International Law

Prospect in the UK has an interesting article summarizing some of the oft-expressed concerns about the ICC.  Perhaps an additional concern hinted at in the article is the very nature of the ICC’s focus on individual cases of liability.

To follow-up an earlier post here (Compassion and IL)… perhaps while focusing on individual cases and stories gets more attention/fundraising in the West, and perhaps comports more with “our” sense of justice, perhaps the individual approach is precisely the kind of western view that is often criticized as being too individualistic and not taking due regard of culture or communities.  Individual stories of tragedy and violations of rights may make for more money and more PR, but do they really help solve the overarching problems?  Does it just lead to a temporary flow of aid and/or attention that is so often after-the-fact and fades as soon as an individual case or crisis is resolved?

Of course there is likely a balance somewhere, and different places are different, but perhaps there is a conflict between desires of some in the West to help, driven so often by individual stories, and the real needs of people, driven so often by large-scale concerns that often threaten whole communities.  It is interesting that some legal systems, including older systems such as the Fetha Nagast (Law of Kings) that was used in Ethiopia until the 1930s (originally compiled by an Egyptian Christian in the 13th century), and others, took very much into account community-level justice and positionality, even when it was a single case against an individual defendant.  Many of today’s legal systems remain far more focused on communities than western systems do, whether or not these systems are seen as conforming to the western view of “rights” (and often, indirectly, creating tension between domestic legal systems and international human rights treaties signed up by the countries).

And perhaps the individualized justice view is not really as all-encompassing in the West as some might think, with strong notions of social justice and resolving problems that communities face still in existence, even if the legal system tends to see people as sole individuals apart from their communities or surroundings.  Perhaps there is a tension here too between retroactive punitive justice against individuals and what a community might see as “justice” or even more so, what a community might see as the best way to resolve a problem or right a wrong. 

It is certainly an issue worth a lot of thought as Tribunals and cases proliferate, and as IL is still largely based off of “western” concepts of individual liability and responsibility, and is perhaps more even more western, by taking the ”latest” or most acceptable to the modern parties (or, more accurately, the elites) in a given treaty or customary world’s view of the law, than the law in the countries its proponents and drafters originally came from.