The USA is not in the ICC, but it has joined its work and participated in debates. It supports the court in all its cases. The US is very slow to ratify international treaties; it took 40 years to ratify the Treaty on Genocide. On the issue of international justice, the US helps not only the ICC but also other forums.
This issue has to do with protecting victims and providing justice. We are talking about the most serious human rights violations, where people are tortured and murdered in large numbers. Today almost all of this is happening in civil conflicts and not in a war in the traditional sense. Mostly these acts are carried out by soldiers or state actors against the civilian population. The kind of violence we now see in Syria.
Then there are instances of ethnic or religious conflict that might appear at first glance accidental or unplanned, but then we find leaders who are willingly and knowingly instigating the actions. The model we have in place now is from the Nuremberg trials and the idea is that we can give protection globally, to people in countries which are unable to provide that same protection itself to its own people. In situations of armed conflict you have individuals who murder thousands and who have no expectation of punishment. The idea of international criminal justice is to bring that to an end.
Sometimes people say you are focusing unfairly on Africa or some regions of the world to the expense of others, but you never hear it from the victims. The ICC now focuses a lot on African countries and the people there are happy because of it. In the trial of Rwanda we prosecuted the leaders of the ‘hate radio’, which had become a major force for inciting the genocide and had become a command post. It was a very complicated case to prove the connection between the communication and the actions and that the directors had actually been in control of the radio. But in the end we managed it. A victim later came and said that what he saw were men who were so big and powerful that he couldn’t see how they could have been brought to justice, but the international community managed to do just that.
The dream is that with these prosecutions we will deter future crimes from happening. We know that this cannot be 100% successful but we also know that through this system it is possible to start to protect the victims. Additionally we can see that justice can reach very powerful men. Leaders are now carefully calculating the risks of different strategies and we can see the effect of this in Kenya, where civil violence has started to decrease in recent years.
The challenge is how to make it effective. What happens at the international level is only a small part of this and there should be a push for more of an involvement at the national level, like we see in the Balkans, where all the countries are leading their own prosecutions of low- and middle level war criminals, sometimes their own countrymen.
The world is much different now than it was in the past, because there is a possibility to hold people accountable for the worst crimes, and even though this isn’t happening everywhere we are getting there and we are approaching a system where the worst crimes in the world can be averted and the victims of these crimes can be protected and the people responsible brought to justice.