Libya: a year in the life of an ICC referral
It’s been a a year since the UN Security Council referred Libya to the International Criminal Court, as the Gaddafi regime cracked down on civilians and an armed rebellion began to grow. There are now similar stirrings for international prosecutions of the Assad regime. The ICC is unlikely to get jurisdiction over Syria, as such a move would likely be blocked by Chinese or Russian vetoes. But last year, Resolution 1970 (26 Feb 2011) got a unanimous vote at the UNSC, and the Court kicked into high gear. It seems a good time to ask what a year in an ICC referral has wrought.
The ICC was clearly just one arrow in a quiver that the UNSC aimed at the Gaddafi regime. Resolution 1970 also contained an arms embargo, an asset freeze, a travel ban, and many strong words. It received a unanimous 15 votes, notably including non-enthusiasts of the ICC (the US, Russia, China, and others) and Libya’s own representative (who had defected from the Gaddafi government). Of course, these actions didn’t produce much immediate effect on the Gaddafi regime, and two weeks later the UNSC’s Resolution 1973 authorized states to take military action to protect civilians and assist humanitarian aid.
Supporters of the ICC rejoiced in Security Council backing, but there was soon skepticism. Writing in early April, after NATO forces had begun bombing Libyan government forces, Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders wrote:
By applying the pressure of justice to a savage leader, the ICC may have perpetuated, rather than ended, his crimes: Col. Gadhafi and his sons and generals do not dare end their campaign of violence if it means spending years in a Dutch cell.
Of course, Gaddafi didn’t end up in a Dutch cell. By October his corpse would be on display for public viewing and the NATO-assisted rebels had taken power. Debate over the ICC referral has been over over-shadowed by debate over the UNSC authorization of military action and the possible consequences for the Responsibility to Protect norm. But the Libyan referral has clearly had an impact on the ICC itself. It has also contributed another confusing data point in the ongoing ‘peace versus justice’ debate.
The ICC as Tool of the Security Council?
The framers of the Rome Statute — the treaty that created the ICC — wanted the Court to be linked to the UNSC but not controlled by it. They were less worried that the Security Council would abuse this power of referral. After all, while a referral gives the ICC jurisdiction, it is up to the Court’s prosecutor and judges to decide if there are international crimes worthy of prosecution or conviction. The UNSC can refer a situation, and the Prosecutor could come back and say “There’s nothing here that warrants investigation.” To date, only the situations in Sudan and Libya are Security Council referrals, while the rest have been initiated by a state referral (Uganda, DRC, and CAR) or by the Prosecutor’s own initiative (Kenya and Ivory Coast).
Disaster, utopia, and democracy
What if citizenship was at its most powerful, meaningful, and effective in the midst of disaster? Rebecca Solnit develops that counter-intuitive argument in 2009’s A Paradise Built in Hell, which I’ve been reading and thinking about for the past couple months. The book makes provocative but well-developed claims. It also challenges the received histories of key events in recent years, the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina in particular. It’s a sprawling book rather than a page-turner, but it offers a lot to chew on.
Solnit writes for a general audience, but the political scientist – and the democratic theorist in particular – will find some very meaty conjectures and narratives here. I’d love to see an academic treatment of this book’s claims and arguments, which are sometimes backed up by anecdote rather than sustained support.
Rather than labour over a summary of the book, I’ll let Solnit do it for me:
In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the content and around the world, have demonstrated this. But belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism.
Much of the book is a compilation of examples of scenes of effective and largely-spontaneous citizen mobilization, often met with disastrous or cruel actions of elites. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, communal kitchens and clinics sprang up around the city. In contrast to the solidarity and generosity of average citizens, the commanding officer at the Presidio – Brigadier General Frederick Funston – marched troops into the city told them to shoot to kill if they saw looters. The soldiers forced people to leave areas where they were fighting fires, and prevented them from retrieving goods. They used explosions to try to create fire breaks, but often did so ineptly. As a result, the 1906 quake has been eclipsed by the Great Fire that followed it.
Elite panic, and old white men with guns
This phenomenon of ‘elite panic’ – when authorities crack down on spontaneous or grass-roots citizen mobilization – was at its worst in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That disaster did an extraordinary job of revealing socio-economic inequalities – the poor and unhealthy, who often were African-American, were hit the hardest.
Blogging to keep my head in the game
Dear reader,
I have started this blog, in part, to force myself to pay attention to what is happening today. As a journalist now doing a PhD on issues of international justice and the politics of humanitarianism, my topics of concern are regularly on the front pages of newspapers. But I am studying the roots of problems. My research is in international relations theory, diplomatic history, democratic philosophy, and institutional design. But sometimes one must lift ones nose from the parchment (meaning the screen) to the contemporary (meaning the same screen, but scrolling more quickly). And so a blog that will, tentatively, include:
1. Updates on ongoing issues and cases of the International Criminal Court, and other tribunals.
2. Occasional reviews and ripostes to articles and books.
3. Rare (hopefully) observations on Canadian politics and its most frustrating commentators (I’m looking at you, Margaret Wente)
4. Shameless use of quotations by favoured political philosophers (I’m looking at you, Foucault)
5. Ephemera
My hope is that this blog will be a writing practice that will keep my head in the game. But who knows what its effect might be.
“People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” (Michel Foucault)
Chris Tenove 