“Imagine if there were a criminal court in Britain which only ever tried black people, which ignored crimes committed by whites and Asians and only took an interest in crimes committed by blacks. We would consider that racist, right? And yet there is an International Criminal Court which only ever tries black people, African black people to be precise, and it is treated as perfectly normal. In fact the court is lauded by many radical activists as a good and decent institution, despite the fact that no non-black person has ever been brought before it to answer for his crimes. It is remarkable that in an era when liberal observers see racism everywhere, in every thoughtless aside or crude joke, they fail to see it in an institution which focuses exclusively on the criminal antics of dark-skinned people from the ‘Dark Continent’…. Liberal sensitivity towards issues of racism completely evaporates when it comes to the ICC, which they will defend tooth and nail, despite the fact that it is quite clearly, by any objective measurement, racist, in the sense that it treats one race of people differently to all others.
Clark makes that case that “even if it is considered justifiable for the ICC to open investigations on the basis that Uganda’s military and police (rather than judicial) capacity is insufficient to address serious crimes, the fact remains that the ICC itself has neither military nor police capacity.”The Uganda-based International Refugee Rights Initiative has also asked the key question: “Where was the gap that the ICC needed to fill in the armoury of tools that were available to pursue accountability and end the war? It seemed clear to those on the ground that the issue was not whether Kony and his senior commanders could be tried; it was whether they could be caught.”
This also applied to the Congo self-referral. Geoffrey Robertson observed that the ICC’s Lubanga indictment which followed the DRC self-referral was “criticized on the basis that they charge crimes committed in the province of Ituri, which has the best functioning courts in the country (thanks to a $20 million EU grant) where Lubanga was already facing much more serious charges than the single offence levelled at him by the ICC, namely that of recruiting child soldiers”. Read more
Clark makes that case that “even if it is considered justifiable for the ICC to open investigations on the basis that Uganda’s military and police (rather than judicial) capacity is insufficient to address serious crimes, the fact remains that the ICC itself has neither military nor police capacity.”The Uganda-based International Refugee Rights Initiative has also asked the key question: “Where was the gap that the ICC needed to fill in the armoury of tools that were available to pursue accountability and end the war? It seemed clear to those on the ground that the issue was not whether Kony and his senior commanders could be tried; it was whether they could be caught.”
This also applied to the Congo self-referral. Geoffrey Robertson observed that the ICC’s Lubanga indictment which followed the DRC self-referral was “criticized on the basis that they charge crimes committed in the province of Ituri, which has the best functioning courts in the country (thanks to a $20 million EU grant) where Lubanga was already facing much more serious charges than the single offence levelled at him by the ICC, namely that of recruiting child soldiers”. Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment