John Robson: ICC’s Pursuit of Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu, Hamas Leaders Is All a Sham

Exterior view of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, on April 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Commentary

A friend’s mother often said there’s no right way to do a wrong thing. It’s true personally and on a wide range of public policy issues, from rent control to world government. All right-thinking people may affirm that “International law is a noble goal and perhaps we’ll get there some day.” But it would actually be a nightmare, as the latest International Criminal Court move to help annihilate Israel shows.

The ICC is illegitimate because it does not uphold the rule of law. And it can’t because world government is wrong in principle unless and until human nature is redeemed and we no longer need government. Thus my immediate reaction to the ICC announcement that it is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his defence minister, and three Hamas leaders, was again to cite Milton Friedman’s “Bertrand de Jouvenel … said he had always been an ardent advocate of world government until the day he crossed the border into Switzerland ahead of the pursuing Nazis.”

If there were a world government, it would be run by Big Brother not by the likes of former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge. In 1939 there were maybe a dozen democracies worldwide, and they’re still a beleaguered minority. A modern world parliament with 600 seats would give China 102 and Canada 3. How’s that self-government?

As John Locke said and Thomas Jefferson echoed, legitimate government depends on consent. The state exists to defend our rights and can have no powers we did not (or could not) delegate to it provisionally, subject to revocation if it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was constituted.

As John of Salisbury wrote in the 12th century, under Henry II, “The difference between the prince and the tyrant is that the prince obeys the law and governs his people in accordance with right.” So a court can only be legitimate if it subjects rulers to legitimate laws. Where does that leave the ICC?

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Oh dear. There’s no global common law of the sort that bound rulers in England before there even was a legislature to “make law.” And there’s no global legislature at all, let alone one elected fairly. So what genuine “international law” can the ICC enforce, through what police, answerable how to we the world’s people?

It’s hard enough to make self-government work when all these questions have sensible answers. Here they have none. A defender of the ICC might vapour about “world government.” But which is it part of?

None whatsoever. Wikipedia calls it an “intergovernmental organization,” not “governmental,” with “jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.” But what “jurisdiction,” and whence?

The ICC was established in 2002 (I had to Google) by the “Rome Statute” which, characteristically, is no statute. It’s a United Nations General Assembly resolution passed 120 to 7 with 21 abstentions by mostly unelected regimes. (We don’t know who voted nay because they deliberately didn’t record it.) So is the U.N. the “government” in question?

No. It’s the “Assembly of State Parties” to this non-statute, which nobody elected and from which Russia withdrew in 2016, Israel and the United States in 2002, and Sudan in 2008. China never joined, so Beijing wasn’t required to surrender Putin when he visited to plot a world government. Nor must Israel surrender Netanyahu. And there’s no chance of Hamas’s backers handing over its leaders. It’s all a sham.

Even the “World Health Organization” invokes the “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” dream. But it’s part of the technocratic coercive undemocratic nightmare that helps the politicians who established it without consulting the people refuse to consult the people on key measures that infringe our rights. And the grotesque condolences extended by people like the president of the European Council on the death of the monstrous president of Iran, or AP’s preposterous “Iran mourns death of President Raisi,” underline this confusion about legitimacy.

The EU, and even Iran’s regime, ape Anglosphere legislatures, constitutions, and “elections.” But the populace cannot veto official actions in either. Nor could it globally when most of the world is run by tyrants.

There’s the rub. The ICC is a phoney world court based on a phoney world government, and a good thing too because if we had a real one there’d be nowhere to run or hide from tyranny or mere folly. Federalism famously allows small-scale policy experiments, with successes imitated and disasters contained and fairly easily reversed. National sovereignty does it far more powerfully. But the sort of mind that does not brook dissent or ponder its own fallibility would erase all borders and all real laws and leave you naked in Room 101.

The TV spoof cop Sledge Hammer once said, “I’m not afraid of anything–except world peace!” My list also includes world government, and so should yours.

As Israelis just discovered yet again, only their border protects them from the Nazis’ heirs.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.