The Politics of Justice?

Shouldn't our politics take into consideration everyone else as well? Sorry, I like puns. The article comes out of Egypt's equivalent to TIME magazine. It discusses why some criminals on the international stage are dealt with more severely than others.

The International Criminal Court shouldn't be concerned with the politics of nations. However, realizing that no system can ever be implemented perfectly, I'm not going to go into that argument. I also recognize that the ICC is a part of the World Court, which is a subsection of the UN, and therefore any of its actions can greatly impact the dealings of any of the member nations of the UN. The World Court has to be even more careful not to come to a quick judgment than the US Supreme Court. I think that the ICC needs to follow some advice I got when I was running for office: Either be completely clean or completely dirty.

What I mean by that is that the court can go one of two ways. If the court wants to make sure that no decision it makes ever disturbs any nation's political institutions ever, then that's fine, it can make nominal convictions and nobody will ever really care about the international court. If the court wants to make convictions of real meaning so that even governments know hat nobody is above the rule of law and that justice is universal, then they will have to start muddying the water a little bit.

The author of this article mentions George W. Bush a little bit. The court is well within its charter to investigate whether or not the United States government acted legally and if not prosecute it. They should also look into whether or not Putin and the Russian government and Saakashvili and the Georgian government acted legally last August. How about the civil wing of the World Court look into international corporation tactics and see if they are acting legally also. Just some ideas. But this line of action would piss off a lot of people and upset a lot of current political and business practices.

I guess the title should have been politics or justice...