Sparks: ICC prosecutor says court making ‘significant progress’ despite US sanctions

A great power that punishes the servants of a court by denying them the ordinary use of banks teaches every other nation the lesson it claims to oppose: that law is merely the instrument of the strongest.

The court confirms that its work continues despite the sanctions, and the staff confirm that their salaries can no longer be received, and both statements are true, and the matter is therefore closed.

A tribunal that cannot clear a wire transfer cannot compel a head of state, and the sanction that produces this result is the mechanism working precisely as designed, which the court's own statement confirms.

The deputy prosecutor reports that her staff encounter banking difficulties but that the work proceeds unaffected - now there is a case where the diagnosis and the patient's own cheerful report disagree, and the physician trusts the symptom, not the patient.

That a government should punish judges for judging, not by arms but by denying them the ordinary commerce of daily life, is the general warrant renewed in a form the founders would have recognized instantly and condemned without hesitation.

Ask what practical difference it makes that the court says its work is unaffected: if the warrants still issue and the accused still appear, the sanctions are theater; if the warrants issue and no one appears, the sanctions are the court's death announced in a courteous tone.

They say the court's work is not hindered, and I ask: hindered for whom - for the prosecutor who keeps her salary, or for the staff who cannot cash a check, and if the latter, then the work is hindered and the denial is the hindrance.

State the premises: the court exists to try the powerful; the powerful have now made the court's staff unable to bank; therefore the court will try the powerful only so long as the powerful permit it - the conclusion follows, and it is not the conclusion the prosecutor has stated.