{"id":9201,"date":"2014-09-17T20:24:57","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T20:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kohelet.org.il\/article\/a-courts-collapse\/"},"modified":"2014-09-17T20:24:57","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T20:24:57","slug":"a-courts-collapse","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.kohelet.org.il\/en\/article\/a-courts-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"A Court\u2019s Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"The International Criminal Court gives up on its prosecution of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenya unlike many other countries is a member of the court. This shows that supposed international norms have not been \u201cinternalized\u201d by the \u201cinternational community\u201d the way many human-rights activists and scholars have claimed.\n\nThe International Criminal Court earlier this month suffered its biggest setback since its establishment at the turn of the century amid hopes that soft power and legalism could deter atrocities. The court\u2019s chief prosecutor announced that she was shelving the prosecution of Uhuru Kenyatta, accused of abetting thousands of murders and rapes in Kenya\u2019s 2007 interethnic election violence.\n\nThe prosecutor said the three-year-old case could not go on because Kenya\u2019s government would not cooperate with requests for evidence. As it happens, Kenyatta is the country\u2019s president (and son of post-colonial founder Jomo Kenayatta); his co-defendant, William Ruto, is the deputy president. They were democratically elected last year, having run for office while under the ICC indictment, cracking jokes about The Hague on the stump.\n\nSo the court decided to prosecute a sitting head of state in its most high-profile case to date and then packed it in when \u2014 surprise \u2014 Kenyatta\u2019s regime decided to make its job difficult. It is an embarrassment of the highest order because the case is the first in which the court has sought to execute what many see as its core mission: prosecuting world leaders for mass atrocities.\nThe creation of a permanent international criminal tribunal with authority over public officials was a dream of cosmopolitan thinkers for much of the 20th century. The end of the Cold War created a unique moment when the dream seemed to have been achieved: The Rome Statute creating the court was ratified in 1998, with the court itself coming into existence a few years later. The court has jurisdiction over the territory and nationals of states that accept its jurisdiction, and it deals with war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Kenya is a member of the court; the U.S., Israel, Russia, and much of the Arab world and the major Asian powers are not.\n\nThe ICC distinguishes itself from its predecessors, the \u201cad hoc\u201d criminal tribunals such as Nuremberg and Yugoslavia, by claiming jurisdiction over sitting heads of state and ongoing conflicts. Until now, international justice was always a kind of victor\u2019s justice, because it depended on the defeat of the accused. The conceit behind the ICC was that international law had grown strong and respected enough that it could take on the current leaders of actual countries without fighting them first.\n\nYet thus far in the court\u2019s twelve years of operation, it has completed only three cases, with one resulting in an acquittal. The defendants it has dealt with have not been the high and mighty, but rather a motley crew of guerilla warlords and deposed despots. They all had one thing in common: They no longer held any power, and their prosecution was simply a coda to their military and political defeat by their enemies.\n\nKenya did what undefeated countries can do: It cleverly slow-walked its cooperation with the international community. If Iran can do it for much higher stakes in Geneva, why would others not be able to do it at The Hague? There have also been very serious allegations of intimidation of the prosecution\u2019s witnesses. Kenya has full control over the \u201ccrime scene\u201d and all the witnesses. All the prosecutor has control over is a staff in The Hague.\n\nThe only provision for dealing with recalcitrant states is a talking-to from the obscure \u201cAssembly of State Parties,\u201d which does not seem interested in dealing with the Kenyan debacle. African countries had long been outraged by the prosecution of the case, insisting against the rather clear language of the ICC treaty that heads of state should be immune. Indeed, Kenya has apparently suffered little to no diplomatic consequences from first electing candidates under indictment for mass atrocities and then having them use their new positions of power to shut down their prosecution in The Hague. There have not been popular protests or agitation by human-rights groups, threats of economic sanctions, or boycotts.\n\nThe collapse of the Kenyatta trial will surely hurt the ICC more than it does Kenya, which shows that supposed international norms have not been \u201cinternalized\u201d by the \u201cinternational community\u201d the way many human-rights activists and scholars have claimed.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The International Criminal Court gives up on its prosecution of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenya unlike many other countries is a member of the court. This shows that supposed international norms have not been \u201cinternalized\u201d by the \u201cinternational community\u201d the way many human-rights activists and scholars have claimed. The International Criminal Court earlier this month [&hellip;]","protected":false},"featured_media":9137,"template":"","article-category":[525],"custom-tags":[],"ppma_author":[60],"class_list":["post-9201","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","article-category-publications"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A Court\u2019s Collapse - kohelet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kohelet.org.il\/en\/article\/a-courts-collapse\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Court\u2019s Collapse - kohelet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The International Criminal Court gives up on its prosecution of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta. 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