Freedom and democracy going wild again:
However, many Ukrainians feared that ratification of the Rome Statute could allow the ICC to prosecute Ukrainian citizens participating in the armed conflict on Ukrainian territory.
To reflect those concerns, the legislation contains a clause that says Ukraine will not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction in cases where the crimes may have been committed by Ukrainian nationals.
Hope you don’t, they are nothing short of a bad joke anyway.
Court without teeth and a court without any benefits. Sentencing war criminals can be done by the regular courts in said country. The people committing war crimes are usually in countries that don’t send them to said court or actively protect them.
Except that in cases where issues are supra national this helps. Could a local court do it, sure. But in this case enforcement is done by signatory countries within their own borders. This means people wanted cannot travel to any signatory country. Which is not nothing in my book.
And depending on the resolve of a country that has a pending case, a wanted person hiding in a country that is not a signatory, might wake up in the trunk of a car parked in the Hague one day. And the court publicly convicted and jailed several high profile war criminals.
So our definition of useless is different.
Edit: Don’t let perfect get in the way of good.
Isn’t the entire point of the Rome Statute that the country accepts the court’s jurisdiction involving international crimes and crimes against humanity as higher than that of any national court? I’m not an expert, but I imagine this defeats the point of signing the statute in the first place.
“Yeah man, we’re totally down to bring justice to those monsters accused of doing war crimes! Woah wait, I mean, except when we do a war crime, that’s alright, we have good reasons.”
Ah, they grow up so fast! Just like big brother USA! 🥲🇺🇲🦅
