The case against international jurisdiction

Telkens men tegen internationale jurisdicties durft pleiten, lijkt het meteen alsof de criticus in kwestie wel een aanhanger moet zijn van onfrisse figuren zoals een Omar Al-Bashir of een Radovan Karadzic. Toch waagt Daniel Hannan zich vandaag op zijn blog aan zo'n pleidooi.

Vorige week gaf hij over dit thema, in de nasleep van de gênante internationale aanklacht in Groot-Brittannië tegen Tzipi Livni, oud-premier van Israël, trouwens ook een lezing voor het "Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies". De ideeën die hij in die lezing trachtte te verwoorden, vonden vandaag ook hun weg naar zijn zéér leesbare blog op de website van "The Daily Telegraph". Hannan valt daarin de internationalistische idee aan dat monsters die in hun eigen land niet vervolgd worden, toch elders - en bij voorkeur door internationale bureaucratieën - berecht zouden moeten kunnen worden. Over de affaire-Livni zei Hannan het volgende: "We zien hier exact wat er mis is met het alsmaar groeiende corpus van internationale globaal afdwingbare mensenrechtenwetten: dictators en terroristen negeren die en worden met rust gelaten, democratisch verkozen politici trachten ze wel in ere te houden maar worden desondanks gestraft."

Daniel Hannan haalde in zijn lezing de volgende zeven ideeën aan.

1. Territorial jurisdiction has been a remarkably successful concept. Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, it has been broadly understood that crimes are the responsibility of the state where they are committed. Untune that string and hark what discord follows! Western liberals might say: “Since Karadzic won’t get justice in Serbia, he should get it at The Hague.” But an Iranian judge might apply precisely the same logic and say: “Adulterers in Western countries are going unpunished: we must kidnap them and bring them to a place where they will face consequences”.

2. International jurisdiction breaks the link between legislators and law. Instead of legislation being passed by representatives who are, in some way, accountable to their populations, laws are generated by international jurists. We are, in other words, reverting to the pre-modern notion that law-givers should be accountable to their own consciences rather than to those who must live under their rulings.

3. In consequence, as Robert Bork has argued in Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, an agenda is being advanced which has been rejected at the ballot box. Courts make tendentious and expansive interpretations of human rights codes which go well beyond what any reasonable person would take the text to mean.

4. With no meaningful scrutiny, international lawyers are able to suit themselves, meandering their way through gargantuan budgets, changing their own rules when they become inconvenient. As John Laughland showed in his study of the Milosevic trial, the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia admitted hearsay evidence, repeatedly amended its rules of procedure and, when the old brute proved surprisingly eloquent in his own defence, took the extraordinary step of imposing counsel on him. Eight years and $200 million later, with the court no closer to a verdict, both judge and defendant were dead.

5. Indicting a head of state – as the ICC did last year when it served a writ against the Sudanese President – amounts to declaring a war which one has no intention of fighting. The only way to bring President Bashir to trial would be to conquer his country and transfer sovereignty from him to the occupying powers: the basis of the Allies’ jurisdiction at the Nuremberg trials. Without such a determination, international arraignments are declamatory: a way for those who serve them to feel good about themselves, even though their practical effect is to make tyrants dig in more deeply.

6. Which brings us back to the main objection. While tyrants ignore international rulings, democracies – or, more precisely, judges within democracies – don’t. Courts in Western countries increasingly use international conventions to challenge the decisions of their elected governments. Four successive Labour Home Secretaries have tried unsuccessfully to repatriate the Afghan hijackers who diverted a flight at gunpoint to Stansted. Despite the nature of their crime, and despite the removal of the Taliban regime from which they claimed to be fleeing, they have been granted leave to remain in the United Kingdom through, in effect, judicial activism.

7. The politicisation of international jurisprudence seems always to come from the same direction: a writ was served against Ariel Sharon, but not against Yasser Arafat. Augusto Pinochet was arrested, but Fidel Castro could attend international summits. Donald Rumsfeld was indicted, but not Saddam Hussein.

En ook in de conclusie op zijn blog kan ik best inkomen.

The answer is not to politicise these wretched rules, but to return to the well-tried and understood concept of state sovereignty, which operated effectively enough between 1648 and the 1990s. When was the internationalisation of jurisdiction agreed? When was it even discussed? To quote Judge Bork again: “What we have wrought is a coup d’état: slow-moving and genteel, but a coup d’état none the less.”