Some editorialists are now mooting the prosecution of Colonel Gaddafi for crimes against humanity. There is also a piece in the Independent by Geoffrey Robertson setting out the grounds on which Gaddafi could be indicted by the International Criminal Court, following a Security Council direction of the case to that body. Two particular aspects of what Robertson says are of special interest to me.
First, regarding the possibility of a charge for crimes against humanity, he writes:
He [Gaddafi] can... be fixed with command responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed by his troops over the past few days as they have shot and killed innocent civilians in a number of towns and cities.
Under Article 7 of the ICC statute, a widespread lethal attack directed against a civilian population amounts to a crime against humanity and the wilful killing of civilians in a civil war amounts additionally to a war crime under Article 8.
This confirms the puzzlement I expressed yesterday over the supposedly far-reaching implications of the ruling of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Terrorism - at least where it is a policy of an organization and not a one-off incident - must surely be a crime against humanity since it is directed, like Gaddafi's present actions, against a civilian population.
Second, Robertson says - just like that - that there is now a duty of intervention on the international community, existing under international law, 'whenever it becomes necessary to stop or to punish crimes against humanity'. He sees this as resting on the doctrine of a 'responsibility to protect'. Good for him. His opinion chimes in with that of shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy that one shouldn't let anger about the Iraq war block the possibility of future interventions, in the right circumstances, based on a 'responsibility beyond [our] own borders'. One would have thought this was an elementary logical point, given that most of those angry over Iraq didn't believe the war was legitimate as a form of humanitarian intervention in the first place. It should therefore have left the validity of that concept intact. But it doesn't do any harm to remind people.
