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 warfare crimes committed through 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 circulate as amounting to U.S. Interference inside 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 worldwide criminal order.
Bensouda’s visa revocation underscores the present systematic inequality in international prison order. This is rooted within the presumed hierarchy via a group of elite countries which have dominated international order from a position of assumed racial, cultural, political, ancient, cloth, monetary and criminal superiority.
These tendencies come in light of remarks made by using the Trump management’s countrywide safety 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 loved dominance thru this presumed superiority, enabling them to suggest different nations are like-minded when it comes to the global criminal order.
The U.S. And different powerful nations have not most effective been a success in keeping the status quo of imbalance inherent in global law, however, 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 using trying to keep the West liable for their 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. The ICC has blatantly redefined the perception of “justice” and has been preoccupied with African states even as turning a blind eye to equally severe crimes devoted 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 by means of 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 to the U.S. Wielding strength inside the age of its new-observed experience of self-alienation, which manifests into ongoing imperialist tendencies that affect the choices made by using international establishments.
This perpetuates the West’s practice and tendency to apply worldwide criminal institutions including the International Criminal Court to constantly persecute and demonize the worldwide South.
Bensouda’s efforts have truly now 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 way of 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 have to no longer come as a surprise. The U.S. Has had a protracted record of meant “exceptionalism” facilitated by worldwide law when it comes to 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 point out in the Geneva Conventions.
