Comment by bramhaag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bramhaag | Hacker News Reader

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You may dislike the ICC, but please don't spread misinformation about them.

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.

The ICTY was established by the United Nations to prosecute crimes committed during the wars in Yugoslavia, but as the ICTY only focused on carried out atrocities (instead of failure to defend an area), no Dutchbat members were prosecuted there either. The ICTY did prosecute Krstić, the commander who led the Srebrenica massacre that Dutchbat failed to defend against.

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...

You're right that I dislike the ICC. It's 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).

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 fake.

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.

You're arguing semantics. We seem to agree they're a bunch of politicians that are bought and sold for propaganda purposes, and that they do essentially nothing.

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.

Someone parroting the far-right propaganda that British-Pakistanis are culturally serial rapists also believes the hasbara that Israel is a perpetual victim that was forced to convince (i.e. terrorise, via the Irgun and Haganah) the British into giving them a land in 1948 because their holy book said they were there 3000 years ago, and that this also justifies the tens of thousands of Palestinians they've killed since then. Colour me surprised.

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