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compelling case that this system is not only flawed but produces serious and systematic injustice. One major theme pressed in a number of chapters is that the international criminal justice system that has emerged in the age of tribunals and “humanitarian intervention” has replaced a real, if imperfect, system of international justice with one that misuses forms of justice to allow dominant powers to attack lesser countries without legal impediment. No tribunals have been established for Israel’s actions in Palestine or Kagame’s mass killings in the DRC. Numerous authors in Justice Belied stress the remarkable fact of the ICC’s exclusive focus on Africans, with not a single case of charges brought against non-Africans. And within Africa itself the selectivity is notorious – U.S. clients Kagame and Museveni are exempt; U.S. targets Kenyatta, Taylor, and Gadaffi are charged. The system has worked poorly in service to justice, as the authors point out, but U.S. policy has had larger geopolitical and economic aims, and underwriting Kagame’s terror in Rwanda and the DRC and directing the ICC toward selected African targets while ignoring others served those aims. Many of the statutes and much political rhetoric accompanying the new ICJS proclaimed the aim of bringing peace and reconciliation. But this was blatant hypocrisy as the exclusion of aggression as a crime, the selectivity of application, the frequency of applied victor’s justice, and the manifold abuses of the judicial processes have made for war, hatred, and exacerbated conflict. The authors of Justice Belied do a remarkable job of spelling out these sorry conditions and calling for a dismantling of the new ICJS and return to the UN Charter and nation-based attention to dealing with injustice. (en) |
