Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics, by David Bosco
| Autor: | Sara Dezalay |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis. 70:159-161 |
| ISSN: | 2052-465X 0020-7020 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/0020702014564545 |
| Popis: | David Bosco Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 312 pp. $29.95 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-19-984413-5The African Union's decision in early July 2014 to exclude sitting African heads of state from the jurisdictional mandate of the yet to be operationalized African Court of Justice and Human Rights epitomized the backlash against the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet the promise of a new world order in which state power is constrained by international legalism, embodied by the operationalization in 2002 of this first permanent criminal court with global jurisdiction, has also been belied by its powerlessness in the face of great power interests, and worse still, its confinement to dealing with state violence at the periphery: on the African continent. As underlined in David Bosco's Rough Justice, however, such logics of double standard cannot be reduced to a clash between the realities of politics and the idealism of justice. On the contrary: in this energetic, well-written, and genuinely informative volume, Bosco recounts a continuous process of mutual accommodation between the court and the major powers, foremost among them the United States. Based on an "elite interview strategy" (9n20),! this volume narrates the history of the ICC from the genesis of war crimes institutions in the aftermath of the Second World War through to the first years of the present court's operation, focusing on its prosecutorial strategies.Bosco, a senior editor at Foreign Policy magazine and assistant professor of international politics at American University's School of International Service, traces the geopolitical factors and evolutions at the domestic level within powerful states that account for the-in retrospect-startlingly swift opening of the ICC in 2002 as much as for the "uneven jurisdictional landscape" that has curbed its operations since.1 2 The immediate end of the Cold War provided a unique opportunity for the court's creation. Yet this was dampened, in the wake of 9/11 and the US-led military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, with a gap opened between, on the one hand, the right to use force that major powers asserted within the UN Security Council, and, on the other, the criminalization of war-making in weak African states. This enabled the council to directly influence the docket of the court by referring cases, while maintaining de facto control over its limited resources.Thus, argues the author, "double standards are deeply rooted in existing global governance structures, and the new court appears more likely to reflect those than to alter them" (189). Tensions between diplomacy and global justice-the peace versus justice trade-off-transformed the court into "an instrument in the toolkit of major powers responding to instability and violence in weaker states" (187). Correlatively, these tensions feed into an entrenched pattern of excluding the court's operations from situations where major powers have deployed combat forces or where they have strong interests (123). The decision of Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first ICC prosecutor, to focus his seminal cases on situations where "powers had few direct interests" (91) is underlined as a direct accommodation to these constraints. These important checks have been, however, counterbalanced by subtle geopolitical shifts: the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandals underscored the inability of the US to continue to induce other states to marginalize the court; furthermore, political changes at the domestic level, with the prominence of an "ICC glee club" in the 2008 Obama administration (154), led the US to mellow its attitude toward the court. While not producing "broad major-power acceptance of the institution" (21), such evolutions could nonetheless indicate a tremor of optimism beyond the dismal conclusion drawn by the author. Indeed, the diagnosis of a Bush pundit in 2005 that the double standard is "the relatively small price to pay" (111) for global accountability could progressively and subtly boomerang against major powers. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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