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Comment by sdeframond | Hacker News Reader

> So half of the defendants carried out the justice sought by the ICC on the other half.

...without trial. And assuming guilty and sentenced to death.

I think this comment shows how far removed is the modern person living in a sheltered, matcha-sipping western environment from actual human historical reality. Do you seriously suggest that during an active war one side would bring the other to trial rather than just destroy them?

I agree. Having lived with a civil war and with non-western roots I find the Western attitude to things like this to be hopelessly naive. It is the product of a golden age following the collapse of communism and the subsequent unrealistic "end of history" optimism.

You're missing the point, "justice sought by the ICC" implies that the ICC just wanted to execute them, which is obviously not true.

So in the case of Sri Lanka, was the LLRC set up and subsequently criticised as a mechanism to lend legitimacy to the way in which government forces conducted operations against LTTE? If so, would its mere existence not indicate some level of societal buy-in to the idea that actions should take part according to some judicial form of 'justice'?

The idea to enquire into whether actions were justified in the context of war. Very different from a criminal trial before actions are taken.

Have you heard about Nuremberg trials?

Those were after Germany's defeat, and those put on trial were no longer active combatants.

I'm pretty sure no military in history has ever delayed taking out an active threat in order to conduct legal proceedings. They don't need to, because enemy combatants don't have to be guilty of any crimes to be valid targets under IHL.

The winning side destroying the losing has historically been the exception, not the rule. So why not?

Huh? You have that backwards. Since the dawn of human civilization, when two societies went to war the winner usually annihilated the loser: steal anything of value, smash the artifacts, execute the men, and take the women and children as slaves. Thousands of cultures were utterly erased this way. It's only recently that warfare has become a bit more "civilized".

I am saying that "half of the defendants" DID NOT carry out the justice sought by the ICC on the other half.

They did something else (an act of war) that should not be conflated with justice.

Indeed, conflating execution without trial with ‘justice’ is utterly bizarre.

There are no trials in combat.

These answers are assuming that the individuals killed were also those responsible. With Israel's stranglehold on media access to Gaza (perhaps better: open hostility), we will likely never know who was killed and what were the charges against them.

Responsible for what? In war, enemies combatants aren't slain as punishment for crimes, but simply because they're enemy combatants. Likewise prisoners of war aren't (typically) detained on suspicion of crimes, they're detained simply for being enemy combatants.

Is there justice in war?

I was quite clearly responding to the GP’s assertion that some sort of ‘justice’ was carried out by one party on the other, which obviously isn’t remotely the case. You can save your cliched one liners.

Trial by which court?

This is standard rules of war. Soldiers don’t have to convene a court before shooting at enemy combatants.

> Trial by which court?

Well, the ICC ?

OP states that "one the defendants carried out the justice sought by the ICC". That's incorrect. One of the defendants went farther than any sentence the ICC would have decided.

As you say, this is an act of war (killing ennemies), not an act of justice (trial and prosecution) .

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