Comment by arlort
4 hours ago
There's no such flaw in most cases brought to the ICC
The ICC is an international court but it administers trials (mostly) local to the members' jurisdiction so this point is moot. A warrant from the ICC doesn't ask the member states to go to war and hunt the target, it asks them to arrest them if the target is within their jurisdiction
The fact that the ICC warrant was unlikely to lead to Hamas' leaders arrest in the short term is not particularly meaningful
The "mostly" qualifier is because IIRC there are some provisions for truly extraterritorial prosecutions in the Rome treaty but I don't know that they've ever been actually used
“Justice” without enforcement is meaningless.
They have a warrant out for Putin, has that made any impact on the war in Ukraine?
> has that made any impact on the war in Ukraine
The objective of the ICC is not to stop wars
The objective of the ICC is to provide a framework to enable prosecuting and punishing the people ordering particularly egregious acts in a way that is more consistent with liberal rule of law principles than post-hoc tribunals like after WW2 and that is more accessible to fragile / new countries due to having the legal infrastructure set up and at least partially legitimized by it being an international body
The fact that Putin (for example) might at some point get extradited / captured, prosecuted and jailed for whatever crimes he gets found guilty of is a moral good in and of itself
If this being done at the ICC rather than in an Ukrainian or Russian (in an hypothetical regime after Putin's) helps others accept the verdict as more based on fact than politics then that's why the ICC exists as an entity
If this makes someone down the line think twice about ordering war crimes then that's an added benefit but it's not the point
If for example Putin was overthrown and had to flee Russia, and happens to fly over an ICC signatory, he could rightfully be arrested and brought to justice. What is the alternative? CIA assassinations and kangaroo courts?