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02 May 2003: "The ICC: the point I forgot to make"

Reading this entry on The Everlasting Phelps, it occurred to me that I had forgotten to explicitly make the vital point regarding the ICC (in this post and this one).

The point about the (ostensibly planned) CCR/PIL/CSER submission to the ICC, as well as the complaint to the Belgian courts, is this: they are accusations levelled by private legal entities. Neither the Prosecutor of the ICC nor the public prosecutor in Belgium have actually taken up these cases. There is not a legal system in the world in which people are not, on occasion, falsely accused of even the most heinous crimes, and even prosecuted and tried on the basis of those false accusations.

But the test of what makes a good legal system must surely be not that no-one is ever falsely accused, but that that person is not falsely convicted as a result. This is a test that the ICC has not, to date, been subjected to, and as a result it is precipitate to condemn the Court for such a reason.

Given that the various justice systems of the United States have patchy record on passing that particular test themselves (witness the fact that over 100 people convicted and sentenced to death since 1973 have been exonerated—one can only wonder how many of those wrongly convicted were sent to their deaths), Americans who criticise the ICC on these rather spurious grounds might be well advised to review Matthew 7:3-5.

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