ICC Challenge: Balancing Power and Principle

BEIRUT -- Much media attention this week is focused on two important anniversaries -- one year after President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo on US-Islamic relations, and the parliamentary elections in Iran that opposition forces believe were stolen by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These significant events touch on wider trends in the region and the world, and deserve to be watched closely, but they are overshadowed by another more important development this week: the first Review Conference of the International Criminal Court (ICC) now taking place in Kampala, Uganda.

This 12-day special meeting of states parties to the ICC is considering amendments to the body's founding statute and also assessing its implementation and impact since it started operations eight years ago. Obama, Ahmadinejad and other such elected leaders come and go routinely, their policies reflecting the constellations of domestic and international power in their narrow political universes. The ICC and all it stands for, on the other hand, touches on a more lasting and critically important dynamic in our world that Obama, Ahmadinejad and their kind understand very well: how the universal human commitment to values of justice, decency and dignity are translated into mechanism that limit the abuse of power by states or sub-state groups, by holding accountable those parties that carry out crimes against humanity, war crimes, or genocide.

This is a noble but difficult goal that the world has tried to achieve via several attempts since the end of World War One, with limited success. The legitimate demand that individual states not threaten international peace and security -- and be stopped and punished when they do so, such as Iraq's attack against Kuwait in 1990 -- has mostly been put into practice since World War Two through the agency of the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly. These have proven to be erratic instruments, which many in the South also view as unfair ones, due to the manner in which a small group of American-led Western powers either dominates or ignores the international consensus in many cases.

The ICC provides a new means of trying to punish, and thereby deter future cases of, gross criminal activity. Cases now under investigation include Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Central African Republic, along with ongoing preliminary examinations related to events in Palestine, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, and Guinea. It is still too early to judge whether the ICC and some of the special tribunals that have operated in recent years for crimes in Lebanon, Liberia, Rwanda, and former Yugoslavia will deter future criminal activity. It seems logical to assume that an impartial, effective and credible international court that holds war criminals accountable would also make other would-be miscreants think twice before engaging in slaughter and mayhem.

Any international mechanism that seeks to achieve this noble goal will likely be imperfect, as we were reminded here in Beirut this week during a public lecture by two members of the Goldstone Commission of Enquiry that assessed the behavior of Israel and Hamas during the last Gaza war: Hina Jilani, Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and widely respected international human rights lawyer, and Colonel Desmond Travers, ex-officer of the Irish Army and a leading international conduct of war investigator.

They clearly stated the point that defines any attempt -- including their Goldstone Commission -- to hold accountable the exercise of power by states like Israel or non-state groups like Hamas: There is always a balancing act that takes place with implementing the principles of international humanitarian law ("the rules of war") and navigating among the application of political power and interests by stronger parties.

The Goldstone Report generated massive and instantaneous rejection by the United States and Israel, I suspect, precisely because it represented a credible, legitimate effort by the international community, working through the organs of the UN, to stop the criminal behavior of both Israel and Palestinian groups in their ongoing war. An important new aspect of the Goldstone process is that it links the existing UN mechanisms (like the UN Human Rights Council, General Assembly, and Security Council) with the ICC; it recommends that the UN Security Council send the war crimes investigation files to the ICC if the Israelis and Palestinians do not conduct their own credible investigations.

The power politics and the legal principles of the Goldstone Report are equally compelling and operative forces that also happen to be in conflict. Israel and American politicians do not want Israel held accountable to universal standards of conduct. The rest of the world does, and also wants Arabs and Iranians to be judged by the same standards. How the ICC process unfolds in coming years will determine in which direction this noble quest for accountability -- and ending criminal impunity -- moves. What happens in Kampala this week is important.


Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.