International Criminal Court

Based on Wikipedia: International Criminal Court

The Court That Puts Presidents on Trial

In March 2023, something extraordinary happened. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin—the sitting president of a nuclear superpower with veto power at the United Nations Security Council. A few months later, it would do the same for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

These weren't symbolic gestures or strongly worded letters. They were legal warrants, backed by an institution with the authority to try world leaders for the worst crimes humanity can commit.

How did we get here? How did the world build a court capable of indicting the most powerful people on Earth—and what does it actually mean when that court has no police force, no army, and relies entirely on member countries to make arrests?

What the Court Actually Does

The International Criminal Court, seated in The Hague in the Netherlands, prosecutes individuals—not countries—for four specific categories of crime: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. That last one, aggression, was only added in 2010 and covers leaders who launch illegal wars of conquest.

This distinction matters enormously. The International Court of Justice, which is part of the United Nations, handles disputes between nations. One country suing another over a border disagreement or treaty violation. The International Criminal Court is different. It puts human beings in the dock. It sends them to prison.

The court is designed as a backstop, not a replacement for national justice systems. It can only step in when a country is unwilling or unable to prosecute its own war criminals. If Germany prosecutes a German general for war crimes, the International Criminal Court stays out of it. If a country shields its leaders from accountability—or has collapsed into chaos and has no functioning courts—then The Hague can take over.

There's a catch, though. A significant one.

The Jurisdiction Problem

The court can only exercise jurisdiction in three situations. First, when the accused is a national of a member state—one of the 125 countries that have ratified the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the court. Second, when the alleged crime took place on the territory of a member state. Third, when the United Nations Security Council refers a situation to the court.

That third option is how the court gained authority over crimes in Sudan and Libya—countries that never joined the Rome Statute.

But here's where geopolitics gets uncomfortable. The five permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France—each hold veto power. Russia and China can block any Security Council referral. So can the United States.

And the United States, along with China, Russia, and India, has never joined the court at all.

The American position has been particularly fraught. The Clinton administration signed the Rome Statute in 2000 but never sent it to the Senate for ratification. In 2002, the Bush administration took the extraordinary step of "unsigning" the treaty—formally notifying the United Nations that the United States no longer considered itself bound by even the limited obligations of a signatory. Congress passed the American Service-Members' Protection Act, which authorized the president to use "all means necessary" to free any American or allied personnel detained by the court. Critics nicknamed it the "Hague Invasion Act."

This creates a two-tier system of international justice that critics find troubling. Leaders from smaller nations, particularly in Africa, can be hauled before the court. Leaders from major powers operate with effective immunity.

The Long Road to Rome

The idea of prosecuting leaders for war crimes isn't new. It dates back at least to the end of World War One, when the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 proposed an international tribunal to judge political leaders. Nothing came of it.

In 1937, the League of Nations drafted a convention for a permanent international court to try acts of terrorism. Thirteen countries signed. None ratified. The convention never entered into force.

Then came World War Two, and with it, horrors that demanded a response.

The Nuremberg Trials, held from 1945 to 1946, prosecuted Nazi leaders for crimes including the Holocaust. The Tokyo Trials did the same for Japanese leaders. These weren't ordinary courts. They were tribunals created by the victorious Allied powers to judge the vanquished. Critics called them "victor's justice"—and the charge had some merit. American firebombing of Japanese cities killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No American faced prosecution.

But Nuremberg established principles that would prove durable: individuals could be held criminally responsible for waging aggressive war and committing atrocities, regardless of whether they were following orders or acting as heads of state.

The United Nations General Assembly recognized as early as 1948 that a permanent court was needed. The International Law Commission drafted statutes in the early 1950s. Then the Cold War froze everything.

The Prosecutors Who Kept the Dream Alive

Benjamin Ferencz was twenty-seven years old when he became the chief prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg. The Einsatzgruppen were the mobile killing squads that followed the German army into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, murdering over a million Jews by shooting.

It was his first case. He had never tried a case before. He won convictions against all twenty-two defendants.

Ferencz spent the rest of his life—he lived to be 103—advocating for international criminal law. His 1975 book "Defining International Aggression" made the case for a permanent court. He testified before the United Nations. He lobbied governments. He never stopped believing that law could restrain war.

Robert Kurt Woetzel, a German-born professor of international law, worked alongside him. In 1970, Woetzel co-edited a book called "Toward a Feasible International Criminal Court." The following year, he founded an organization dedicated to making it happen.

They waited decades.

The 1990s Changed Everything

The end of the Cold War unfroze international cooperation—and unleashed ethnic conflicts that had been suppressed by superpower standoffs.

Yugoslavia collapsed into war. In Bosnia, Serbian forces conducted systematic ethnic cleansing, including the massacre of over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. Detention camps. Mass rape as a weapon of war. Television cameras broadcast the horror to living rooms worldwide.

In 1993, the Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia—an ad hoc court specifically for that conflict.

Then came Rwanda. In approximately 100 days in 1994, Hutu extremists slaughtered between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Neighbors killed neighbors with machetes. The international community did almost nothing to stop it. Afterward, the Security Council created another tribunal.

These courts proved something important. International criminal prosecution was possible. It could work. The Yugoslav tribunal convicted Slobodan Milošević posthumously (he died during trial) and dozens of other perpetrators. The Rwandan tribunal convicted the former prime minister and other organizers of the genocide.

But creating a new court for every atrocity was expensive, slow, and inefficient. The obvious solution was a permanent institution.

The Rome Conference

In June 1998, delegates from 160 countries gathered in Rome to negotiate a treaty creating a permanent international criminal court. Non-governmental organizations, operating under the umbrella of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, provided input and attended meetings.

The negotiations were contentious.

The United States wanted the Security Council to have greater control over which cases the court could pursue—which would have given Washington veto power over any prosecution it disliked. Other countries pushed back, arguing this would gut the court's independence.

Arab states insisted on including "the transfer of population into occupied territory" as a war crime—a provision aimed squarely at Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel objected strenuously.

On July 17, 1998, the Rome Statute was adopted by a vote of 120 in favor, 7 against, with 21 abstentions. The seven countries voting no were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen.

The statute required 60 ratifications to enter into force. That threshold was reached in 2002. On July 1 of that year, the International Criminal Court officially came into existence.

The First Cases

The court's first arrest warrants came in 2005, targeting leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group in Uganda. Joseph Kony, the group's leader, remains at large to this day. He has never faced trial.

This pattern would repeat. The court can issue warrants. It cannot enforce them. It has no police force. If a country refuses to arrest an indicted suspect, there is little the court can do except issue diplomatic protests.

The first actual conviction came in 2012. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese militia leader, was found guilty of conscripting and using child soldiers. His trial had taken six years.

Lubanga was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. For sending children as young as eleven into combat.

The Africa Problem

A persistent criticism of the International Criminal Court is that it has disproportionately targeted African leaders while ignoring crimes committed by powerful Western nations and their allies.

The numbers support this critique. Of the court's first dozen formal investigations, the overwhelming majority were in African countries. The first indicted sitting head of state was Omar al-Bashir of Sudan. Then came Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya (charges later dropped due to witness tampering and intimidation). Then Laurent Gbagbo of Côte d'Ivoire (acquitted).

The African Union, a continental body representing 55 African nations, has been vocally critical. Several African countries have threatened to withdraw from the court. Burundi actually did, in 2017, becoming the first country to leave. The Philippines followed in 2019.

Defenders of the court point out that many African investigations were referred by African governments themselves, asking for help prosecuting crimes they couldn't handle domestically. They note that the court goes where the crimes are—and that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw devastating conflicts in Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, Sudan, and Libya.

The argument is unpersuasive to critics who note that devastating conflicts also occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen—conflicts involving American and British forces. The court's preliminary examination of alleged American war crimes in Afghanistan was dropped after intense American pressure.

The Russia and Israel Warrants

In 2023 and 2024, the court moved against major players in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a decade earlier.

The warrant for Vladimir Putin, issued in March 2023, relates to the forcible deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia—a war crime under the Rome Statute. Russia, of course, is not a member of the court. But Ukraine has accepted the court's jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory, giving the court a legal basis to act.

Putin is unlikely ever to stand trial. He cannot travel to any of the 125 member states without risking arrest. But the warrant transforms every state visit into a legal and diplomatic minefield. When he traveled to Mongolia—a member state—in September 2024, Mongolia's refusal to arrest him triggered a formal court referral.

The warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, issued in November 2024, relate to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. The court also issued warrants for Hamas leaders.

Israel, like the United States, is not a member of the court. But Palestine has been a member since 2015, giving the court jurisdiction over crimes committed on Palestinian territory.

The Netanyahu warrant provoked fury in Israel and the United States. American politicians from both parties denounced the court. Some called for sanctions against court officials.

The Enforcement Paradox

The International Criminal Court's greatest weakness is also, in a strange way, the source of what limited power it has.

The court has no enforcement mechanism of its own. It relies entirely on member states to arrest indicted individuals and transfer them to The Hague. When countries refuse—as Chad and South Africa refused to arrest Omar al-Bashir despite ICC warrants—the court can do nothing but issue reports to the Assembly of States Parties.

But this weakness forces the court to be careful. It cannot afford too many failed prosecutions or ignored warrants. Each warrant it issues must be defensible. Each prosecution must be well-documented. The court's legitimacy depends on being seen as impartial and legally rigorous.

The court has been operating for over two decades now. It has secured fewer than a dozen convictions. Its proceedings are notoriously slow and expensive. Critics call it ineffective.

But the court's defenders argue that its impact goes beyond convictions. The threat of prosecution may deter some atrocities. The documentation of crimes creates a historical record. The existence of international criminal law shifts norms about what leaders can do without consequence.

Maybe. Or maybe it provides a veneer of accountability while the powerful continue to act with impunity. The jury—so to speak—is still out.

The Structure

The court employs over 900 people from roughly 100 countries. It conducts proceedings in English and French.

Four organs make up the court. The Presidency handles administration. The Judicial Divisions, composed of 18 judges elected by the Assembly of States Parties, actually hear cases. The Office of the Prosecutor investigates crimes and initiates proceedings. The Registry manages everything else—headquarters, the detention unit where accused persons are held, and the public defense office.

Judges are elected for nine-year terms and cannot be reelected. This is designed to insulate them from political pressure—they never need to worry about keeping any government happy to secure another term.

Cases proceed through three stages. The Pre-Trial Chamber decides whether there's enough evidence to proceed to trial. The Trial Chamber conducts the actual trial. The Appeals Chamber reviews convictions and sentences.

As of 2024, the court's president is Tomoko Akane of Japan.

What the Future Holds

The International Criminal Court exists in an awkward space between aspiration and reality.

The aspiration: a world where the most powerful are not above the law. Where a head of state who orders massacres or ethnic cleansing knows they may someday face judgment in a courtroom, not just the court of public opinion.

The reality: a court that major powers ignore or actively obstruct. A court that has indicted dozens but convicted few. A court whose warrants go unenforced when powerful countries decide not to cooperate.

And yet.

Benjamin Ferencz, the Nuremberg prosecutor who spent six decades advocating for international criminal law, used to say that law is not a substitute for force but an alternative to it. Every dispute resolved by law is a dispute not resolved by violence.

The International Criminal Court represents humanity's imperfect, halting, frustratingly slow attempt to create alternatives to violence at the highest levels of power. It may be decades before we know whether that attempt succeeded or failed. For now, it exists. It issues warrants. World leaders calculate whether they can safely travel to The Hague.

That's more than existed before.