How many divisions does the ICC have?
The arrest warrant against Putin is better than nothing, but just barely.
When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladmir Putin last week, I thought it was a bold gesture that reflects the world’s outrage about the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its policy of kidnapping Ukrainian children to brainwash them into becoming obedient Russians.
And when Putin minion Dmitry Medvedev compared the arrest warrant to toilet paper, I thought…honestly, he’s not wrong.
Okay, that’s probably going a bit too far. If Putin sets foot in a country which has ratified the Rome Statue, which created the International Criminal Court, and actually takes its legal obligations seriously, he would be arrested and remanded to The Hague.
So, that’s maybe four or five countries off limits to him, then. Really nice countries, mostly in Western and Northern Europe, but Mad Vlad likely wasn’t planning any visits to Stockholm or Copenhagen anyway.
Visits to Tallinn, Riga and Chișinău may still be on the agenda, if you get my drift. And he can still come to Budapest as a tourist. Because of freaking course he can.
Hungary says it would not arrest Russian president Vladimir Putin if he entered the country, despite the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing an arrest warrant for him last week, accusing him of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, said on Thursday that even though Hungary is a signatory to the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the ICC, and ratified it in 2001, arresting Putin would have no basis in Hungarian law.
“We can refer to the Hungarian law and based on that we cannot arrest the Russian President … as the ICC’s statute has not been promulgated in Hungary,” Gulyas said. He added that the Hungarian government had not yet “formed a stance” on the ICC arrest warrant for Putin.
The comments might not come as a huge shock to Hungary’s European neighbors.
Orban and his government have always been by far the closest ally of the Kremlin within the European bloc. After Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine last year, Orban was the most reluctant European Union leader to impose sanctions on Russia.
Hungary is also a NATO member and has voiced objections to Western nations sending arms to Ukraine. Orban has warned that Europe is “drifting into” the war in Ukraine and has made extensive efforts to block Ukraine from joining NATO. It is also dragging its feet on Sweden’s efforts to join NATO.
The 123 member states of the ICC are obliged to act on an arrest warrant, meaning that if Putin enters any of these territories he should be placed under arrest by national law enforcement. However, Gulyas claimed on Thursday that the Rome Statue has not been built into the Hungarian legal system, so would not apply.
Hungary signed on to the ICC twenty-two years ago and its legal system still hasn’t implemented it. From my own knowledge of legal systems and government bureaucracy, I can say that this is…actually completely plausible.
But I’m sure Orban is taking the invisible-typewriter approach to the issue in any event.
And then there’s South Africa, also a Rome Statute signatory, which will actually host Putin at the BRICS summit this summer. And when asked if they’ll act on the arrest warrant when Putin’s hopelessly outdated Soviet-era jet lands in Johannesburg, a government spokesman started making “static” noises with his mouth and said he suddenly had a bad connection so maybe they can call him back later kthnxbye.
South Africa, meanwhile, said it was aware of its legal obligation to the ICC, but its leaders said it still planned to invite Putin to Johannesburg for an August summit of leaders of major developing countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, known collectively as “BRICS.” South Africa, which has remained neutral about Russia’s invasion and held military exercises with Moscow, said it would continue to consult with stakeholders. On Friday a government minister said the country was awaiting a new legal opinion on the subject.
“We are awaiting a refreshed legal opinion on the matter and we continue to be a member-state of the Rome Treaty,” Naledi Pandor, minister of international relations and cooperation, told South African Broadcasting Corp. on Friday. “We are concerned about the situation of the people of Ukraine. What we would want to do is be in a position where we could continue to engage with both countries to persuade them towards peace.”
It’s possible that their lawyers are seriously looking into the issue, just as it’s theoretically possible Maxime Bernier could become Prime Minister of Canada this year, but recent history does not suggest South Africa takes its obligations seriously:
South Africa did not arrest former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who faced an ICC arrest warrant for alleged genocide and war crimes committed in the Darfur conflict, when he attended an African Union summit in Johannesburg in June 2015.Former South African President Jacob Zuma and his government were reprimanded by local courts for not complying with the ICC.
There have been a handful of similar instances throughout history, involving figures ranging from a militia leader in the Democratic Republic of Congo to former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who withdrew his country from the court in 2018 when its prosecutor announced it would investigate his “war on drugs” campaign that is suspected of killing tens of thousands of people.
Duterte promised “I will never go to the ICC alive.”
The problem is that the ICC has no real power to require countries to fulfill their responsibilities as party states, said Victor Peskin, a professor in the school of politics and global studies at Arizona State University and a human rights researcher. The court can find a state noncompliant, but it’s not much more than “a symbolic reprimand,” he told NBC News.
There are a few other countries where Putin is likely safe despite them having signed on to the ICC:
NBC News also contacted the 17 countries that are signatories of the Rome Statute and did not vote to condemn Russia in the U.N. General Assembly last month. None responded, potentially signaling Putin could also be safe to visit countries like Bangladesh, Bolivia, El Salvador.
La Paz is lovely this time of year, I’m sure.
What are the lessons from all of this? The first one is obvious: international law is only as powerful as the counties and organizations that enforce it. The United States takes some heat for not having joined the ICC, but honestly, I prefer that to making a big show of being a good global citizen and signing up and then ignoring it.
The other lesson, once again, is that our “Westerner” perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine is skewed. We in North America and Europe-except-Hungary-and-Serbia are outraged, and we assume the rest of the world feels the same way.
The sad fact is, we’re in the minority. It’s not that most other countries actively support Russia, but they just don’t see it as their problem any more than Russians and Ukrainians lost any sleep over, say, the Second Congo War of 1998-2003.
There are also many countries - including South Africa - which have long-standing historical and political links to Russia. And some rulers see their nations’ old European colonial masters lined up on one side of this conflict and sympathize with the other side just on principle.
And a few well-placed bribes tend to get legal authorities off your back. Let’s not forget that point.
Maybe there will come a day when the worst song ever written by a Beatle comes true and the entire world is united under one effective government and legal system, leaving the likes of Putin unable to escape justice for his shocking crimes. But it won’t happen in my lifetime. Honestly, I can’t see it ever happening until we make contact with intelligent life on other planets, but that’s another post.
"...leaving the likes of Putin unable to escape justice for his crimes."
The likes of Putin will indeed escape justice for their crimes more often than not in the world we now live in because the advent of 'shock and awe' on our television screens 2 decades ago completed the process begun during the Vietnam War and, in real time instead of tape delay, shocked the last of the awe and fear of man's ability to destroy fellow human beings right out of us, especially in the affluent and comfortable West, and that has not and will not return, if it was ever really there in the first place.
War, like politics, is now as important for its entertainment value as it is for its real-world consequences.
This is the polite way of saying that the effin' daily media deluge of the bloody, violent destruction of human beings by other human beings, from the mundane mass shooting in a school or club in the States to the mass destruction of a Ukranian town or city, is now so ingrained in us as a normal and to-be-expected event that literally nothing is shocking anymore, only surprising at best, and then only if some new novelty is attached. We've become numb to violence, both small and intimate and at the scale of entire countries at war, and in reality no longer really give a shit as long as it doesn't touch us personally and our comfortable lives are allowed to proceed apace, despite our protestations to the contrary.
Would anyone be genuinely *shocked* or even much surprised if Putin dropped a few barrel bombs on a few neighborhoods? Nah... that's already been done in Syria. Maybe used a few chemical weapons? Not really. Iraq and Saddam are old news. Lobbing in a nuke somewhere might produce some actual shock, but it would probably have to be a pretty good sized one, not one of those little tactical battlefield jobs. And that would only be because, practically speaking, it hasn't been done within living memory and covered near ceaselessly in real time on cable news or the 'net. And if it weren't for the knock-on effects that might make more than a few people's lives less comfortable in places other than ground zero, I doubt it would be long before a mushroom cloud here and there would no longer be shocking at all.
The indictment of Putin and the fact that absolutely nothing of any meaning or consequence will come of it would be better seen as an indictment of so-called civilized nations and their people for negligence and the nihilism of the comfortable self-delusion that, in the end, it may cause them a few problems to which they must respond in some way, but it's ultimately not really *their* problem to solve. And I can't really *Imagine* a time when this won't be the case, mushroom clouds or not.