Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If anyone here is from the US and doesn't like Israel scoffing at the ICC, they should read up on the American Service-Members' Protection Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Prot...

> The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Act authorizes the president of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the president to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody.

It was introduced in 2002 when the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and hasn't been rescinded. So if the US ever committed war crimes in those countries, or any other ones; too bad. The US so totally and completely doesn't recognise the ICC's jurisdiction that it will literally invade the Netherlands in order to not be bound by it in any way, shape or form.

Is this all that weird? The ICC is fairly Eurocentric. India and China aren't signatories either.

The "Hague Invasion Act" is performative silliness enacted in the immediate wake of September 11. The truth is that no major European country is going to arrest an American, Indian, Philipino or Israeli politician. There's kind of a deus ex machina thing happening with the ICC; you still have to do standard-issue diplomacy.

What do you mean they wouldn't arrest? Israel's foreign minister Tsipy Livny had arrest warrants issued against her by courts in the UK and in Belgium.

The UK literally apologized to Livny for doing that; that's how not toothy these things are.

That depends on who is in power. I don't think Jeremy Corbyn's Labour government would have apologized.

A real shame a Corbyn Labour government isn’t a reality.

What's frustrating about that is that a lot of the US's early efforts to not get involved in the ICC was to protect Henry Kissinger from prosecution, who, most objective observers tend to agree did commit or authorize multiple war crimes, from assassinations of Chilean leaders, to the carpet bombing of Indochina, particularly Cambodia, and others.

> What's frustrating about that is that a lot of the US's early efforts to not get involved in the ICC was to protect Henry Kissinger from prosecution

No, it wasn't; the ICC (which the US had a lead role in negotiating and initially signed despite never ratifying it) was never going to have retroactive authority, and the US knew that was not an issue long before it “unsigned” the Rome Statute.

Both the unsigning and the “Hague invasion act” were in 2002, during the runup to the 2003 Iraq War; it was about protecting people then in office from consequences in the war of aggression they were about to launch, to the extent it was about protecting specific people and not just the broad idea of American exceptionalism and opposition of the US government of the time to the idea of international institutions not fully subordinated to the US.

> No, it wasn't; the ICC (which the US had a lead role in negotiating and initially signed despite never ratifying it) was never going to have retroactive authority, and the US knew that was not an issue long before it “unsigned” the Rome Statute.

The ICC was formed out of the ICJ, to tackle matters that rose beyond 'dispute' between states. The ICJ came out of the IMT, which was the Nuremburg trials, which defined war crimes and crimes against humanity for the first time, so it would not have been really retroactive. These things were already crimes, there just wasn't a body capable of prosecuting them.

> The ICC was formed out of the ICJ

No, it wasn't. In any sense.

It was a permanent successor to ad hoc criminal tribunals like the International Military Tribunal, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

> The ICJ came out of the IMT, which was the Nuremburg trials

No, it didn't, it was the UN system's successor to the League of Nations system's Permanent International Court of Justice (the ICJ statute is modelled on that of the PICJ, the PICJ transferred irs assets and archives to the ICJ on its dissolution, the ICJ was headquartered in the Peace Palace that had held the HQ of the PICJ, and the ICJ even adopted the PICJ seal.)

The ICJ—like the PICJ, a court for disputes between nations—was in no respect a successor to International Military Tribunal, which dealt with crimes by individuals (and, indeed had most of its lifespan during that of the ICJ, starting work only a few months before the ICJ.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com