Thread by @WholePicture_

Here a #Thread about #ColdWar #jurisdiction #UnitedStates #China #Russia :

After the Second World War and the Cold War, there were brief phases in which major crimes were solved by an international criminal justice system.

nzz.ch/meinung/intern…

Today the open rivalry between the great powers prevents independent investigations.

For the first time, politicians and the military could no longer hide their crimes behind abstract "acts of state", but were made individually responsible for their actions.

The Allies defined the three central elements in the "London Statute": war crimes, crimes against humanity (attacks on the civilian population) and war of aggression. In 1948 there was genocide.

With the individual attribution of guilt, the existence of a national collective guilt was denied. And by making the negotiations public and transparent, they should trigger a societal learning process.

In the same year of the Allied triumph in 1945, the proposal was made to set up an international criminal court to secure these achievements and to protect and maintain international criminal law on a permanent basis.

But a little later, the outbreak of the Cold War froze all these efforts: Wars of aggression and countless massacres and expulsions went unpunished for four long decades.

It was not until the end of the Cold War that international criminal law was given a second chance.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 1998.

Its task is to permanently strengthen international criminal law.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ICTY (1993–2017) paved the way.

It was founded on German suggestion when a broad public in the West no longer wanted to watch the killing in the Balkans, but also did not want to intervene militarily.

The court appeared to be a middle ground - and the UN Security Council followed suit.

But even this court, which, like Nuremberg, left valuable files for historical research, could not entirely avoid the accusation of the victorious justice.

120 states supported the hopeful departure in 1998 by signing the Rome Statute. For the first time, a permanent court was supposed to prosecute the “core crimes” of international criminal law independently of political power.

But it soon became clear that the great powers did not want to participate. China left, then Russia and finally the USA.

This court is also struggling with efficiency problems. Of two dozen cases, only a handful have been completed after 17 years.

Criticism is also raised by the fact that the prosecutors almost exclusively investigated Africans in the early years. But in March of this year the prosecution opened an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan.

She wants to investigate the Taliban, which are accused of massive and serious attacks against the civilian population, but also against the government troops in Kabul and against the American military and the secret service.

Washington's response was quick and violent. President Trump authorized the authorities to impose sanctions and entry bans on court staff and their families. For the United States, according to Trump, the court has “neither jurisdiction, nor legitimacy nor authority”.

The ICC had based its jurisdiction on the fact that Afghanistan was a member state of the court, as well as Poland, Lithuania and Romania, where CIA staff allegedly mistreated prisoners.

The chances that the International Criminal Court can investigate the war crimes of the Afghan war under these circumstances are slim.

The same applies to the war in Syria: The Russian bombing of hospitals will probably go unpunished. In this respect, the situation today is like that of the Cold War.

The great powers protect themselves and their allies against the jurisprudence of an international, independent court.

75 years after the start in Nuremberg, a time window closes for the second time in which law and power meet on an equal footing.

We are moving back to one of those “normal phases” of history in which, in the relationship between peoples, the following applies in case of doubt: power breaks law.