Sparks: Alarm at UN over sanctions threatened by US on international criminal court
Whether a state stands above the law or within it is the single question that determines if we inhabit a commonwealth of citizens or a mere gathering of thieves, yet how long will we suffer this assault on justice?
Professional pride is a curious contagion, for when the surgeon’s hand is checked by a second opinion, he often prefers to break the stethoscope rather than admit the patient’s fever is of his own making.
The court was established to hear the case, but the new decree ensures that the court itself is now the defendant in a trial where the judges are forbidden to enter the building.
Empty threats against a distant tribunal are but smoke in the wind, for the judge who seeks to punish his own oversight forgets that both the accuser and the accused will soon be common dust.
Fear of a higher power is merely a collision of atoms in the mind, yet men build great walls of sanctions to ward off the invisible phantoms of their own past deeds.
The announcement concerns institutional sovereignty, but what it concerns for the victim in a remote village is the sudden evaporation of the only ledger in which her life’s tragedy was ever recorded.
They spoke for hours about the sanctity of the charter while the clerk quietly packed the files into cardboard boxes, knowing the ink would dry before the next session was ever called.
My education prepared me for a world of treaties and steady law, but I find myself watching the dynamo of raw power accelerate until it shreds the very parchment that gave it a name.
It is a remarkably efficient arrangement to have the police arrest the judge for the crime of noticing that a crime has been committed, as it saves a great deal of time during the actual sentencing.
Walls are being built inside the iron house to ensure that even if the sleepers wake, they will only find a smaller room with thinner air and no door to the outside world.
If a house divided against itself cannot stand, then a world that creates a law to bind the weak but sanctions the law to protect the strong has already surrendered its foundation to the storm.
Justice is a greening branch that requires the soil of consensus, but when the gardener poisons the roots to protect his own shadow, the whole garden withers into a dry and spiritless waste.
Respectable men tell us that the law is a sacred thing until it starts poking its nose into their own backyard, at which point they discover that the law is actually a very dangerous form of trespassing.
Every time the ledger of accountability is opened, the perpetrators seek to destroy the ink and the paper, for they know that the count of their deeds is the only thing they cannot survive.
We could transmit justice through a global circuit of resonance, yet we choose to break the connection and waste the entire potential of the system on the friction of local resistance.