|
|
|
In-Depth:
Justice for a Lawless World? Rights and reconciliation in a new era of international law
|
 Download this in-depth report
Part I 6.36 MB
Part II 2.40 MB
- Professor Noam Chomsky
- ICC Chief Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo
- Samantha Power, Professor of Practice in Human Rights Policy
- Juan Mendez ,President of the International Center for Transitional Justice
- Justice Geoffrey Robertson Q.C.
- Dr Fanie du Toit, Programme Director for Educating for Reconciliation at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa
- Abdullah An-Na`im, Ph.D, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
- Augustin Nkusi, the Director of the Legal Support Unit, National Service of Gacaca Jurisdictions, Rwanda
- Benjamin Gumpert, counsel representing Justin Mugenzi, who is currently on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
- Hanny Megally, Director, Middle East and North Africa Program, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
- Paul van Zyl, Country Programme Director at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
- Johnston Busingye, Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice in Rwanda
- Dennis McNamara (Special Adviser on Internal Displacement to the UN’s Emergency Relief Co-ordinator and Director of the OCHA Inter-agency Internal Displacement Division) on the rule of law
IRIN welcomes feedback. Send your messages to feedback. |
|
GLOBAL: Samantha Power, Professor of Practice in Human Rights Policy
|
Samantha Power. |
|
Samantha Power is a Professor of Practice in Human Rights Policy. Her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction. Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (1998-2002). From 1993 to 1996, Power covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and the Economist. She is the editor, with Graham Allison, of “Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact”. She is currently writing a book on the life of the murdered UN official Sergio Vieira de Mello.
QUESTION: Historically international ‘law’ has been honoured more in its breach than its observance. Is there more than a symbolic value to international law, and is there a deeper change taking place? Are we in fact witnessing a new era of human rights and international justice?
ANSWER: I think as tempting as it is to give in to despair in the 21st century, in light of the teeming proliferation of threats and the continuation of mass atrocities, one only has to flash back 15 years to recall that a perpetrator of mass crimes against humanity, genocide, etc. was guaranteed to walk if his state was unwilling or unable to punish him. Usually, of course, the perpetrators of such atrocities are normally doing the bidding of the state or they are actually running the state. So, the very fact that Charles Taylor has to suffer the indignity of fleeing his home in the wake of an extradition request – in his bathrobe; the very fact that Ratko Mladic for all his alleged impunity is utterly unable to be a political or security factor in the former Yugoslavia because he has to hide under ground; the fact that when you go to the tribunals in The Hague or Arusha, or now in Freetown, you see people who committed those crimes who had every expectation of being able to live out their lives spending the ‘fruits’ of their labours, you know a shift has occurred. Is it a sufficient shift? Hardly. Is it the beginning, potentially, of a movement towards accountability and enforcement? I think it is, unquestionably.
Q: To what extent, in the current age, is international law in essence waging a war of attrition with customs/assumptions of traditional national sovereignty?
A: There is certainly a prevalent mindset among states that have every incentive to keep their practices off-limits from international scrutiny or international enforcement mechanisms. To hear Robert Mugabe, to hear the Sudanese government, and even to hear President Bush talk, you would think international law has no place for them. We don’t live in a world where people wait until they are already completely compliant to some law and then sign on to international legal commitments. We live in a world where people sign onto international legal commitments and then one hopes that those international legal commitments acquire national force.
There are probably a lot of countries that do see it as a war of attrition or a trade off, but there are probably at this point an equal number that see it differently either for financial reasons or for reasons of reputational enhancement, or because of some domestic constituency that want to adhere to these laws. There is no doubt that it going to take some time for many of the countries to be convinced that these principles of international law are in their interest, including major sovereignty fetishists like the United States that for reasons of self interest, and also culture, keep themselves free at all times to do whatever they want in the moment rather than invest in the structures and institutions that might create greater stability over all.
Q: The International Criminal Court (ICC) has just made its first arrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and is extending its activities relatively fast. How important do you think the ICC will be in the future and why?
A: The ICC’s impact is going to be far harder to measure than just the number of suspects in the dock. The fact that a voice is going to be speaking inside the heads of some of the people who are capable of committing terrible harm saying – “Some of the bad guys are going to jail!” – how are we ever going to measure what hasn’t happened as a result of that voice? How are we going to capture the brain waves of the deterrence?
Obviously, the ICC is not deterring all crimes. We live in a very bloody world and it is very hard to say that we are living in a less bloody world than before the courts were established. However, as bad as things are in Darfur, for example, how much worse might it be if people didn’t have at the back of their minds the thoughts of these courts. This is not about absolute deterrence. It’s about relative deterrence. Let’s face it – national laws don’t successfully deter criminals so one can’t hold international laws, courts to a higher standard. What is probably going to make the big difference is better enforcement.
Secondly, because of specific sovereignty concerns, perhaps the ICC’s greatest impact will be to expedite the development of domestic legal enforcement tools in countries where atrocities actually happen through complimentarity, where proud statesmen don’t want to turn over their thugs and want to do it at home for a range of reasons. So the threat of the ICC, the spectre of Luis Moreno Ocampo, might make countries go ahead and prosecute their bad guys themselves.
Q: Even if big world powers do comply with, and support the demands of, international justice, to what extent do they, and will they, continue to use it as a scapegoat for not acting, as crimes against humanity are being perpetrated… preferring the non-risk, low-cost and relatively politically neutral approach of letting the UN (or others) prosecute war criminals after the carnage has been wrought?
A: Yes, that’s the pattern right now. As hard as it was for the Bush administration to stomach the referral of the Darfur crimes to the International Criminal Court by the Security Council, or being part of that process by abstaining, that was much more palatable than meeting the public cry for genocide suppression with the mobilisation of international resources. It’s always going to appear less risky and more appealing - for a thousand reasons - to punish perpetrators after the fact. And frankly, the very habits and tendencies that make states unwilling to stop the crimes as they are occurring, are the same that make states pretty lousy at enforcing indictments that are issued by these international courts. The message is pretty clear: Be for international justice, but don’t risk international lives to make it happen.
Q: Some of the most vociferous criticisms of the US’s approach to international justice are coming out of America. How widespread is the US’s resistance to international justice or is the resistance and refusal led by military and political elite and unrepresentative of regular Americans?
A: I actually don’t think there is much of a vocal or politically relevant constituency in the US for us joining the ICC. The very fact that none of the Democratic candidates in the 2004 election thought it was in any way politically advantageous to mention is testament to that.
There are people here who are harshly critical, and appropriately so, of the Bush administration’s position but we have in this country, unfortunately, a long tradition of not participating in human rights treaties; of not signing them or not ratifying them when we have signed them. I don’t know how long it takes to change a norm, but the norm here is a norm of aversion to this kind of obligation. The phrase one hears here over and over again is that the big fear is that there will be ‘trumped up charges’.
Q: In relation to international intervention, including action to prevent genocide, how do you respond to the charge that however ‘just’ or morally driven a military intervention may appear, there will inevitably be innocent deaths and possible human rights violation in the process?
A: I am essentially a humanitarian hawk in this regard. I acknowledge the charge and accept it totally, and recognise it is something that has to be weighed very, very carefully. I mean the predictable consequence of using force, the reliably predictable, the foreseeable consequence of using force, is that innocent people will die. There’s no such thing as an immaculate intervention.
Look at Kosovo. It’s the definition of war and calling it humanitarian intervention shouldn’t make us lose sight of the fact that it’s war. So then the question becomes: “compared to what?” and it becomes a question of costs and benefits to the intervene, and certainly to the intervener. For example, when one contemplates intervention in Darfur – not in a million years I would not advocate US troops being deployed to Darfur because they would be a ready and ripe target for jihadis and, if it’s conceivable, make Darfur even more dangerous for the civilians there than it is today.
As in Indonesia and East Timor, sometimes you have to create the spectre of a broad-based international coalition in order to stave off the very confrontational intervention that necessitates bloodshed, or which inevitably causes bloodshed. However one cannot be misty-eyed about the cost of confrontational intervention.
[ENDS]
|
|
|
|
|