No. I don't support the existence of the International Criminal Court.
To me, it's about the principle. Sovereignty should be at the level of the nation-state, as should the capability to prosecute and imprison people be. Whatever is or isn't a crime, what the sentence should be, and what the reasoning behind this sentence should be is inherently dependent on the tradition and values in one's own nation-state.
That doesn't make me a cultural relativist: I have no problem saying there's no morality in the criminal justice systems in a lot of countries. However, it does make me recognize that if you have "international" legal experts judge people from completely different contexts based on an "international" (read: American) understanding of whatever is or isn't a crime, the system is there only to re-enforce the authority of the world's big powers and to hollow out smaller nations' sovereignty. There is also no accountability mechanism whatsoever, which is inherent to all these "international" institutions to which power has been silently transferred away.
If a Karadzic or Al-Bashir goes free because this principle needs to be upheld, so be it.
This is probably a bit meta-the ICC as an argument, but I don't really understand why sovereignty is so precious that it shouldn't be overriden even in cases where it is objectively leading to worse outcomes. As in, surely an attachment to sovereignty in cases where it means allowing people to be killed or abused or whatever is just putting an ideological perspective over real life?
And then you have the dual arguments of - First, How does "national" sovereignty even apply if the government doesn't have the consent of the people? That isn't self-determination for the nation, so I fail to see how it can be described as "national" sovereignty in the first place; and secon, in cases like Rwanda in 1994, where the law an order, the institutions of the state, social relation between people are so breaken down that they idea of their being a nation to even have sovereignty seems to be completely misplaced.
I mean, I don't disagree that there is a concern about the accountability of international institutions,
especially in the way they are abused by the big powers to satisfy their own self interests - but my solution would be to reform those and democratise them properly; even if that is a bit utopian.
