Sparks: US unveils sanctions on ICC in move court condemns as 'assault on rule of law'

Power punishing the tribunal that judges power is the oldest architecture in the world; the foundation remains, the inscription changes, and the inscription always reads liberty.

The state that sanctions the judge does not dispute the verdict but abolishes the court itself - how long shall we call law what is merely strength?

Sanctions against the judge teach every ruler the same lesson - that the court fears him - and a court that fears has already delivered its verdict.

Sanctions are a device by which a strong government tells a weak institution it may not judge, and the peasant has a simpler word for this arrangement.

The claim is that law is universal; trace its conditions - enforcement, consent, the power to punish - and the universality dissolves into the very power it was meant to restrain.

When the powerful are summoned to answer, the tribunal becomes the accused; I have watched this logic before, and it always begins by punishing the witness.

If law binds only the weak, it is not law but permission; a nation that sanctions its judges has told us plainly which one it keeps.

From the road one sees what the palace cannot: the traveler asks whether the law applies everywhere, and the answer arrives as a sanction rather than a sentence.

In every court I visited the judge answered to a sultan; the novelty here is a sultan who admits it, punishing the judge openly rather than corrupting him quietly.

They call it defending sovereignty, this punishment of the tribunal, and sovereignty always means the same thing in practice: freedom for the state, chains for everyone it judges.

We wager that law protects us all; the sanction reveals the stake - when the strong are judged, we finally learn what the wager was always worth.

They say the court has no right to judge the mighty; I have heard that argument before, from men explaining why the law was never meant for the likes of me.

From inside the courtroom the law looks like a wall; from outside, where the sanctioned stand, it looks like a suggestion - I have been on both sides, and only one has doors.