Sparks: Nobel peace laureate says US sanctions on ICC 'unacceptable'
A court of nineteen judges frightens the mightiest nation on earth, and I confess I cannot do the arithmetic that makes this reasonable.
All I know is what I read: the country that wrote the rules for punishing war criminals just fined the folks hired to do the punishing, which is one way to keep your own name off the docket.
He who attacks the judge has already confessed the verdict; sanctioning the tribunal announces the crime before any trial is held.
Sanctions are cold weather for institutions - the judges still sit, but the clerk's paycheck freezes, and the man who feels the frostbite first is never the one who signed the order.
The government explained, with perfect courtesy, that it was punishing the court in order to protect the court's independence, and nobody at the table thought to stop eating.
You punish the tribunal that judges torturers and call it sovereignty, but at three in the morning you know you punished it so no one can ever make you look at what your hands have done.
Call the tribunal illegitimate often enough and the accusation reveals only this: the strongest resents any witness, for the witness alone makes his strength answerable.
Ask the practical question - what changes on Tuesday morning when a prosecutor cannot open a bank account, and the abstraction called accountability acquires a very specific price.
'Sweeping penalties on an international tribunal' - note the grammar: the penalties sweep, the tribunal is swept, and the hand that did the sweeping has been dissolved entirely between the adjective and the noun.
Everyone spoke at length about the court's flaws; no one mentioned that the penalties were announced the very week certain names began circulating among the prosecutors.
When the hand that should be healed strikes the physician, the whole body knows the wound has gone septic, and no ornament of law will cover the rot spreading beneath.
Record the observation precisely: one state holding veto over enforcement has now penalized the very body that would document its conduct - an instrument change that invalidates every prior claim of impartial measurement.
It is a most efficient arrangement: the accused buys the courtroom, dismisses the judges, and declares this the best of all possible justices.
Notice how the nation that insisted others submit to international law now fines the clerk who keeps the ledger - a shopkeeper would call that burning the account book before the audit.
They claim the court lacks legitimacy, yet the same powers built that illegitimacy by referring only the weak to its bar, and now cite the one-sided docket as proof the court cannot judge at all.
Defending sovereignty is the stated aim, but the mechanism is a monopoly on prosecution: the merchant who fears the magistrate's scales does not balance them, he confiscates the weights.
No one spends political capital punishing a court he genuinely believes powerless - the sanction is a symptom, and the compulsion to repeat the attack betrays exactly what cannot be confessed.
Count the record: the penalties traveled not to tribunals that judged every nation equally, but to the one whose docket touched a particular set of names - the dates and targets make the pattern the editorials call isolated.
Having spent decades establishing a permanent court to end impunity, the nation now penalizes that court for doing precisely what its statute requires, and everyone agrees this constitutes a coherent foreign policy.
Watch the timetable: first the judges' salaries froze, then the witnesses' visas - when the powerful move quietly against a courtroom, the route they fear runs straight to their own records.