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The development path of international criminal justice has therefore been beset by the reluctance
of significant states across the liberal-autocratic divide. As a result, only under very specific
conditions has it been able slowly to evolve, meaning that its development has, in many ways,
run parallel to that of humanitarian intervention, as partially expressed by the Responsibility to
Protect (R2P) concept.
Indeed, it can be argued that international criminal justice is a form of liberal intervention in that
it typically substitutes foreign powers for national ones in the limited administration of the
normal legal function of sovereign states. And there is also no escaping the fact that its precepts
fly directly in the face of the Westphalian model of sovereignty, which purposely denies rights
and obligations to transgress borders for the purposes of protection or punishment.
It is the question of obligations which is the pivotal issue over which international criminal
justice consistently stumbles. The great jurist H.A.L. Hart drew the distinction between having
an obligationand being obliged to do something. The strongest states might be persuaded to
undertake many obligations, but without the coercive power to sanction their breach they will not
be obliged to honour them. In other words, the highest law remains the decision of arms which,
because of nuclear realities and the globalised nature of the world economy, essentially leaves
some states above the law.
There is therefore an obvious inconsistency in international criminal justice in so far as its
universalist principles cannot yet be applied universally. Nevertheless, international criminal
justice clearly has the potential to be a key component in propagating liberal order.
Fostering a more liberal world, which presumes the absence of the type of leaders and actions
that international criminal justice is concerned with, is a normative project boosted incrementally
with every leader who is forced to seek political compromise where he or she might have wished
to call in the tanks. It is incidental and not fundamental that not all states can be brought to
account in the same way.
Increasing normative momentum around the strong states that continue to transgress those norms
will make their positions increasingly untenable in a world of ever more pervasive
communications. Assuredly, the prosecutions under international criminal law to date have
informed the behaviour of many petty autocrats, with even the species of more serious ones
being increasingly sensitive to the status of pariahdom, if not the courts themselves.
And it is for precisely this reason that major powers pouring scorn on the process is a very
unwelcome development.
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