Recent years have seen a flourishing of BS institutions. There is the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization that suddenly leaped to prominence last year when it was reactivated in order to accuse Israel of “genocide” in Gaza; there is the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a politicized pseudo-court that seems determined to fast-track that same genocide allegation; there is the United Nations Human Rights Council, whose only standing agenda item devoted to a single country is, yes, about the Jewish state; and the list goes on.
But the institution that must win any and all awards for not being what it says on the tin is the International Criminal Court (ICC). Founded in 2002, the ICC has served as a political tool for a quarter century. In the 2000s, European signatories routinely criticized the George W. Bush administration for not signing up the U.S. to be a member of the new institution. But the Bush administration took the view that all Democrat and Republican administrations have taken before and since: No American statesman or soldier should ever find his actions judged under the jurisdiction of a foreign court. American justice is enough.
Many Europeans count this as evidence of American barbarism. Why would the U.S. refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of something as noble-sounding as the ICC? The reasons, in the years since, have become quite clear. To take only one notable example, in 2002, when the court was being established, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón sought to call former secretary of state Henry Kissinger as a witness for an investigation into human rights abuses by South American military dictatorships. Garzón wanted to question Kissinger about what the U.S. government knew about these alleged abuses. Authorities in Britain, where Kissinger was staying at the time, denied the request. But the incident served as an important reminder: If the U.S. ever submitted to a foreign court, international or foreign criminal jurisdiction could and would be used against America and her allies.
That is why, at the end of last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took American opposition to the ICC to a new level: sanctioning American individuals or businesses that transact with the court. As Rubio said in a statement posted to social media, “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling their ability to operate against us because our message is clear: The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”
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