International Law Under Attack

Three weeks ago, the trial of Rwandan Colonel Theoneste Bagosora for the murder of 800,000 people in 100 days was supposed to begin in Tanzania. However, his current boycott of the proceedings has led to an adjournment of his trial until September. Bagosora will be facing the International War Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda, a special U.N. tribunal set up to punish those responsible for the ethnically-motivated massacres in Rwanda in 1994. In another U.N. war crimes trial, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has taken a similar strategy of obstructionism. He delays his trial with each of his attempts to halt the proceedings. The problems of these tribunals are likely to plague the newly-ratified International Criminal Court (ICC) in its pursuit of war criminals.

Although the worlds of Rwanda and Yugoslavia seem to be vastly different, the machinations of both their leaders in the war crimes tribunals threaten the authority and future success of the international legal system and the ICC. For international jurisdiction even to have a chance, Bagosora and Milosovic must not be allowed to manipulate and circumvent the courts.

Despite the stringent security, the court’s building in The Hague is unimpressive. Hours of listening to evidence against a few Serbian men who allegedly murdered several Bosnian-Muslim families makes one believe that the dream of international justice is possible.

However, the defendants hope to kill that dream. The current defenses of Bagosora and Milosovic seem to be torn from the same page. They both have chosen to impede the court’s proceedings by attacking its legitimacy. And their defense may be working. Bagosora and Milosovic have found the Achilles’ heel by playing right into Western insecurities about international authority over sovereign nations and their leaders. Take away their names, adjust a few statistics, and one could be looking at a pro-Western general and politician.

The questions some Western governments—especially the U.S.—pose are precisely the ones that Bagosora and Milosovic are asking. Questioning physical evidence and direct testimony is not their game plan. Instead, they attack the court itself, as well as the “prejudiced” foreign prosecution.

This defense creates another defendant: the international legal system. Its delicate framework is in danger of being crushed. If Bagosora and Milosovic succeed in putting international law on trial, the world may lose this avenue of punishing crimes against humanity.

There is of course a balance between the sovereignty of a state and responsibility to international agreements. For any state, the idea of giving up sovereignty to the virtually untested concept of international law is scary, especially when other nations seem so at odds with many local beliefs. As of now, most nations agree—at least on paper—with the principle of international law. Those nations must now work on reforming and improving these laws and their enforcement. Backing away from such enforcement would surely be a death sentence for the very legitimacy of the principle of international law.

As perpetrators of terrorism—not just in Afghanistan, but also across the globe—are being captured by U.S. forces, it is imperative that we have set standards by which we can try and judge them. Ideally, international courts can provide the oversight and legitimacy that state-based judicial action cannot. For the international legal system to falter now, the chasm between the U.S. and the rest of the world would grow to even larger proportions.

While it is difficult to grant international courts authority when there are no completely binding international contracts, having a system in place to try war criminals and to make other legal decisions makes it easier to enforce standards for all nations. Even with the ICC, these problems remain.

But without a genuine and realistic alternative to the ICC and the current special war crimes tribunals, we cannot allow the international legal system to fumble. For now, that means that Bagosora and Milosovic must not be given free reign in their trials. They destroyed their homelands; we cannot allow them to destroy the justice that the international legal system can bring.

Katherine M. Dimengo ’04 is an English concentrator in Winthrop House.