Daniel Schwammenthal spoils a good argument with a bad one. He's concerned about the possible intention of the ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, to go after NATO and US soldiers allegedly responsible for war crimes or torture in Afghanistan. Schwammenthal writes:
[I]n his first six years at the ICC, he [Ocampo] pursued real evildoers. He indicted Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony, militia leaders from the Congo and Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, responsible for the genocide in Darfur. Yet collecting information about possible war crimes by American soldiers smacks of just the sort of politicized prosecution critics of the ICC had always warned about.
The ICC prosecutor's focus, Schwammenthal thinks, should be on the most serious crimes and criminals, and not, as he puts it, on 'the most advanced democracies in the world - which operate under strict rules of engagement, have their own chain-of-command investigations and swift prosecution of criminals'. Given that relative to the scope of war crimes and crimes against humanity on a global scale, the efforts of the ICC are bound to be limited, you can see his point. At the same time, as a court of last resort, the ICC exists in principle to pursue even those international crimes committed by citizens of advanced democracies where these crimes have not been the subject of national judicial processes. Such crimes may be less significant than the gravest ones - 'the butchery in places like Sudan or Congo' - but they are not, as Schwammenthal says they are, 'insignificant'; even in the context of this comparison, they are not. In an ideal world an international criminal court would be able to handle all such cases. That the actual ICC can't do so is a reason for it to concentrate on the most serious ones. But in principle there is good reason, also, not to be complacent when soldiers or other citizens of the democracies commit crimes (of war, against humanity) in fighting enemies who don't respect the prohibitions of international humanitarian law. Schwammenthal writes as if those crimes will come out in the wash, so to speak, as if their prosecution is a matter of course. We know, however, that that isn't always so. 'Politicization' of the issue has more than one possible meaning and his attitude is a form of it. (Via.)