Microsoft's ICC blockade: digital dependence comes at a cost
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It seems like a court, especially one dealing with international crimes where international esponage seems quite likely, should have in-house tech. It seems like being fully independent would be really important. Sort of in the same way i would expect e.g. the eu gov not to be dependent on a foreign cloud provider either (have no idea if they are or not)
Pragmatically though - yeah after Snowden US is not a good choice.
So obviously then China is the right place for the ICC to be hosted. I'm sure the UN can pass that.
They're also using Cloudflare for both DNS and a CDN.
So calling this lessons learnt makes no sense. He hasn't learnt his lesson and is not displaying any intention to start now (given that he comes from a British/Pakistani family of conservative party politicians, which is also a family of sex offenders, that seems about par for the course)
It's weird how one needs to keep explaining to US and EU people: almost all governments do not take decisions based on how they'll affect people and/or the government involved. Different governments have different priorities. The decisions of the UN are targeted towards keeping their members happy and paying. The vast majority of governments worldwide are governments that were conquered by a group or even a family. These people see controlling government as a business and the business is to use control of the government to extract the maximum for that family. And joke all you want about Trump, it can be 1000x worse, and it generally is. The ICC isn't that bad, but it's pretty bad.
If you want to know what the ICC is (and isn't) about, read about how they went about prosecuting a Dutch citizen (their host country). It reads like a Blackadder script. The guy was accused, the Dutch government threatened, suddenly the accusation got dropped, he got knighted by the Queen in a New Year ceremony, got a pay rise. The ICC got a new building.
Google "DutchBat".
The ICC has never prosecuted a Dutch citizen (or anyone, for that matter) over war crimes committed during the Bosnian War. The events of Dutchbat happened in 1995, 3 years before the Rome Statue (the treaty that established the ICC) was accepted. The ICC has no retroactive jurisdiction as per the Rome Statue (Article 11(1)) [1]:
The Court has jurisdiction only with respect to crimes committed after the entry into force of this Statute.
There were some civil cases against Dutchbat, the Dutch state and the United Nations. Dutch courts held the state responsible to some degree in all cases.
Unsurprisingly, the rest of your story is also false. There are no credible reports of the Dutch government threatening anyone to drop cases related to Dutchbat. Some Dutchbat officers were awarded military honors, but they were not knighted, nor did their pay increase as a result of their actions in Srebrenica. The ICC moved to a new building in 2016, this was again not a result of anything that happened in Yugoslavia.
[1] https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/2024-05/Rome-Sta...
And indeed, as Dutchbat and the entire Yugoslav conflict illustrates, they are HIGHLY selective in what justice they provide. Or the most recent Israel situation: every country in the world gets to decide WHO on their soil can get prosecuted for war crimes. That's part of the ICC charter. Except of course Israel doesn't. Palestine, however, does gets to dictate who doesn't get prosecuted, on the exact same territory. ICC doesn't enforce it's membership agreements against Mongolia, or South Africa where it comes to Putin. And so on.
ICC shows everything wrong with the world, and the UN: they're powerless, but promise (I should say "sell") the world. They are an excuse for governments to do nothing. They are highly paid totally ineffective politicians. They are corrupt. They are racist. They let themselves be hired for shouting real loudly at ... whoever you want, really. Sometimes it's even someone who deserves it (like Putin), but mostly it's not. They're behind the times. They are not independent (e.g. not throwing out Mongolia for hosting Putin against the Rome statute or South Africa for very publicly violating the Rome statute and publicly promising to do it again (about Sudan and Putin). They're not independent in legal matters, often publicly cooperating with political maneuvering between countries. And to top it off, they fuck up security in email server.
They are an offensive affront in so many ways. They are offensive to the idea of justice. They're offensive to good government. They're offensive to international agreements (or at least to the idea of actually following agreed international agreements). Hell, they're offensive to good computer security practices.
It’s not fake any more than any ither court is fake.
> It gives the illusion to people that "international justice" exists, while enabling governments to point to the ICC and pay and do nothing (or next to nothing).
It doesn't the opposite: it highlights failures in international justice and draws added attention to government inaction.
It is a relic of the high point in international humanitarian interventionism, created specifically so that created so that the drag of creating and winding down ad hoc international institutions for accountability in each conflict wouldn't be needed.
> And indeed, as Dutchbat and the entire Yugoslav conflict illustrates, they are HIGHLY selective in what justice they provide
The ICC didn't exist in the Yugoalav conflcit.
> They are an excuse for governments to do nothing
They aren't; governments who preferred to do nothing did nothing with less friction before the ICC existed.
Okay ... if that's "every other court", and it's just par for the course that governments both commit the worst atrocities imaginable and do nothing about accountability afterwards, then I just failed to consider just how incredibly cynical you are.
I, however, call that a fake court, I also call their other actions corrupt (both in what they DO, like when it comes to Israel, as what they DON'T DO, like acting against governments where it comes to Putin, or frankly most of their other cases). Their very existence is a lie (in that countries create this court, but have ZERO intention to actually provide any justice). You may claim this is all just normal, but that is certainly not what they say on TV, what their website says, what they argue in the UN. That's lying, at best. They selectively enforce their agreements for political reasons, frankly for money, e.g. again against Israel. Their elected official got caught committing slavery, rape, theft, tax evasion. They didn't even get fired for that. And, of course, they take a massive amount of money for all this "government service". Again
And, like in WW2, Israel and the Jews are once again having the same function of a canary in a coal mine. Racism. Corruption. Selective justice. Justice for sale. Bad governance. For some reason Israel and Jews keep being the first victims or should I say targets, much more apt. But like in WW2, they quickly move on to everyone else if their case against Israel moves even a nanometer forward.
Hosting a email service isn't rocket science. If ICC can't be bothered to do that for themselves that speaks more to their general incompetence then anything else.
This isn't the first time they have faced US sanctions, after all.
I personally found building a rocket in KSP easier than getting all the external actors required to ensure reliable email delivery (completely self-hosted) lined up.
The fact is, most actors will not work with you if you don't have a business acct with your ISP. That's human relationship management, and therefore, hard.
Ironically, rocket science is easy by comparison. Use equations, plugin values, solve for X. Calculators and slide rules can get you to another planet easier than you can get a packet to a goddamned Gmail user through all the bloody layers of abstraction. And don't even get me started on the cryptographic material management. Just figuring out how large a key you can actually use and not have DNS mangle it is a bitch. That and bloody SMTP/IMAP proxying configuration if you have multiple domains on your intranet.
I embarked on the quest and have put a pin in it, ceasing to go any further until further notice, but as someone who has embarked on that journey, your comment is about the most condescending thing imaginable, and strikes me as being the product of a time where maybe email wasn't as hostile a space as it is today.
I don't think it matters who writes the software. Governments should mandate the infrastructure be hosted and operated locally by people accountable to the host nation (the operators would pay for the software, perhaps a subsiduary or whatever). It should require a Netherlands court to deprive an institute located in the Hague of its infrastructure.
This means bringing "big regulation" like we have for the electrical network (and the physical internet!) to the cloud. It would be tricky to draft since we'd still want to support the millions of small providers who, unlike Microsoft, you wouldn't describe as infrastructure.
"Government agencies operate on Microsoft systems, hire employees with Microsoft expertise, and those employees, in turn, continue recommending Microsoft.
“There’s political pressure, but in practice, all they know is Microsoft,” the same person said.
Marietje Schaake, a technology policy expert and author of The Tech Coup, said Microsoft has strategically positioned itself as the go-to government partner. “The Netherlands has long been transatlantic in orientation and gives commercial parties a lot of space,” Schaake told de Volkskrant. She also pointed to a revolving door between Microsoft and government institutions."
Good luck sourcing your replacement components from a hostile nation.
Unfortunately, current citizens have been awash in the notion that capitalism needs supersede government secirity.
Just off the top of my head, accessing the IRS website (taxes) gets tracked by google. Windows keeps trying to pull everything online. Americans don't get separate apple app stores.
It goes on and on.
But you can only use this in a big way once. And all parties have pretty much assumed the US would never use its leverage as Trump has been doing.
The same way we dare invest in the US stock marked, because we're confident the US won't do a Cuba-style nationalization of private assets.
Obviously, the orange man is gambling EU won't decouple from the US. He might be right, this probably isn't big enough.
Decoupling all systems is expensive, it cheaper to wait 4 years.
That said, the orange man did get EU defense investment -- the investments are just not being made in the US.
Sadly, I don't think anyone will decouple, people still laugh at the idea of using LibreOffice.
People who say this haven't internalized how much shit the US is in. In the absolute best case scenario where there is a fair election and the Democrats retake the federal government, the decisions made over the next 4 years will have harrowing effects throughout the world that will take decades to recover from.
In the most likely case scenario, Republicans will continue trying to expand their fascist power and suppress the judiciary and their stranglehold on Congress so they can effectively remain in power indefinitely.
At this point, Europeans would be stupid to rely on US in any sense whatsoever. Sure, milk the cow for whatever's left while you're at it, but "this too shall pass" is not a viable long-term strategy.
Imagine what you would do if you thought weakness could leave you no recourse if you were sent to the gulags? How ruthless and self serving would you get?
> once you start defying lawful orders, people are going to be scared that this same power can be used against them.
I feel like people only born yesterday could say this. There has been a bipartisan push for an Executive unfettered by the legislature since 9/11, and extreme partisans just point at each other. You're both right.
On average, not much apparently. Can't find the story now, but there was someone recounting Jewish families still hiding and hoping people aren't coming for them specifically, in towns where soldiers ended up coming for all the families. It seems like when it comes to similar decisions made individually, people aren't that keen to risk their lives.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/microsoft-network-b...
Look at how silicon valley was bootstrapped through government expenditure.
I rather suspect that this would come with mandatory encryption backdoors.
Having worked on Firefox CI infrastructure years ago, it's a huge and complex setup. As I recall back then it was >100 compute hours per push.
Fork it and keep synching in from upstream, sure that's easy. But are you an independent browser?
I've been quite happy with smaller local services for a loong time. Started using them in 2004 when I got my first website and aside from short try of gmail when it was still free, always used them.
Mandating browsers (preinstalled on devices sold in EU) auto-delete cookies on window close, and add a button to whitelist 1st party cookies on specific domains, would solve many more problems without wasting time with annoying popups.
The ICC is incredibly important, incredibly young and global. Shifting this to europe would not solve the problem.
If the ICC was able to have a contract with a fully sovereign supplier, that would be a whole new can of worms. It would be a matter of time (hours? days?) until a fully sovereign corporation put its profits above its negative impact on people.
More than that, how does an organization funded by a group of nations avoid the budget becoming politicized?
The issue is complex and the silver bullet is hard to find.
Well it’s incredibly young, but it is neither incredibly important seeing as how the premise of the court is suspect nor global seeing as how substantial portions of the globe have either not signed, not ratified, or withdrew their signature before ratification. I’ll give you “international”.
You’re right though: any possible software vendor is theoretically subject to someone’s sanctions regime. If they want to uphold the independence of their institution, that’s probably more work for an internal IT department.
It requires a given state to allow it to operate and have jurisdiction. That's a political act through and through.
The US doesn't recognize it anymore so it's baffling why they didn't move to non US equipment.
edit. i believe the migration was initiated and implemented by the current icc prosecutor. amazing absence of a foresight.
I will assign a non-zero (but not-one) probability to this being a frame, for obvious reasons. Motive, means, opportunity.
Think of the treaty as more of an extradition scheme. Its also a bit of an insurance policy - its an incentive not to commit international crimes against/on territory of member states, because it becomes much harder to evade justice.
There is also an element of symbolism to it, of what type of country you want to be.
A year goes by, and the government of the world's other large rogue state responded thusly, to the ICC's consideration of arrest warrants for both Netanyahu and Hamas leaders:
> On 24 April 2024, Khan was sent a letter signed by 12 Republican U.S. senators[c] threatening him and other UN jurists and their families with personal consequences if the ICC were to seek an international arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu or other members of the Israeli government. The letter cited the American Service-Members' Protection Act – known informally as "The Hague Invasion Act"[42] – which specifically includes "all means".[43][44] The signatories said they would view any arrest warrant as "a threat not only to Israel's sovereignty, but also to the sovereignty of the United States". They threatened: "Target Israel and we will target you", and that any further action would "end all American support for the ICC" and "exclude [Khan and his associates and employees] and their families from the United States". The letter ended: "You have been warned."[45]
Whether that is good or bad is debatable, but i think it gives the wrong impression of the icc to assume that this type of situation is the primary thing the icc does (or did historically)
The Rome Statute is an international treaty by every definition of that term. It is available to every sovereign state, and has been signed and ratified by a majority of the UN member states on all six habitable continents. The ICC is as global as the WHO, UNICEF or the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In this case, the signatory is the state of Palestine, jurisdiction has been established, and it affects anyone who commits specific crimes within that jurisdiction.
Still not enough? A law that mandates backdoors necessary to trigger the above in all exported tech.
And people talked about Huawei…
All I’m doing though is pointing out that no European institutions were harmed by this result, and I’ll even add to that that generally the American sanctions regime is often a benefit to our allies; and this type of sanctioning is something we have usually done in concert with our European allies. What’s different this time is that it’s targeting an ICC prosecutor rather than people who are also on the EU’s hit list, namely Putin’s cronies.
So after the US (and others) fought for Europe in WW-II. Defended Europe during the cold war (and till today). Took most of the load ($, weapons etc.) in supporting Ukraine against Russia. Now you're going to tell it to f off? And that is somehow in the interest of the citizens?
How many American companies have offices in Europe? How many American products are in your life? Hacker News is based where?
I would agree the partnership needs to evolve as does everything. But in a world that's looking more and more like China-"The West"-India(?) Europe's place is still in the west. That's likely the best thing for the world and for Europeans. And for Americans. Hopefully also including better partnership with the rest of the world as well.
Presidents come and go. Don't get too stuck on Trump.
128B "aid to the government of Ukraine" $195B total spending for Ukraine
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/united-states-america...
$158B in total spending $136B financial and budgetary support and in humanitarian and emergency assistance + military assistance
It's a bit obfuscated but I think on paper the US is ahead overall. Certainly Ukraine without the US would be much worse off. Likely under Russian control.
There's nothing wrong with mutually beneficial deals, of course. But citizens of Europe should have a clear understanding that they cannot expect US to remain friendly to them in the future, even if and when Trump goes away. If you want benefits, you'll have to negotiate from a position of strength, and this means being able to walk away from the table because you don't actually need the deal on it.
Countries have interests. That has always been the case. Europe's interest in this case is to align with the US.
But sure, Europe needs to figure some stuff out.
Europe's interest is to be allied with the US. But if US isn't interested in that - and long term this now has to be assumed as a definitive possibility - Europe should be prepared to act accordingly.
The US is still very much part of the west.
Anything is a possibility. I get it that there's some drama and people are upset. The US has challenges and Europe also has challenges.
European Democracies should start a, new, NATO-like military Alliance on their own, but without Trump's America.
(and without the notorious US-made military equipment kill-switches)
And while we're at it, this time will be different: Instead of the membership criteria being anti-soviet communism, as in NATO, it should be effective Liberal Democracy - and - Freedom from Exceptionalist Exemptions, namely from the International Rule of Law. So, to be part,
1. Compulsory International Criminal Court membership and compliance - hence no exceptionalistic US, no exceptionalistic Israel - and now, no Orbanic Hungary.
2. No "Illiberal Democracies": say, for example, a composite of a minimum 0.67 score on the WJP Rule of Law Index and others: therefore no Orbanic Hungary, and no illiberal others like it. Poland, Slovakia, Italy: time to make some hard choices if you want in.
3. Democratic backsliding removes you rights in the Alliance, and, can proportionally lead to outright expulsion.
Not one more new military equipment purchase from the US, (and dispreference for other non-qualifying nations procurement). Member nations should use their - substantial - industrial capacity to equip themselves with indigenous military materiel.
Hey, it would be actually great for the economy!
Initially European scope, but bridges to a broader global scope (or even a secondary sister-Alliance) with open-ended partnerships with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and yes: Taiwan.
US and/or Israel want to join, if a more Democratic future selves? Simple: fully join the ICC, and meet the Alliance's full criteria as every other member. Same applies for prospective new members.
Sweden shows how principled positions can be maintained while building serious defense capabilities. Now multiply that model by Europe's combined industrial and technological base.
We just need the political will to execute - instead of rolling over and wagging our tail to bullies.
Nothing screams "complicit in genocide" like attacking and cripling the institution investigating such crimes.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more public outrage at what I think is the geopolitical equivalent of having a journalist killed.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
> Nothing screams "complicit in genocide" like attacking and cripling the institution investigating such crimes.
The law you cited is clear. Don’t touch American service members and American service members won’t touch the court. Reasonable enough given we aren’t party to the court and will not be held subject to its jurisdiction.
Not really. International law is for the most part not worth the paper its written on. However if you do believe in it, USA signed the UN charter where they in theory gave up the right to use military force except in self-defence. A foreign court holding a trial for an american citizen accused of commiting a crime in a foreign place is definitely not a valid excuse to invade someone under international law.
Its also pretty hypocritical, since if someone travels to america and commits a crime there, america has no problem arresting them for their conduct while in america. Why aren't other countries allowed to do the same?
This isn’t a Dutch district court in The Hague trying ordinary crimes. This is a non-Dutch court hosted in The Hague with jurisdiction limited to signatory nations and trying extraordinary crimes listed in its charter, but again, with limited jurisdiction. Right now the extent and scope of their reach is under debate specifically between the signatory Palestinian State and the non-signatory Israel, and we’re seeing that “debate” play out between governments which have an interest in minimizing its institutional reach and the ICC itself which has an interest in maximizing its institutional reach. Real sovereign nations are, as it turns out, more powerful than the ICC. Which brings us to:
> Its also pretty hypocritical, since if someone travels to america and commits a crime there, america has no problem arresting them for their conduct while in america. Why aren't other countries allowed to do the same?
Other countries can and they do, and we do the same to foreigners that commit crimes in America. This isn’t at issue. This isn’t even in the discussion.
What is, is the American Service-Members Protection Act wherein we’ve passed a law specifically to insulate our service members and our allies from an international institution whose jurisdiction over us and other non-signatories we explicitly don’t recognize, and there’s a big stick in there where the President at his own discretion is explicitly authorized to use force to liberate any American or citizen of a US ally from the ICC. This does not extend to the Dutch judicial system.
The ICC is best understood as a consortium of soverign states. The US is more powerful than pretty much all other states combined. So really its not that soverign states are more powerful than the ICC, but that usa is more powerful than everyone and does what it wants.
> This isn’t a Dutch district court in The Hague trying ordinary crimes
This is kind of an odd distinction given that the real dutch courts do claim universial juridsiction over international crimes. Real dutch courts claim the right to prosecute these crimes regardless of where they take place including in non-icc countries. The ICC on the other hand is much more limited.
More accurately, it’s a treaty organization that relies on the sovereignty of its signatory nations to assert its claim of legitimacy.
> This is kind of an odd distinction given that the real dutch courts do claim universial juridsiction over international crimes. Real dutch courts claim the right to prosecute these crimes regardless of where they take place including in non-icc countries. The ICC on the other hand is much more limited.
There’s a couple of countries that subscribe to similar judicial principles. The long arm of their legal systems are in fact still limited in reality if not on paper.
Regardless of the Dutch court system’s claimed jurisprudence, that is irrelevant because the ICC is not a Dutch court and I’m not inclined to view further attempts to conflate a single sovereign nation’s own court system with one rooted in a specific signed treaty between signatory nations as an argument made in good faith.
The reason i'm focused on this is you claimed national courts are legit. This naturally raises the question of what the difference is.
What specificly is the element that you think makes treaty courts illegitament? Are you opposed to them in general or the ICC specificly? I'm just not clear on the nature of your objection specificly.
From my perspective, if a state can make a court, then it stands to reason that a state can delegate to any court it feels like. If it wants to delegate some of its justice powers to the ICC, i don't see how that's any different than if it delegated those same powers to a court of its own making.
1) I did not say the ICC was illegitimate.
2) The difference between the ICC and a nation’s own court system is the Rome Statute which defines the ICC’s jurisdiction and competencies.
"(b) Persons Authorized To Be Freed.--The authority of subsection (a) shall extend to the following persons: (2) Covered allied persons."
That includes Nehterlands, which is a member of NATO.
So US can snatch Dutch war criminal from Netherlands if US president likes the person or whatever? :) Very clear law with no weird implications.
Addenum: I solely react to your claim that this law is very clear.
Because the Netherlands signed the Rome Statute, it does not (italics mine):
> COVERED ALLIED PERSONS—The term ‘covered allied persons’ means military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally (including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), or Taiwan, for so long as that government is not a party to the International Criminal Court and wishes its officials and other persons working on its behalf to be exempted from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
Jokes aside though, remember that the prior commentator brought in the American Service-Members Protection Act as a weird form of whataboutism. Bringing that up does not transform the ICC into a European court, even if an actual American military intervention of The Hague would not bode well for the integrity of Dutch sovereignty and my advise to the European nations and citizenry that can’t grok the implications of hosting an international political institution is to convince the ICC to relocate itself so the Eurocentric among you stop mistaking it for a European court.
Still bad.
Dont even try :)
Keep the chocolate separate from the artificial sweeteners.
Whatever our deal is with the EU and individual European countries, the ICC is emphatically not an EU nor even a European court. They’re hosted in The Hague, it is not of The Hague in the same way the UN is not of New York.
Which political decision? The one to prosecute a US ally, or the one to sanction the ICC?
When someone decries something as "politics," there's often a problem where the analysis conveniently stops when the blame can be placed on the speaker's disfavored group.
ICC is about criminal liability of individuals, which sometimes has bearing on international politics but is not intrinsically so.
More generally, part of the envisioned role of the ICJ is that it could be a court system where countries can go to solve any disputes about how to interpret any treaty (however the rules are both parties have to consent, which means in practise it rarely happens)
US isn't really a party to all this, so there isn't much they can do legally (to be clear i think americas sanctions are unacceptable). They could file a juridsictional challenge, which some countries did, but legally there isn't a huge amount of ground to stand on for that.
Other than that, the actual legal part doesn't start until (if) the suspects are apprehended. And if it does get to a trial, its going to be the accused lawyers who are going to be fighting it out.
What's legally questionable, is for ICC to claim jurisdiction over Israel - a nation that never signed to or ratified the ICC statue.
They do not claim that.
What they claim: - palestine is a state (probably the most controversial claim)
- states have the right to punish crimes that happen in their borders regardless of who commits them
- states can delegate that right to other parties
- Palestine delegated that right to the ICC.
Additionally from an international law perspective, there is the idea that some things are preemptorary norms which apply to all states. This includes things like parts of the geneva convention or the genocide convention that define certain crimes. Based on the precedent at nuremburg, an international body can setup a tribunal to punish those crimes even against the will of the state in question. The ICC doesnt use this but its fairly well established doctribe in intl law.
You do realize the precedent at Nuremberg (note the spelling), requires that the the capitulation of the party being tried? Famously, at the trial of admiral Dönitz, the defense presented an affidavit from admiral Chester Nimitz, where he confessed to the same crimes Dönitz was being tried for. Dönitz was convicted, but the court declined to try Nimitz because the United States was on the winning side and thus outside of the jurisdiction of the court.
You can't impose a tribunal on a country, without capitulation.
Claims about "helping the world" are highly subjective and often bullshit (see the often-mocked tech company talk about "making the world a better place [by doing awful stuff like shoving targeted ads in people's faces]".
> If the ICC is doing so much harm to the US, fight legally. That's where the battle should be fought. Not ripping away some guy's email access.
What do you mean? Sanctions are "fight[ing] legally," literally.
What's the problem with that? Ultimately, that's what all law is. Law doesn't work unless the lawgiver has the power to force its will on whomever it deems to be a lawbreaker.
The ICC's problem here is that it tried to exert control where it has no power, inviting retaliation.
Intrinsically, nothing, as long we remember the amoral nature of the whole thing. That what you say is true has nothing to do (in either direction) with its consequences being good in my, your, or anybody else’s conception of goodness; each one of us will have to evaluate that completely independently.
It seems you are making the point that using technology to punish subjective politics is the right way?!
Sidenote: ICC has been backed by many nations, occasionally including US too. Using sanctions in retributions to unfavourable opinions might seem against the spirit of US Constitution in other contexts...
Why not let arguments do their work in open debate? The ICC isn't a bunch of loonies or Saddam's Baath party. These are reasonable people, with dissident opinions, for sure. But reasonable.
> Sanctions are "fight[ing] legally," literally.
Technically, the more appropriate term might be "legalism", in the mechanistic sense.
Well, that happened. Israel presented an argument that the investigation legally must end, as they haven't consented to ICC jurisdiction; the ICC openly considered and openly rejected this argument (https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-p...), saying that Palestine's consent was sufficient because the alleged crimes took place in Palestinian territory.
The US has always taken an extremely aggressive stance that this theory of ICC jurisdiction is unacceptable. "It is a fundamental principle of international law that a treaty is binding upon its parties only and that it does not create obligations for nonparties without their consent to be bound", as 22 USC §7421 puts it. (If you're old enough, you may recognize this as part of the bipartisan "Hague Invasion Act" of 2002, widely understood as a threat of military force against anyone who tries to enforce ICC jurisdiction on a citizen of the US or its non-ICC allies.)
Its a little more complicated than that. The dispute is also about if palestine is a "state" and thus able to consent (and i'm not sure, but possibly what the territorial extent of Palestine is. it probably doesnt matter, but the fact that the official government of Palestine lost control of the gaza strip in a civil war a long time ago is another winkle in this whole thing)
While the court initially rejected Israel's challenge, the appeal court reverses the decision, and threw it back to the lower court, which is now deliberating on it https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-appea... . As far as i understand most observers think this is an extreme long shot on the part of Israel and they are unlikely to win this challenge.
[IANAL, and far from an expert at this, this stuff is complicated, it is very possible i got the details wrong]
The 2002 withdrawal was clearly to sidestep prosecution for the lies that led to Iraq's invasion.
US was okay with ICC until those human right high horse stuff could apply to US...
I guess so I was saying, is that US might have been a signatory. In spirit, US has often advocated for applying rules of international humanitarian law where appropriate.
Treaties like NATO, NAFTA, or various "coalitions of the willing" were never backed by a majority of the worlds population. (Maybe an agreement between China and India, might count?).
I think the point isn't that US never believed in multilateralism - it did - but that it feels rules and laws should only apply to others.
> It seems you are making the point that using technology to punish subjective politics is the right way?!
My point was to not trust claims that so-and-so is "helping the world," is a vague but positive description that is abused and often collapses on further scrutiny (especially because the speaker may have different subjective interests, what's "helping the world" to him can be "harming the world" to you).
Your response was weird. I was talking about something that I specified clearly, but you took it as I was speaking about something else.
> Using sanctions in retributions to unfavourable opinions might seem against the spirit of US Constitution in other contexts...
No. What are you smoking?
> Why not let arguments do their work in open debate? The ICC isn't a bunch of loonies or Saddam's Baath party. These are reasonable people, with dissident opinions, for sure. But reasonable.
Ok then. I claim authority over you and your friends, but you never consented. I'm not a loony, why don't you recognize my authority over you and engage with me in open debate?
That's "why not."
You don't have to imagine it, it's happening. Is it happening to judges in your country, though?
I understand in the pretend world they want to be able to do $x without ever worrying about being beholden to any other countries laws or politics or whatever else.
They want this for lots of values of $x, and often have fun asserting it will soon be possible.
In the real world however, this has never been possible, since the dawn of recorded history, for lots and lots and lots of values of $x.
Pretty much any time $x becomes valuable or interesting enough, it becomes impossible to have this happen in all and usually most cases.
It often doesn't matter how simple a thing $x is - sailing a ship for example, or buying produce, it usually only matters how valuable or interesting it was.
As long as enough countries exist, and they have laws that have extra-territorial effect, the likelihood this problem will be really solved trends towards zero.
What exactly does someone expect to happen here when it's just people and companies trying to follow the laws they think they are required to follow.
This is actually what should happen, and is happening
The usual response is then that some country or group of countries need to build some untouchable-by-other-countries infrastructure and that will solve having to deal with others politics. This seems to me naive at best. The only cases this will work is for things that can be 100% contained and controlled within a given country/group. That is roughly impossible for most interesting things.
For example - it makes no sense to have a economic-block-specific email provider to work around sanctions, because whoever wanted to sanction them will just ban transiting email to them, and then transiting packets, and then equipment, and then chips to make equipment, and then machines to make chips to make equipment, and then wafers used to make chips, and then raw resources used to make wafers, and then equipment to mine raw resources, and then ....
Let's assume you don't care about this group, but they are still powerful. Great - they'll do this not just directly, but indirectly, by forcing others who do have to care to do the same to you.
Now, it would be different if you are building this thing as a political move or strategy, rather than expecting it to solve your problem directly. But otherwise, it is remarkably rare to be able to work around the politics with technology, and if you do, you won't be able to for very long.
It's much more useful to focus on dealing with the politics, if you want to change it.
Wasting lots of time and energy and money trying to avoid politics seems like a bad plan
One reason the the court has been hamstrung is that it relies heavily on contractors and non-governmental organizations. Those businesses and groups have curtailed work on behalf of the court because they were concerned about being targeted by U.S. authorities, according to current and former ICC staffers.
Microsoft, for example, cancelled Khan’s email address, forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider, ICC staffers said. His bank accounts in his home country of the U.K. have been blocked.
https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-co...
What we've seen over the last 10 years in tech and politics is the rise of people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing and they wear their ignorance like a badge of honor.
I've had so many conversations with crypto bros about how crypto doesn't really solve anything and NFTs are BS and DeFi is pushed by people who have no idea of why finance is the way it is or they're simply trying yet another rug pull. This is a fundamentally anti-intellectual position.
What we've seen since January 20 is the absolute dumbest, most ignorant sycophants destroy things they simply don't understand and don't want to understand. Destroy USAID (as one example)? Foreign aid is a tool of US soft power, a key part of US foreign policy. That's not money for nothing. We're buying influence. Don't even get me started on tariffs. Again, it's fundamentally anti-intellectual.
Part of me is glad to see how many people are waking up to the myth of meritocracy.
By taking punitive yet performative action against the ICC for hurting Israel's feelings by saying true things does nothing but weaken US tech influence over Europe. it tells Europe that the US cannot be relied upon and an alternative needs to be found.
Fun fact: the US has passed a law colloquially known as the Hage Invasion Act [1]. This not authorizes but requires the US to invade the Hague if the ICC ever detains and prosecutes any US service member or official or those of any ally.
By itself it doesn't really matter but it's death by a thousand paper cuts and there are a thousand other small things that are pushing Europe to distance itself from the US.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
What people should know is that even within a religion like Christianity there are vast differences between sects. Jesuits are not Southern Baptists, for example.
A lot of texts from antiquity were preserved by the Catholic monastic tradition through the Middle Ages. Theology in the Roman Catholic sense has always been treated as an academic discipline.
Evangelicism arose primarily in the US as a byproduct of "manifest destiny" combined with no access to academic theologians. Sects popped up based on "plain" readings of religious texts. Put another way: it's almost entirely vibes-based.
But none of this really matters because religion is never the reason for a conflict such as this. Religion is simply the veneer applied to motivate the masses. The actual motivations are always materialist. In this case that means a settler colonial project to disrupt a region of strategic improtance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Usually, I suspect that, behind the behavior of dumb figureheads and dumb pawns, is some party that is smarter (and evil).
Same for refusing orders. It may change nothing, like in this story:
> One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in
> a certain house ... and to blow up the house with them.
> The sapper refused ... The commander then ordered his
> men to put the old women in the house and the evil deed
> was done.
But people sometimes still do it.
And even this case it's pretty obvious that they are under attack.
If you run your own server, you might not know that you've been compromised.
Maybe not the 'main threat', but most certainly a threat. Have been since 2002.
You may or may not if run your own server. In a case of the hosted solution you are absolutely can't know.
Also, why only target US? Europe has helped fund projects that have gone into weapons research.