Archives » Tuesday, July 15, 2008
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Newsweek
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Jul 15, 2008 11:16 PM
By Jonathan Tepperman
Since the International Criminal Court decided to indict Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for war crimes earlier this week, the chorus of criticism has grown deafening. Khartoum, with support from Beijing and Moscow, is outraged by what it sees as a flagrant invasion of Sudan’s sovereignty. U.N. and African Union bureaucrats and aid workers worry the charges will imperil the safety of peacekeepers and aid workers in the country (and with reason; AU troops there have increasingly become targets of late, scarcely able to protect themselves let alone the people of Darfur). Meanwhile, pundits opine that the indictment represents another instance of overreaching by an international body, and will make any peace settlement in Sudan even harder to achieve (by reducing Bashir’s incentives to cooperate). The old debate over whether it’s better to seek justice or peace (which may mean offering amnesty to the worst malefactors) has been taken up once more.
There are several problems with these arguments. As for sovereignty, that’s a nonstarter. Since Nuremberg, the international community has recognized that certain laws and norms have universal jurisdiction, applicable everywhere. And a new principle of international law adopted by the Security Council in 2006, known as the responsibility to protect, holds that local governments can now effectively default on their sovereignty when they egregiously abuse their own citizens--as Khartoum most certainly has. The case for overreaching is similarly thin. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, is no cowboy, and didn’t undertake this indictment on his own initiative. He was doing his job. The Security Council itself (including Raussia and China) first ordered him to investigate the Sudanese government in 2005, and the indictment was a natural conclusion of that process.
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