US Imposes Sanctions on International Criminal Court

The Courthouse Lamp

You have seen a great power defend its soldiers and its friends from a tribunal it never agreed to join. You have not yet looked for the man who stands in a burned village holding a shoebox of photographs, waiting for an investigator who will now arrive later, or not at all. Let us follow the money a little further, and introduce the person who has been left out of the account.

I will begin by granting the strongest case for the sanctions, because it deserves to be heard before it is weighed. The United States never consented to the International Criminal Court. A citizen has a right to be judged by a law his own country helped to make. A court that answers to no electorate, and that may choose its defendants for reasons tinged with politics, is a real danger, and a government that does nothing while its officers are summoned before foreign judges would rightly be accused of negligence. If the question were only whether Washington may refuse the court’s authority over Americans, the matter would be short. It may.

But that is not the instrument that was chosen. The government did not simply decline to cooperate, or deny visas, or forbid its own agencies from sharing files. It reached for sanctions, the tool built for arms dealers and narcotics cartels, and pointed it at a courthouse. Consider what a sanction actually does. It does not stop a judge from thinking. It stops a bank from paying her. It stops the cloud company from storing the evidence, the airline’s corporate account from booking the forensic team, the translator’s wages from clearing. The sanction falls on the plumbing, and plumbing does not distinguish between a case the Americans dislike and a case the Americans applauded last year.

Here is a small comedy worth enjoying for a moment. Somewhere in a bank’s compliance department sits a clerk whose entire career depends on never being the person who approved the wrong wire transfer. He has no opinion about international justice. He has a very strong opinion about his pension. When a sanctions order arrives naming a tribunal, he does not read it narrowly; he reads it the way a nervous man reads a letter from the tax office, assuming the worst about every line. So he freezes not only what the order names but everything that smells of it: the consultant who once invoiced the court, the charity that helps witnesses travel, the university project that catalogues mass graves. No legislator voted to shut down the gravediggers’ database. The clerk did it, because the law made caution free and courage expensive. This is the true reach of the measure, and it never appears in the announcement.

Now follow the chain one link further, into the following year. Every warlord, every colonel who has ordered a village emptied, every minister who has signed a deportation, keeps a private ledger of risks. In one column he writes the profit of his crime; in the other, the chance that someday a prosecutor with a budget and a plane ticket will knock on his door. The sanctions have not touched the first column. They have quietly erased part of the second. The investigations that the tribunal cannot afford will not be announced as abandoned; they will simply move slower, lose witnesses to old age and fear, and let evidence rot in damp storerooms. The colonel will notice even if the newspapers do not.

And he is not the only student of this lesson. Other governments have now watched how one starves a court rather than arguing with it. The method is public, cheap, and portable. A country that one day wishes to see its own enemies prosecuted, perhaps the very men who killed Americans, will find the courthouse dimmer than it remembers, its staff wary, its bankers skittish, its precedent established by Washington itself.

Picture a town that, displeased with one summons from its magistrate, cuts off the oil to the courthouse lamps. The town has made its point. But every case is now heard in the dark, including the case against the thief who robbed the mayor.

So I put my question to those who report this as a contest between a superpower and a tribunal, as though only two parties sat at the table. Who pays for the missing lamp oil? Not the officials named in the order; they will find other banks, other salaries, other careers. Go instead to the man with the shoebox. He has kept those photographs dry for a long time. He keeps checking the road.