Happy Birthday, International Justice
July 17, 2007
Where were you on July 17, 1998?
At summer school? On a Peace Corps assignment? Enjoying a family vacation? At the International Conference for the Establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC)?
If you happened to be a member of the 150+ government delegations and countless NGOs attending the ICC Conference in Rome, Italy in the summer of 1998, you have a birthday to celebrate today.
On this day nine years ago, the Rome Conference delegations (including a characteristically large one from the U.S.) made history by adopting the Rome Statute, the treaty creating the first ever ICC. July 17 marks International Justice Day celebrates this remarkable accomplishment.
The Nuremberg Trials and the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals made tremendous contributions to the advancement of international justice and the creation of the ICC. But this Hague-based Court breaks new ground—unlike its predecessors, the ICC is a permanent body, not a situation-specific tribunal set up after atrocities have already been committed. Translation: war criminals everywhere beware—this Court is here to stay, and it’s watching you.
Even as they adopted the ICC Statue, few at the Rome Conference believed the ICC would become a reality anytime soon. After all, the concept was novel and the age-old issues of state sovereignty, international diplomacy, and domestic politics remained. The statute required at least 60 countries to ratify it in order for the ICC to be officially established. And while the mass slaughter of over 174 million people in the twentieth century had stained more than the killing fields in Auschwitz, Phnom Phen, and Srebrenica, widespread international support for a permanent ICC was still a stretch. Fast forward four very short years ahead: On April 11, 2002, ten countries simultaneously ratified the Rome Statute, pushing the existing 56 ratifications to 66. With the needed ratifications in place, the ICC became a reality on July 1, 2002. I was at the U.N. that day, squeezed into the auditorium gallery with my fellow Human Rights First interns as new ICC member states read their congratulatory statements. The goosebumps come back even now. Currently the ICC boasts 105 member states, with Japan joining just today (check out my IJ Wire for the news story).
As I’m writing, I’m clicking back and forth between my blog post and the New York Times website featuring Nicolas Kristof’s latest Op-ed on Darfur. It’s about former government official and Darfur advocate Roger Winter who thought that blowing the whistle on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was the last time his calls would fall on deaf ears in Washington. Roger Winter was wrong: Notwithstanding the efforts of journalists like Kristof and organizations like the Save Darfur Coalition, the international community and the U.S. in particular has done little to stop the carnage in Darfur. Nine years after the Rome Conference, humankind has not evolved past committing mass atrocities like the systematic rape, mutilation, and pillaging we are witnessing in Darfur. But where humankind has failed, international justice and its laws, norms, and mechanisms have made tremendous progress. We have a very, very long way to go. But when I think of how far we’ve come in less than a decade, I get those pesky goosebumps again.
Happy Birthday, International Justice.
