In a column about which I have my reservations, though I shall pass over these, Gerry Simpson, Professor of Law at Melbourne Law School, writes:
[P]erhaps this is all part of a much deeper problem for international criminal justice and one that the ICC (given the rules it operates under) will find difficult to confront: namely that international criminal justice is embedded in a system of governance that forecloses the prosecution of officials of the great powers (in particular the US, Britain, China, Russia and France). Not a single official from one of these states has been indicted before an international criminal court since 1945.
This raises the following question (note, raises and not begs it): can a system of law be effective without some overarching power capable of enforcing its rules against the strongest of those supposedly subject to it? More specifically, could international law be effective without 'enforcers' that are capable of getting the compliance of the US, Britain, China, Russia and France? The answer might appear to be: definitely not. But in principle the answer is: yes. It would work if there were voluntary compliance from the strongest players - as, for example, with domestic law, when a government willingly yields to the judgement of a court, even though it may do so reluctantly. That this is possible in principle tells us nothing, of course, about how likely it is as things presently stand in the international arena. But the point is worth registering that a unified global state may not be indispensable for a more effective regime of international criminal justice.