Ever since German and Japanese surviving leaders were prosecuted after World War II at Nuremberg and Tokyo, there has been a wide abyss separating the drive for criminal accountability on the part of those who commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes from the realities of world politics. The law is supposed to push toward consistency of application, with the greatest importance attached to holding accountable those with the greatest power and wealth. The realities of world politics move in the opposite direction, exempting from criminal accountability those political actors that play dominant roles. In a sense the pattern was encoded in the seminal undertakings at Nuremberg and Tokyo that assumed the partially discrediting form of ‘victors’ justice.’ Surely the indiscriminate bombings of German and Japanese cities by Allied bomber fleets and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ‘crimes’ that should have been investigated and punished if the tribunals had been fully ‘legal’ in their operations. It was the case, especially in Tokyo, that the tribunal allowed defendants to be represented by competent lawyers and that the judges assessed fairly the evidence alleging criminality, producing dissenting opinions in the Japanese proceedings and there was an acquittal at Nuremberg. In effect, there was a measure of procedural fairness in these trials. Without doubt those who were accused of crimes did engage in activity that was legally permissible and important for the future of world order to criminalize through findings of guilt and impositions of punishment, but this outcome was flawed to the extent that victors were not subject to comparable standards of accountability.
There was a second message arising from these trials: that winning side by conducting trials of this kind takes advantage of the opportunity to reinforce claims as to the justice of historical verdicts by pronouncing on the criminality of losers while overlooking the criminality of victors. There was also a third message that tries to overcome the flaw of double standards. It has been called ‘the Nuremberg promise,’ and involves a commitment by the victors in the future to abide by the norms and procedures used to punish the German and Japanese surviving military and political leaders. In effect, to correct this flaw associated with victors’ justice by making criminal accountability in the future a matter of law applicable to all rather than a consequence of the outcome of wars or a reflection of geopolitical hierarchy.
The Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Robert Jackson (excused temporarily from serving as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court), gave this promise an enduring relevance in his official statement to the court: “If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” These words are repeatedly quoted by peace activists, yet ignored by political leaders who took no notice of either the original flaw at Nuremberg or the obligation to remove it. Since 1945 crimes by the victors in conflict have continued to be overlooked by international criminal law, while prosecutions reflecting geopolitical leverage have kept happening without any concerted intergovernmental or UN effort to correct the imbalance. Since the end of the Cold War implementation of criminal responsibility has been increasingly imposed on losers in world politics, including such leaders as Slobadan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi each of whom were deposed by Western military force, and either summarily executed or prosecuted.
This dual pattern of criminal accountability that cannot be fully reconciled with law or legitimacy has given rise to several reformist efforts. Civil society and some governments have favored a less imperfect legalization of criminal accountability, and raised liberal hopes by unexpectedly achieving the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002 through the extraordinary efforts of a global coalition of NGOs and the commitment of a group of middle powers. Fearful of losing their impunity geopolitical heavyweights such as the United States, China, India, and Russia have refused to sign on to the ICC. Yet this and other formal initiatives have not yet seriously impinged on the hierarchal realities of world politics, which continue to exhibit an embrace of the Melian ethos when it comes to criminal accountability: “the strong do what they will, the weak do what they must.” Such an ethos marked, for Thucydides, unmistakeable evidence of Athenian decline, but for contemporary realists a different reading has been prevalent, underpinning political realism, contending that hard power calls the shots in history, and the losers have no choice but to cope as best they can. Double standards persist: the evildoers in Africa are targets of prosecutors, but those in the West that wage aggressive war or mandate torture as national policies continue to enjoy impunity as far as formal legal proceedings are concerned.
The existence of double standards is part of the deep structure of world politics. It was even given constitutional status by being written into the Charter of the United Nations that permits the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, that is the winners in 1945, to exercise a veto over any decision affecting the peace and security of the world, thereby exempting the world’s most dangerous states, being the most militarily powerful and expansionist, from any obligation to uphold international law. Such a veto power, while sounding the death knell for the UN in its core role of war prevention based on law rather than geopolitics, is probably responsible for keeping the Organization together through times of intense geopolitical conflict. Without the veto, undoubtedly the West would
have managed to push the Soviet Union and China out the door during the Cold War years, and the UN would have disintegrated in the manner of the League of Nations, which after the end of World War I converted Woodrow Wilson’s dream into a nightmare. Beyond this, even seen through a geopolitical optic, the anachronistic character of the West-centric Security Council is a remnant of the colonial era. 2011 is not 1945, but the difficulty of achieving constitutional reform means that India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and South Africa seem destined to remain permanent ladies in waiting as the UN goes about its serious male business. What this means for UN authority, including its sponsorship of the politics of individual criminal accountability, is that all that is ‘legal’ is not necessarily ‘legitimate.’
My argument seeks to make two main points: first, double standards pervade the application of international criminal law eroding its authority and legitimacy; and secondly, those geopolitical hierarchies that are embedded in the UN framework lose their authority and legitimacy by not adapting to changing times and conditions, especially the collapse of the colonial order and the rise of non-Western centers of soft and hard power.
There are different kinds of efforts to close this gap between the legal and the legitimate in relation to the criminality of political leaders and military commanders. One move is at the level of the sovereign state, which is to encourage the domestic criminal law to extend its reach to cover international crimes. Such authority is known as Universal Jurisdiction (UJ), a hallowed effort by states to overcome the enforcement weaknesses of international law, initially developed to deal with the crime of piracy, interpreted as a crime against the whole world. Many liberal democracies in particular have regarded themselves as agents of the international legal order, endowing their judicial system with the authority to apprehend and prosecute those viewed as criminally responsible for crimes of state. The legislating of UJ represented a strong tendency during the latter half of the twentieth century in the liberal democracies, especially in Western Europe. This development reached public awareness in relation to the dramatic 1998 detention in Britain of Augusto Pinochet, former ruler of Chile, in response to an extradition request from Spain where criminal charges had been judicially approved. The ambit of UJ is wider than its formal implementation as its mere threat is intimidating, leading those prominent individuals who might be detained and charged to avoid visits to countries where such claims might be plausibly made. As might be expected, UJ gave rise to a vigorous geopolitical campaign of pushback, especially by the governments of the United States and Israel reacted with most fear to this prospect of criminal apprehension by foreign national courts. As a result of intense pressures, several of the European UJ states have rolled back their legislation so as to calm the worries of travelers with tainted records of public service!
There is another approach to spreading the net of criminal accountability that has been taken, remains controversial, and yet seems responsive to the current global atmosphere of populist discontent. It involves claims by civil society, by the peoples of the world, to establish institutions and procedures designed to close the gap between law and legitimacy in relation to the application of international criminal law. Such initiatives are appropriately traced back to the 1966-67 establishment of the Bertrand Russell International Criminal Tribunal that examined charges of aggression and war crimes associated with the American role in the Vietnam War. The charges were weighed by a distinguished jury composed of moral and cultural authority figures chaired by Jean-Paul Sartre. The Russell Tribunal was derided at the time as a ‘kangeroo court’ or a ‘circus’ because its conclusions could be accurately anticipated in advance, its authority was self-proclaimed and without governmental approval, it had no control over those accused, and its capabilities fell far short of enforcement. What was overlooked in such criticism was the degree to which this dismissal of the Russell experiment reflected the monopolistic and self-serving claims of the state and state system to control the administration of law, ignoring the contrary claims of society to have law administered fairly in accord with justice, at least symbolically. Also ignored by critics was the fact that only such initiatives could overcome the blackout of truth achieved by the geopolitics of impunity. The Russell Tribunal may not have been ‘legal’ as understood from conventional governmental perspectives, but it was ‘legitimate’ in responding to double standards, by calling attention to massive crimes and dangerous criminals who otherwise enjoy a free pass, and by providing a reliable and comprehensive narrative account of criminal patterns of wrongdoing that destroy or disrupt the lives of entire societies and millions of people. As it happens, these societal initiatives require a great effort, and only occur where the criminality seems severe and extreme, and where a geopolitical mobilization precludes inquiry by established institutions of criminal law.
It is against this background that we understand a steady stream of initiatives that build upon the Russell experience. Starting in 1979, the Basso Foundation in Rome sponsored a series of such proceedings under the rubric of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal that explored a wide variety of unattended criminal wrongs, including dispossession of indigenous peoples, the Marcos dictatorship, Armenian massacres, self-determination claims of oppressed peoples. In 2005 the Istanbul World Tribunal on Iraq inquired into the claims of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes associated with the U.S./UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, commencing in 2003, causing as many as one million Iraqis to lose their lives, and several million to be permanently displaced from home and country. In the last several weeks the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, a direct institutional descendant of the original undertaking, held a session in South Africa to investigate charges of apartheid, as a crime against humanity, being made against Israel. In a few days, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal will launch an inquiry into charges of criminality made against George W. Bush and Tony Blair for their roles in planning, initiating, and prosecuting the Iraq War, to be followed a year later by a subsequent inquiry into torture charges made against Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales. I intend to write subsequently about each of these proceedings.
Without doubt such societal efforts to bring at large war criminals to symbolic justice should become a feature of the growing demand around the world for real democracy sustained by a rule of law that does not exempt from responsibility the rich and powerful whether they are acting internally or internationally.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal: Bush and Blair Guilty
29 Nov***************
Criminal Justice in Kuala Lumpur
In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a tribunal (Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal or KLWCT) consisting of five judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict that found George W. Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide as a result of initiating the Iraq War in 2003, and in the course of maintaining the subsequent occupation. The proceedings took place over a four day period from November 19-22, and included an opportunity for court appointed defense counsel to offer the tribunal arguments and evidence on behalf of the absent defendants who had been invited to offer their own defense or send a representative, but declined to do so. The prosecution team was headed by two prominent legal personalities with strong professional legal credentials: Gurdeal Singh Nijar and Francis Boyle. The verdict issued on November 22, 2011 happens to coincide with the 48th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The tribunal acknowledged that its verdict was not enforceable in a normal manner associated with a criminal court operating within a sovereign state or as constituted by international agreement as is the case with the International Criminal Court or by acts of the United Nations as occurred in the establishment of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. But the KLWCT by following a juridical procedure purported to be operating in a legally responsible manner, which would endow its findings and recommendations with a legal weight that seems expected to extend beyond a moral condemnation of the defendants, but in a manner that is not entirely evident.
The KLWCT added two ‘Orders’ to its verdict that had been adopted in accordance with the charter of the KLWCC that controlled the operating framework of the tribunal: 1) Report the findings of guilt of the two accused former heads of state to the International Criminal Court in The Hague; 2) Enter the names of Bush and Blair in the Register of War Criminals maintained by the KLWCC.
The tribunal these Orders by adding recommendations to its verdict: 1) Report findings in accord with Part VI (calling for future accountability) of the Nuremberg Judgment of 1945 addressing crimes of surviving political and military leaders of Nazi Germany; 2) File reports of genocide and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague; 3) Approach the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution demanding that the United States end its occupation of Iraq; 4) Communicate the findings of the tribunal to all members of the Rome Statute (governing the International Criminal Court) and to all states asserting Universal Jurisdiction that allows for the prosecution of international crimes in national courts; 5) Urge the UN Security Council to take responsibility to ensure that full sovereign rights are vested in the people of Iraq and that the independence of its government be protected by a UN peacekeeping force.
The Anti-War Campaign of Mahathir Mohamed
These civil society legal initiatives are an outgrowth of a longer term project undertaken by the controversial former Malaysian head of state, Mahathir Mohamed, to challenge American-led militarism and to mobilize the global south to mount an all out struggle against the war system. This vision of a revitalized struggle against war and post-colonial imperialism was comprehensively set forth in Mahathir’s remarkable anti-war speech of February 24, 2003, while still Prime Minister, welcoming the Non-Aligned Movement to Kuala Lumpur for its XIIIth Summit. Included in his remarks on this occasion were the following assertions that prefigure the establishment of the KLWCC and KLWCT: “War must be outlawed. That will have to be our struggle for now. We must struggle for justice and freedom from oppression, from economic hegemony. But we must remove the threat of war first. With this Sword of Democles hanging over our heads we can never succeed in advancing the interests of our countries. War must therefore be made illegal. The enforcement of this must be by multilateral forces under the control of the United Nations. No single nation should be allowed to police the world, least of all to decide what action to take, [and] when.” Mahathir stated clearly on that occasion that his intention in criminalizing the behavior of aggressive war making and crimes against humanity was to bring relief to victimized peoples with special reference to the Iraqis who were about to be attacked a few weeks later and the Palestinians who had long endured mass dispossession and an oppressive occupation. This dedication of Mahathir to a world without war was reaffirmed through the establishment of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalize War, and his impassioned inaugural speech opening a Criminalizing War Conference on October 28, 2009.
On February 13, 2007 Mahathir called on the KLWCC to prepare a case against Bush and Blair whom he held responsible for waging aggressive warfare against Iraq. Mahathir, an outspoken critic of the Iraq War and its aftermath, argued at the time that there existed a need for an alternative judicial forum to the ICC, which was unwilling to indict Western leaders, and he was in effect insisting that no leader should any longer be able to escape accountability for such crimes against nations and peoples. He acknowledged with savage irony the limits of his proposed initiative: “We cannot arrest them, we cannot detain them, and we cannot hang them the way they hanged Saddam Hussein.” Mahathir also contended that “The one punishment that most leaders are afraid of is to go down in history with a certain label attached to them..In history books they should be written down as war criminals and this is the kind of punishment we can make to them.” With this remark Mahathir prefigured the KLWCC register of war criminals that has inscribed the names of those convicted by the KLWCT. Will it matter?
Does such a listing have traction in our world? Will future leaders even know about such a stigmatizing procedure? I think civil society is challenged to
do its best to build ‘negative’ monuments in the public squares of global consciousness constructed with a deliberate intent to disgrace those guilty of crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. For too long our public squares have been adorned with heroes of war!
In his 2007 statement Mahathir promised that a future KLWCT would not in his words be “like the ‘kangaroo court’ that tried Saddam.” Truly, the courtroom proceedings against Saddam Hussein was a sham trial excluding much relevant evidence, disallowing any meaningful defense, culminating in a grotesque and discrediting execution. Saddam Hussein was subject to prosecution for multiple crimes against humanity, as well crimes against the peace, but the formally ‘correct’ trappings of a trial could not obscure the fact that this was a disgraceful instance of ‘victors’ justice. Of course, the media, to the extent that it notices civil society initiatives at all condemns them in precisely the same rhetoric that Mahathir used to attack the Saddam trial, insisting that the KLWCT is ‘a kangaroo court,’ ‘a circus,’ a theater piece with pre-assigned roles.
The KLWCT did I think make a mistake by establishing a defense team for Bush and Blair, and then failing to present their best possible arguments. Instead, a sheepish defense based on their acknowledging human failings for engaging in criminal conduct did create an impression that this ‘tribunal’ was not assessing the legal merits of the charges, but merely in reinforcing the preordained guilt of these particular individuals. In reporting on the defense effort, the following excerpt is illustrative of this self-discrediting as aspect of the approach taken by the KLWCT: “Lead Defense Counsel continued, ‘Had George W. Bush said ‘we know who you are, we know what you did, and we forgive you,’ the world could have been a much different place. But, instead, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo happened. We are fallible human beings. We make mistakes. And the Defense stated that the defense of Bush and Blair defense is that the accused ‘are human.’” Such a mock atonement, which does not correspond with the continuing effort of these former leaders to justify their Iraq War policy, was entirely inappropriate and erodes both the persuasiveness and credibility of the undertaking. It may be that an empty chair would have been the most suitable way to acknowledge the absence of the defendants from the courtroom, despite being given an opportunity to
present their best defense, or if it was decided to mount a defense on their behalf, then it should have done as skillfully and persuasively as possible.
The KLWCT has already announced a subsequent session devoted to the torture allegations directed at such American political leaders as former Vice President, Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Hopefully, the question of how to handle absent defendants will be handled in a better manner. The basic choice is whether to mount a genuine defense or to forego a defense on the belief that the purpose of the tribunal is to document the allegations and to pass judgment in overcome the refusal of governmental and inter-governmental judicial institutions to address such geopolitically sensitive issues. It is not clear whether the KLWCT effort to imitate the criminal procedures of tribunals constituted by the state system if the best model for these civil society initiatives. Perhaps, it is time to evolve a distinctive language, norms, institutions, and procedures that
reflect both the populist foundations of a jurisprudence of conscience.
Although receiving extensive local coverage, Western media without exception has ignored this proceeding against Bush and Blair, presumably considering it as irrelevant and a travesty on the law, while giving considerable attention to the almost concurrent UN-backed Cambodia War Crimes Tribunal prosecuting surviving Khmer Rouge operatives accused of genocidal behavior in the 1970s. For the global media, the auspices make all the difference.
Universal Jurisdiction
The KLWCT did not occur entirely in a jurisprudential vacuum. It has long been acknowledged that domestic criminal courts can exercise Universal Jurisdiction for crimes of state wherever these may occur, although usually only if the accused individuals are physically present in the court. In American law the Alien Tort Claims Act allows civil actions provided personal jurisdiction of the defendant is obtained for crimes such as torture committed outside of the United States. The most influential example was the 1980 Filartiga decision awarding damages to a victim of torture in autocratic Paraguay (Filartiga v. Peña 620 F2d 876). That is, there is a sense that national tribunals have the legal authority to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes wherever in the world the alleged criminality took place. The underlying legal theory is based on the recognition of the limited capacity of international criminal trials to impose accountability in a manner that is not entirely dictated by geopolitical priorities and reflective of a logic of impunity. In this regard, UJ has the potential to treat equals equally, and is very threatening to the Kissingers and Rumsfelds of this world, who have curtailed their travel schedules. The United States and Israel have used their diplomatic leverage to roll back UJ authority in Europe, especially the United Kingdom and Belgium.
The Move to Civil Society Tribunals
To a certain extent, the KLWCT is taking a parallel path to criminal accountability. It does not purport to have the capacity to exert bodily punishment or impose a financial penalty, and rather stakes its claims to effectiveness on publicity, education, and symbolic justice. Such initiatives have been undertaken from time to time since the Russell Tribunal of 1966-67 to address criminal allegations arising out of the Vietnam War whenever there exists public outrage and an absence of an appropriate response by governments or the institutions of international society. The Lelio Basso Foundation in Rome established in 1976 a Permanent Peoples Tribunal (PPT) that generalized on the Russell experience. It was founded on the belief that there was an urgent need to fill the institutional gap in the administration of justice worldwide that resulted from geopolitical manipulation and resulting formal legal regimes of ‘double standards.’ Over the next several decades, the PPT addressed a series of issues ranging from allegations of American intervention in Central America and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to contentions about the denial of human rights in the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, the dispossession of Indian communities in Amazonia, and the denial of the right of self-determination to the Puerto Rican people.
The most direct precedent for KLWCT was World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul (WTI) in 2005, culminating a worldwide series of hearings carried on between 2003-2005 on various aspects of the Iraq War. As with KLWCT it also focused on the alleged criminality of those who embarked on the Iraq War. WTI proceedings featured many expert witnesses, and produced a judgment that condemned Bush and Blair among others, and called for a variety of symbolic and societal implementation measures. The jury Declaration of Conscience included this general language: “The invasion and occupation of Iraq was and is illegal. The reasons given by the US and UK governments for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003 have proven to be false. Much evidence supports the conclusion that a major motive for the war was to control and dominate the Middle East and its vast reserves of oil as a part of the US drive for global hegemony… In pursuit of their agenda of empire, the Bush and Blair governments blatantly ignored the massive opposition to the war expressed by millions of people around the world. They embarked upon one of the most unjust, immoral, and cowardly wars in history.” Unlike KLWCT the tone and substance of the formal outcome of the Iraq War Tribunal was moral and political rather than strictly legal, despite the legal framing of the inquiry. For a full account see Muge Gursoy Sokmen, World Tribunal on Iraq: Making the Case Against War (2008).
Justifying Tribunals of Popular Justice and Public Conscience
Two weeks before the KLWCT, a comparable initiative in South Africa was considering allegations of apartheid directed at Israel in relation to dispossession of Palestinians and the occupation of a portion of historic Palestine (Russell Tribunal on Palestine, South African Session, 5-7 November 2011). All these ‘juridical’ events had one thing in common: the world system of states and institutions was unwilling to look a particular set of facts in the eye, and respond effectively to what many qualified and concerned persons believed to be a gross historical and actual circumstance of injustice. In this regard there was an intense ethical and political motivation behind these civil society initiatives that invoked the authority of law. But do these initiatives really qualify as ‘law’? A response to such a question depends on whether the formal procedures of sovereign states, and their indirect progeny—international institutions—are given a monopoly over the legal administration of justice. I would side with those that believe that people are the ultimate source of legal authority, and have the right to act on their own when governmental procedures, as in these situations, are so inhibited by geopolitics that they fail to address severe violations of international law.
Beyond this, we should not neglect the documentary record compiled by these civil society initiatives operating with meager resources. Their allegations are almost always exhibit an objective understanding of available evidence and applicable law, although unlike governmental procedures this assessment is effectively made prior to the initiation of the proceeding. It is this advance assurance of criminality that provides the motivation for making the formidable organizational and fundraising effort needed to bring such an initiative into play. But is this advance knowledge of the outcome so different from war crimes proceedings under governmental auspices? Indictments are made in high profile war crimes cases only when the evidence of guilt is overwhelming and decisive, and the outcome of adjudication is known as a matter of virtual certainty before the proceedings commence. In both instances the tribunal is not really trying to determine guilt or innocence, but rather is intent on providing the evidence and reasoning that validates and illuminates a verdict of guilt and resulting recommendations in one instance and criminal punishment in the other. It is of course impossible for civil society tribunals to enforce their outcomes in any conventional sense. Their challenge is rather to disseminate the judgment as widely and effectively as possible. A PPT publication in book form of its extensive testimony and evidence providing the ethical, factual, and legal rationale for its verdict proved sometimes to be surprisingly influential. This was reportedly the case in exposing and generating oppositional activism in the Philippines in the early 1980s during the latter years of the Marcos regime.
The Legalism of the KLWCT
The KLWCT has its own distinctive identity. First of all, the imprint of an influential former head of state in the country where the tribunal was convened gave the whole undertaking a quasi-governmental character. It also took account of Mahathir’s wider campaign against war in general. Secondly, the assessing body of the tribunal was composed of five distinguished jurists, including judges, from Malaysia imparting an additional sense of professionalism. The Chief Judge was Abdel Kadir Salaiman, a former judge of Malaysia’s federal court. Two other persons who were announced as judges were recused at the outset of the proceedings, one because of supposed bias associated with prior involvement in a similar proceeding, and another due to illness. Thirdly, there was a competent defense team that presented arguments intended to exonerate the defendants Bush and Blair, although the quality of the legal arguments offered was not as cogent as the evidence allowed.
Fourthly, the tribunal operated in rather strict accordance with a charter that had been earlier adopted by the KLWCC, and imparted a legalistic tone to the proceedings. It is this claim of legalism that is the most distinctive feature of the KLWCT in relation to comparable undertakings that rely more on an unprofessional and loose application of law by widely known moral authority personalities and culturally prominent figures who make no pretense of familiarities with the technicalities of legal procedure and the fine points of substantive law. In this respect the Iraq War Tribunal (IWT) held in Istanbul in 2005 was more characteristic, pronouncing on the law and offering recommendations on the basis of a politically and morally oriented assessment of evidence by a jury of conscience presided over by the acclaimed Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy and composed of a range of persons with notable public achievements, but without claims to expert knowledge of the relevant law, although extensive testimony by experts in international law did give a persuasive backing to the allegations of criminality. Also unlike KLWCT, the IWT mad no pretense of offering a defense to the charges.
Tribunals of ‘Conscience’ or of ‘Law’?
It raises the question for populist jurisprudence as to whether ‘conscience’ or ‘law’ is the preferred and more influential grounding for this kind of non-governmental initiative. In neither case, does the statist-oriented mainstream media pause to give attention, even critical attention. In this regard, only populist democratic forces with a cosmopolitan vision will find such outcomes as Kuala Lumpur notable moves toward the establishment of what Derrida called the ‘democracy to come.’ Whether such forces will become numerous and vocal enough remains uncertain. One possible road to greater influence would be to make more imaginative uses of social networking potentials to inform, explain, educate, and persuade.
This recent session of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal offers a devastating critique of the persisting failures of international criminal law mechanisms of accountability to administer justice justly, that is, without the filters of impunity provided by existing hierarchies of hard power. So whatever the shortcomings of the KLWCT it definitely moved to close the criminal justice gap that now protects what might be called ‘geopolitical criminals’ from accountability for their crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, and this is a move, however haltingly, toward global justice and the global rule of law.
Tags: George W. Bush, International Criminal Court, Iraq War, Kuala Lumpur, Mahathir Mohamad, Tony Blair, United Nations, War crime