In an op-ed in The Wall Road Journal earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State and Nationwide Safety Adviser Marco Rubio known as for the eradication of the Worldwide Prison Courtroom, casting it as a menace to U.S. sovereignty and self-rule. Promising to dismantle the court docket “brick by brick”, he complained that Individuals is perhaps “tried by judges from random nations throughout the globe, discovered responsible beneath worldwide legal guidelines we neither consent to nor management, after which imprisoned hundreds of miles from America.”
Rubio is partly proper about how the court docket works, however utterly flawed that it may be dismantled on a whim, or that it represents a menace to American sovereignty. It’s true that the ICC is—and was all the time conceived to be—a standing legal court docket, which means people beneath its jurisdiction may be indicted and tried for the gravest crimes: genocide, crimes towards humanity, struggle crimes and navy aggression.
However none of that is new. The court docket’s mandate was written into the Rome Statute, the drafting of which the U.S. participated in. It’s true that Washington finally determined to not signal the treaty, which was adopted in 1998 and went into power in 2002. Nevertheless, that doesn’t imply the U.S. “has not consented” to the worldwide legal guidelines that the court docket is charged with implementing, as Rubio falsely claimed. The truth is, the U.S. helped lead the event of these very legal guidelines, and even hosted the 1948 convention that produced a primary draft of the Genocide Conference, the language of which is now a part of the ICC statute.
