On April 5, the US revoked the visa of the International Criminal Court’s lead prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, for her attempts to open research into alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. In Afghanistan. A week later, judges on the ICC rejected Bensouda’s request to open research into U.S. Involvement in Afghanistan.
While rights advocates condemned this move as amounting to U.S. Interference inside the workings of the ICC, it’s extra alarming than mere obstruction, and is rooted in the pre-existing hierarchy and embedded colonial systems in the international criminal order.
Bensouda’s visa revocation underscores the prevailing systematic inequality in the global criminal order. This is rooted within the presumed hierarchy by way of a collection of elite countries which have ruled international order from a role of assumed racial, cultural, political, historical, material, economic and legal superiority.
These developments are available in light of feedback made by the Trump administration’s countrywide protection marketing consultant, John Bolton, who delegitimized the function of the ICC in a speech he delivered in September 2018. He said that “the U.S. will take any manner important to conquer unjust prosecution through this illegitimate Court.”
Countries just like the U.S. Have continually enjoyed dominance via this presumed superiority, enabling them to indicate different countries are like-minded regarding the worldwide felony order.
The U.S. And different effective international locations have now not handiest been a hit in maintaining the status quo of imbalance inherent in international law. However, they have additionally been instrumental in organizing the policies governing that criminal order.
With tectonic political shifts the world over, the ICC’s representatives – and jurists like Bensouda – represent some of the final vestiges of resisting the dominant worldwide legal order by trying to keep the West answerable for their transgressions within the worldwide South.
Unfortunately, the Court’s unwillingness to transport beyond its imperial roots is clear from its rejection of Bensouda’s request. Instead, the ICC has blatantly redefined the perception of “justice” and has been preoccupied with African states at the same time as turning a blind eye to similarly severe crimes committed by way of the U.S.
Meddling is habitual
Needless to say, U.S. Interference and intervention in dozens of sovereign states is common. Meddling with the functioning of one of the highest judicial bodies inside the international is an acquainted sample of American supremacy inside the international felony order.
They circulate through the U.S. To revoke Bensouda’s visa is an expression of that supremacy through intimidation and bullying of representatives of global establishments. However, it also points to the U.S. Wielding energy in the age of its newly discovered experience of self-alienation, which manifests into ongoing imperialist dispositions that affect the selections made with international institutions 2. The next level of binding international law is international agreements (treaties) or Conventional International Law. Just as jus cogens rights and rules of law and CIL are primary and universally binding legal precepts, so do international treaties form binding international law for the Party Members that have ratified that treaty. The same way that some States’ domestic constitutional law declares the basic human rights of each State’s citizens, so do international treaties create binding law regarding the rights delineated therein, according to the customary international jus gentium principle of pacta sunt servanda (agreements are to be respected). Treaties are, in turn, internalized by the domestic legal system as a matter of law. Thus, for example, the U.N. Charter’s provision against the use of force is binding international law on all States, and it, in turn, is binding law in the United States, for example, and on its citizens. (6) Treaties are analogous to “contracts” in the domestic legal system.
