Comment by dragonwriter
2 months ago
> It's basically a warning against attempting to apply jurisdiction to countries that are not parties to the Rome Statute.
The crimes prosecuted by the ICC are accepted by the US as matters of universal jurisdiction under international law, so the US can have no legitimate objection to (1) any country exercising jurisdiction over them wherever they are alleged to occur, or (2) any country exercising its sovereign power to delegate its exercise of jurisdiction over them anywhere to an international tribunal, like the ICC, either generally, under specified terms (such as those in the Rome Statute), or ad hoc.
And they certainly have the least basis for doing so when the country on whose territory they are alleged to have occurred, and who would thus have jurisdiction whether or not they were matters of universal jurisdiction under international law, does so. (Which is, other than a UNSC resolution, the only way the ICC, under the Rome Statute, gets jurisdiction when the accused are not nationals of a State Party to the Statute.)
The actual objection is not the broad principle you are trying to articulate, but it is to the idea of Israel being accountable under international law for crimes for which it has the full support of the US government, irrespective of any theory of law. Trying to frame it as having a good-faith legalistic rationale is either being woefully ignorant or being as flagrantly dishonest as the US government itself is being.
> The crimes prosecuted by the ICC are accepted by the US as matters of universal jurisdiction under international law, so the US can have no legitimate objection to (1) any country exercising jurisdiction over them wherever they are alleged to occur
There's plenty of legitimate objections such as not trusting a foreign court to appropriately decide international law.
> (2) any country exercising its sovereign power to delegate its exercise of jurisdiction over them anywhere to an international tribunal, like the ICC, either generally, under specified terms (such as those in the Rome Statute), or ad hoc.
In the case of Afghanistan, neither the US nor the Taliban are delegating that sort of authority to the ICC.
> And they certainly have the least basis for doing so when the country on whose territory they are alleged to have occurred, and who would thus have jurisdiction whether or not they were matters of universal jurisdiction under international law, does so.
IMO that's a pretty weak argument, especially when you have states being prosecuted which are non-signatories to the Rome Statute or are not full UN member states like in the case of Palestine.
> The actual objection is not the broad principle you are trying to articulate, but it is to the idea of Israel being accountable under international law for crimes for which it has the full support of the US government, irrespective of any theory of law.
The UN has a very well documented history of bias against Israel.[0] It seems entirely reasonable to me that neither the US nor Israel would trust a UN court, especially for anything related to wars involving Israel.
[0] https://unwatch.org/2024-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...
> There's plenty of legitimate objections such as not trusting a foreign court to appropriately decide international law.
So, which country do you think should decide international law?
Israel is a colonialist occupation project. So the UN being "biased" against it is good and correct.
> Israel is a colonialist occupation project.
Saying a country made up heavily of refugees fleeing persecution is just a colonialist occupation project is pretty ridiculous IMO.
> So the UN being "biased" against it is good and correct.
There are many countries(including the US) that much more easily fit into your "colonialist occupation project" label that the UN doesn't go after.
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For the lazy, that unwatch link can be summarized as "israel keeps doing awful things and refuses to stop but the UN is biased against israel because it doesn't condemn hamas in every single resolution that also mentions israel", aka "we know we are doing awful things but Hamas does too stop picking on us!"
> For the lazy, that unwatch link can be summarized as "israel keeps doing awful things and refuses to stop but the UN is biased against israel because it doesn't condemn hamas in every single resolution that also mentions israel", aka "we know we are doing awful things but Hamas does too stop picking on us!"
From the link it states "From 2015 through 2023, the UN General Assembly has adopted 154 resolutions against Israel and 71 against other countries.".
This is clearly a case of extremely blatant bias, no matter how bad you think Israel is, it certainly doesn't deserve twice the resolutions against it than the rest of the world combined. The UN has basically thrown out all credibility when it comes to anything related to Israel.
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