Let’s hear it for the United Nations and its systems of international tribunals. That thought was prompted by news of the trial now being held by a special international tribunal for Cambodia. In the dock is an odious former Khmer Rouge prison commandant who was responsible for countless deaths. Meanwhile other special UN tribunals continue to investigate war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Lebanon, and the International Criminal Court has courageously issued an arrest warrant for Omar Bashir, the president of Sudan, who has presided over genocide in Darfur. When I was in Lebanon recently, members of the March 14th movement told me they thought the indictment had already had a positive impact in chastening Syrian president Bashir Assad and dissuading him, at least for the time being, from further political assassinations that may wind up getting him indicted.
From where I sit, these tribunals are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing — and not what many opponents feared they would. Critics have claimed that international courts would become unaccountable tools of an anti-American, anti-Israel agenda. That is certainly possible, but to date that danger has not materialized.
Instead politicized prosecutions have so far come exclusively from national courts which, if you listen to the arguments of pro-sovereignty conservatives, are supposed to be repositories of democratic virtue and accountability. So how to explain that a Spanish judge is pursuing a crackpot case charging Bush administration officials such as Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo, and Douglas Feith with supposed human-rights violations at Guantanamo? Clearly there is a lack of accountability for Spanish judges. Similar problems have arisen in other European courts where attempts have been made to prosecute American and Israeli officials.
It is sometimes in America’s interest to give up some sovereignty in order to promote our broader interests. That’s not a terribly hard sell when it comes to NAFTA or the WTO; conservatives are naturally sympathetic to international systems for trade accountability. But if we can hold nations accountable for unfairly raising tariffs, why shouldn’t we hold them accountable for far more serious breaches of human rights?
