.S. To revoke Bensouda’s visa is an expression of that supremacy through intimidation and bullying of representatives of global institutions. However, it additionally factors into the U.S. Wielding strength within the age of its newly observed experience of self-alienation, which manifests into ongoing imperialist tendencies that affect the choices made by international establishments.
This perpetuates the West’s practice and tendency to apply worldwide criminal institutions, including the International Criminal Court, to persecute and demonize the South constantly.
Bensouda’s efforts have truly not been halted by way of the U.S. Government’s flow towards her. However, the revocation of her visa and the Court’s validation of any such move by rejecting Bensouda’s request raises questions about broader justice issues, what’s being considered within the purview of the ICC, and the legitimacy of international regulation.
Such techniques no longer come as a surprise. The U.S. has had a protracted record of “exceptionalism” facilitated by worldwide law regarding its participation within the worldwide legal order and its violations of worldwide humanitarian and human rights law with impunity.
For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006 certified the so-called conflict on terror as a form of armed war. However, as Jeremy Waldron, a professor at New York University School of Law, pointed out, the U.S. continuously violated the Geneva Conventions throughout the war through superb rendition strategies and unlawful detention. This changed into performed under the pretext that the particular class of armed warfare that the U.S. Changed into worried in lacked express protection in the Geneva Conventions.
