Picture the scene. Unable to tolerate his authoritarian tendencies any longer, Luxembourgers rise up and overthrow Jean-Claude Juncker, execute Grand Duke Henri and seek to implement a representative people’s government. Competing interests, factional rivalries and negative external interference from Belgium and the Netherlands, who are themselves in an ill-disguised state of unofficial war, thwart the efforts of the new government to restore stability. In the abscence of proper jobs and security, Luxembourgers resort to crime and violence to sustain themselves and their families. Lured by offers of money, food, and a measure of personal security, Luxembourgers join the militias of the highest bidder, whilst others head to see, ravaging German and French fishing fleets in ever more brazen acts of piracy.=The international community, led by the United Nations Security Council, expresses its “deep concern”, “calls upon” all parties to reject the use of violence and work for a sustainable solution and agrees that the best thing would be to do very little other than issue reports and strong words, if indeed, such words could be considered strong.

This scenario is so unlikely as to rightly appear absurd. There would be massive injections of international aid,  intervention on a massive scale to guarantee as swift a return to normality as is humanly possible, whilst the international courts would swing into action to prosecute the worst offenders.

Yet almost two decades after the ousting of the repressive regime of Siyad Barre in 1991, the international community has failed comprehensively to assist a return to normality in Somalia. What is it, exactly, that makes Somalis less worthy of our efforts and attention? Skeptics of international action in Somalia will doubtless cite the failed UN and US-led interventions between 1992-1995, and more recently the Ethiopian invasion in 2006, as evidence that international intervention will only serve to inflame an already dire situation in the world’s most comprehensively failed state. In his most recent report on the situation in Somalia, the UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the UN peacekeeping force mooted by Security Council resolution 1863 could have precisely that effect if not handled properly.

In spite of this, skeptics must realise that the situation on the ground at present does not lend itself well to parallels with past interventions, and if international action is not taken in Somalia quickly, the political progress brought about through the already faltering Djibouti agreement will be undone completely. The incumbent Transitional Federal Government (TFG), led by Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed since January, is an unusually broad coalition of old enemies and current friends, that seeks to represent all of the country’s main clans and represent some form of compromise on questions of ideology and religion. The appointment of Sheikh Sharif as president is a good example. Formerly head of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), the rebel Islamist movement that briefly took power before being ousted by an Ethiopian invasion in 2006, he is nonetheless seen as a reformer on the more liberal Islamic wing. However, any progress the government might have hoped to make is now being dangerously threatened by advances by Al-Shabaab, the main Ismalist opposition in the country.

One senior source in the Somali government said recently that in his view, the military capabilities of the TFG and the militants were roughly equal. This does not bode well for a quick end to the fighting. The TFG’s current strategy of trying to undermine the hardline Al-Shabaab leadership by trying to coax away the younger, perhaps more mercenary elements in the movement, is almost certainly being nullified by the influx of foreign militants to swell Al-Shabaab’s ranks.

The only international military presence for the TFG to rely on at present is AMISOM, the African Union Mission in Somalia. AMISOM is, however, both undermanned and under-resourced. Only two countries, Uganda and Burundi, have so far committed forces to the mission, and two and a half years after its creation, the force is barely at 50 per cent of its mandated strength. What forces there are are short of armoured personnel carriers, body ar mour and other vital equipment, and Burundi recently declared that it would not contribute any further forces to the mission until such time as the international community agrees to do more. In addition, its mandate is too weak to allow it to effectively combat militants.

As Ban Ki-moon re-emphasised in his recent report, the key to a sustainable solution in Somalia is capacity building, that is, strengthening the internal institutions of Somalia to enable them to independently maintain a handle on the situation rather than externally imposing a solution that is ultimately unsustainable. However 18 years of almost uninterrupted chaos has clearly demonstrated that the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is unable to resolve its problems alone. Only if it is given the space and the security to strengthen its position will the TFG have a realistic chance of succeeding, and that space and security can only be provided by a properly manned and resourced international peacekeeping force.

On 18 August last year, Somalia’s Joint Security Committee (JSC) called for the deployment of UN peacekeepers, a call that was repeated on 10 December by the African Union, who would like to see the UN assume responsibility in place of AMISOM. Few people on the ground in Somalia are in any doubt that the TFG needs real support if it is to succeed. The recent assissination of Somalia’s Security Minister, Omar Hashi Aden, by a suicide bomb is a bitterly ironic proof of the TFG’s inability to provide proper security, even in the one third of the country it currently controls. The UN refugee agency’s representative to Somalia, Guillermo Bettocchi, said on Wednesday the recent bout of bloodletting in the country was the “worst ever” in nearly two decades of chaos.

Yet in spite of this, there is good evidence that the militants enjoy but little support amongst the majority of Somalis. Contrary to the worst fears of some observers, Al-Shabaab did not overrun the country following the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces in January, and clan militias opposed to the group’s radicalism have plugged the gaps in many areas. Militants have endeared themselves still less to the country’s Sufi element with their desecration of Sufi graves in the south of the country as “idolotrous”. In his March report, Ban Ki-moon concurred with the view that Al-Shabaab do not enjoy the support of most Somalis. Indeed, the motivation for most Somalis to take up arms appears not to be religious fervour but money. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than with the country’s piracy problem. Pirates who have given interviews freely admit they are in it for the money, and perhaps also the women. Payouts can sometimes be in the tens of thousands of dollars, and ransom demands often exceed $1 million, huge sums in a country where per capita GDP is just $600. Similar motivations seem to drive many of the country’s land based militants.

One does not need to be familiar with Thomas Hobbes to know that if the state cannot provide protection and the rule of law, then a people will become a law unto themselves to ensure their own protection. Until the TFG is able to provide a genuinely stable environment, in which jobs can be both created and guaranteed, there is no hope for Somalia. Two decades of out and out civil war have demonstrated they cannot do this alone.

The international community has taken upon itself the Responsibility to Protect, the logic being that if a government was either unable or unwilling to protect its people, then the international community had a moral duty to intervene. There is no doubting the TFG’s willingness to protect its people, but its ability is quite another matter. The Security Council’s most recent resolution on Somalia has once again re-iterated the UN’s “intent” on deploying a UN peacekeeping force in Somalia to follow on from AMISOM. Unfortunately, the Secretary General has reported a fairly universal unwillingness amongst the international community to commit any soldiers to such a force at the present time. One wonders, giving this apathy, whether any proposed force would be given an adequate mandate even if it were to be established. It is almost as though the international community has become numbed to the chaos in Somalia, as though the fact that some 3.2 million Somalis, almost one third of the populaion, relying on aid does not really matter. Yet in the TFG, there is a government genuinely committed to restoring order, if only it were given the capability to do so. Few decisions of any international significance were ever borne of altruism alone. But the cost to international shipping of the piracy problem, and now the influx of foreign militants in to the country, threatening to turn it into an unregulated Islamist hotbed in north-east Africa, should convince the international community that meaningful action in Somalia is in everyone’s best interests.

The brutal conclusion to the quarter century long conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE has left a quarter of a million refugees and between 7,000-20,000 civilian dead in its wake. That the death toll varies to such a degree is testament to the Sri Lankan government’s abject failure to allow international aid agencies and the media access to the conflict zone, almost certainly for fear that to do so would hinder it in its zeal to finish the job.

Though reprehensible, the failure of the Sri Lankan government in this matter is not surprising, and though not necessarily forgivable, is at least understandable. The conflict between the government and the LTTE cost Sri Lanka the lives of tens of thousands of its citizens and several billion dollars of economic disruption. That the government would always seize the chance to terminate the conflict with both hands was wholly predictable.

The real failure in this saga was on the part of the United Nations to press the Sri Lankan government harder to allow the aid agencies and the press into the conflict zone, who together would almost certainly have succeeded in focusing the Sri Lankan government’s mind on the importance of minimising the collatoral civilian damage of the conflict.

Almost as bad has been the resolution passed by the ironically named United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in response to the conclusion of hostilities. Far from highlighting the civilian cost of the conflict, or criticising the Sri Lankan government’s exclusionary policy re international organisations, the resolution “Welcomes the conclusion of hostilities and the liberation by the Government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages, as well as the efforts by the Government to ensure safety and security for all Sri Lankans and bringing permanent peace to the country.”

The roll call of nations that voted for this resolution included some with what could, at best, be called dubious human rights records, including China, Egypt, Russia and Saudi Arabia amongst others.

Casual observers of the UN may well ask how an organisation that pledges almost in the first sentence of its charter “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person”, can fail in this task quite as often as it does.

The truth is that at the heart of this organisation is a fundamental and perhaps even irreconcilable contradiction. On the one hand, the UN pledges to uphold human rights, but on the other to be a truly universal organisation that represents all nations and recognises the “sovereign equality of all its Members”. Unfortunately, the UN is and can only be as effective as its members wish to make it, and there are very many members of the UN, including two of the five permanent members of the Security Council, who do not possess governments committed to the maintenance of human rights in any meaningful sense of the word.

The composition of the Human Rights Council is a case in point. Predominantly made up of African and Middle Eastern countries with decidedly dubious track records on human rights protection, the UNHRC has been accused of “partisan posturing and regional divides” and failing to get on with actual protecting ordinary people from abuse by none other than UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon himself. Mr Ban is one of many to have criticised UNHRC members for voting more often with a view to protecting members’ interests than protecting human rights. The UNHRC was established in 2006 to replace the ineffectual and discredited Commission on Human Rights, though quite how Member States believed a change in the name would effect a change in conduct is hard to fathom. According to Freedom House, just 22 of the UNHRC’s 47 members can be called free countries.

The sad truth is that many UN Member States are staunchly opposed to the UN involving itself in human rights work that might highlight failings by a Member government because they fear that to do so would lead to greater pressure on them to show greater restraint toward their own dissident minorities. The problem of what to do to improve the situation seems almost insurmountable. Does the UN want to guarantee human rights, or to be a universally representative organisation that guarantees the soveriegn equality of all its members? It seemingly cannot do both.

One of the biggest problems confronting even those countries that are serious about human rights is the inevitability of power politics in any situation that involves one country putting pressure on another. This was historically the case during the Cold War, when Western countries, and in particular the United States, gave succour to often brutal dictatorships in order to prevent them from falling under the Soviet sphere of influence. Many have criticised India’s failure to do more in Sri Lanka in recent weeks, and New Delhi’s comparative silence might seem all the more surprising given the large number of ethnically Tamil Indians who live in the south of the country.

However, even putting aside recollections of India’s disastrous intervention in 1983, what also needs to be considered is the role of China in the region. China has been credited with supplying the Sri Lankan government with the arms it required to defeat the Tamil insurgency, and China’s desire to establish itself as a strategic entitity in the Indian Ocean is currently being facilitated by the construction of a $1 billion port in the Sri Lankan town of Hambantota. India cannot afford to push the Sri Lankan government too hard for fear of Sri Lanka turning away from India to China for strategic solidarity. It was China, aided by Russia, that blocked discussion of the Sri Lankan situation in the UN Security Council.

China, indeed, is the principle obstacle to the furtherance of human rights not just in Sri Lanka, but globally. It operates a strict policy of what could be termed “live and let buy”, trading with any and all of the world’s nations, asking no questions of their commitment to human rights, and doing everything it possibly can to prevent others from doing so. China’s relations with Sudan are a case in point. Wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity President al-Bashir may be, but that does not deter China from buying almost 80 per cent of Sudan’s exports. Without China’s willingness to provide the Sudanese regime with this economic prop, and without its obstructing the efforts of the Security Council to pass stronger resolutions on the Sudanese situation, considerable improvements in Sudan’s human rights record, if not outright regime change, might already have been effected.

Ultimately, where human rights are concerned, the economic strength of countries wishing either to effect or obstruct progress is what really counts. “Money talks” as the saying goes. It is no coincidence that the most frequently used weapon in the international community’s human rights armoury is the economic sanction.

This is why the West must seize the chance to effect meaningful change to the way the international community approaches the issue of human rights whilst it still can. With a combined GDP of more than $33 billion, the EU and the US alone account for more than half of the global economy of $62.3 trillion. Likewise, the EU and US together constitute more than 60 per cent of Sri Lanka’s export market. However, the seemingly unstoppable economic rise of China is reducing that ratio in both cases.

It can only be hoped that as China’s middle class increases in size, so in turn they will become less and less tolerant of their country’s human rights policy, both at home and abroad. Until then, however, those countries that are serious about human rights need to establish a human rights council that is separate from the United Nations, and that is able and willing to not only call human rights abuse by its name, but to authorise genuinely effective action as and when such abuse takes place. There is no pretending that this organisation would be a silver bullet. Sudan is one case in point, and North Korea another, that if a regime truly wishes to isolate itself and ruin the country’s economy in the process, then it will not shirk from doing so. So long as such regimes can find at least one strong ally such as China, they can very often hang on.

However, there are a great many other countries with regimes that are not quite so cavalier, and who may well respond to real pressure if effectively applied.  At present, the approach of countries with a commitment to the furtherance of human rights is nowhere near coherant enough, and is still dominated by power politics. These countries still seek to present a united front through the vehicle of the UN, as the world body with the most international legitimacy. However, as has been demonstrated in Sri Lanka, the UN is all too often hamstringed by the truculence of members who do not share that commitment to human rights.

Countries that do hold that commitment should be willing to take a radical step and commit themselves to a human rights council that would put the maintenance of human rights above partisan considerations and whose decisions would be binding on all Member States. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights cannot continue to be an aspirational document devoid of any enforcement provisions. It should serve as the basis for this human rights council, and if its articles are deemed by the council to have been breeched by any country, then that should compel member states to take the action recommended by the council.

A government must exist solely for the purpose of serving the best interests of its people. That his fundamental human rights are protected is surely the highest earthly interest any man can have. Those governments that consistently fail to serve the best interests of their people must be made to pay the consequences. If the United Nations remains as the principle body through which nations with a respect for human rights seek to exert themselves, then that simply will not happen.

The quarter-century long secessionist campaign of violence waged by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) has almost completely collapsed. All that is left for the international community to do now is sit back and watch as thousands of civilians trapped in the cross-fire are slaughtered.

A recent statement by Seevaratnam Puleedevan, secretary-general of the Tigers’ peace secretariat saying that the “LTTE will never surrender and we will fight and we have the confidence that we will win with the help of the Tamil people,” does not bode well for the estimated 50,000 civilians still trapped in the rapidly shrinking conflict zone in the north-east of the country.

The UN has voiced its “deep concern” over the situation but has so far proved unable to act. A meeting of the Security Council called by France failed to agree on a resolution owing to the fact that Russia and China, two veto-wielding members, insisted the situation was strictly an internal matter and did not jeopardise international peace and security. Neither Russia nor China wishes to set a precedent of interference in a country’s internal matters for fear it could lead to increased pressure on themselves to deal less severely with their own dissident minorities. Strictly speaking, they have international law on their side.

The post-WWII Westphalian consensus restricts action from the Security Council to situations which threaten “international peace and security”. The so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which aimed to give the UN the mandate to act beyond its traditional role as a mediator of international disputes, has thus far proven to be nothing more than unenforceable cant.

Realistically speaking, the prospect of the Sri Lankan government allowing for the deployment of peacekeepers, even with a Security Council ready and able to act, is virtually zero. However, the international community should, at the very least, be putting serious pressure on the Sri Lankan government to allow the aid agencies to operate in the country right now, with the threat of economic sanctions the price of non-compliance. Sri Lanka is heavily dependent upon imports and foreign aid, and the EU and US are the country’s two biggest export markets, together accounting for almost 55 per cent of Sri Lankan exports.

There can be little doubt that serious human rights violations are taking place in the conflict zone, thus explaining why the Sri Lankan government is restricting aid agencies and media coverage in the area to the extent that it is. The government claims on its website to be conducting the “world’s largest hostage rescue mission” having rescued over 30,000 civilians from Tamil forces so far. The wildly varying estimates of refugee numbers coming from the various aid agencies demonstrates that the reality is no-one knows quite what is going on. A final confrontation between the government and the LTTE is inevitable and cannot be stopped. The LTTE will almost certainly go down. What can and must be stopped is the government’s enthusiasm to finish the job, and the LTTE’s determination to throw everything at them in a final cast of the dice, resulting in thousands of innocent civilians going down with them.

“Taking a wasps nest… is more effective than catching the wasps one by one”. So said Lord Palmerston in 1841, in reference to the destruction by British forces of slave quarters controlled by the Spanish on the West African coast. World leaders agitating over how best to deal with the problem of Somali piracy would do well to heed his words.

The current approach, involving the patrol by a dozen warships of over a million square miles of water in the hope of apprehending a pirate in the act cannot possibly eliminate this multi-million dollar problem. The capture by pirates of 111 vessels off the Somali coast in 2008, marking a 200 per cent rise on the previous year, was what helped resolve the United Nations Security Council to the unanimous adoption of Resolution 1851 on 16 December 2008, which appeared to mark a turning point in the international community’s readiness to engage seriously with the issue.

Acknowledging repeated calls for assistance from the then president of Somalia, Abdullahi Ahmed, the resolution authorises states to “undertake all necessary measures that are appropriate in Somalia, for the purpose of suppressing acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea” including land based operations should they be necessary. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with UN resolutions, it seems that words have spoken louder than actions.

Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that if the international community wishes to deal with the problem of Somali piracy then land-based operations will be not only necessary but essential.

An analysis of the International Maritime Bureau’s Live Piracy Map supports concerns that the present approach may in fact be exacerbating the problem. Though successful attacks in the Gulf of Aden are down on the same period last year (a fact some observers attribute to poor weather at the start of 2009), reports of attacks on vessels way out in the Indian Ocean that didn’t happen in 2008 suggest that some pirates may simply be circumnavigating the task force and conducting their operations further afield.

If this problem is ever to be resolved, what is needed is a concerted international effort to take the fight to the pirates, which means destroying their bases of operation on land. The indiscriminate threat to global trade posed by the problem of piracy has already resulted in an unprecedented level of international co-operation. Countries with normally frosty relations such as Britain and Russia have at times literally been fighting side by side against the Somali pirates.  19 countries currently have ships deployed to combat or deter pirates in the region and at the start of 2009 there was even talk of Switzerland sending soldiers to contribute to the effort.

Unfortunately, this international effort has thus far not extended to a serious consideration of land based operations. When, on 20 November 2008, Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin proposed just such an incursion he  received short shrift. On the same day, NATO’s Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer iterated his belief that Africa must take the lead in combatting piracy in Somalia. The African Union does currently have a mission in Somalia but it is characteristically short of funds, equipment and personnel. The AU has called for greater international assistance for the mission and there is no question that it will not succeed unless such assistance is forthcoming.

It goes without saying that a long term solution to Somalia’s piracy problem (or to this fragmented war-torn country’s myriad of wider problems for that matter) cannot be achieved without very serious progress achieved endogenously. The lack of effective governance that has blighted the country since the ousting of the repressive regime of Siad Barre in 1991 is what has enabled the piracy problem to develop to its current state in the first place, and not until the government gets a genuine handle on the country will it be eradicated. In a country that ranks at or very near to the bottom of virtually all socio-economic indicators, piracy is one of the most lucrative professions a Somali can currently hope for. Estimates for the total in ransom payouts in 2008 vary from $30m to $150m, huge sums of money for a country where the annual GDP is just $600.

Abdirahman Farole, the recently elected president of the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, from where the majority of attacks are launched, has affirmed his commitment to eradicating the problem on the back of a critical UN report that accused his predecessors of complicity in piracy. On 10 April 2009 Mr Farole reasserted his conviction that paying ransoms only encourages further attacks and called for the use of force against the pirates as the only realistic way to deal with the problem.

Both history and common sense suggest Mr Farole’s analysis is probably correct. If ransoms are the incentive for piracy, then paying those ransoms will only increase that incentive. This was the unhappy experience of the United States with the Barbary pirates in the 19th century and it is the same unhappy experience of the international community now. Unfortunately, as things stand at present, the companies that own the hijacked ship prefer to pay the ransom than risk the loss of cargo and a bloodbath.

The international set up off the coast of Somalia is inadequate at present because it is reactive: A distress call from a ship results in a rapid though all-too-often not rapid enough response from the nearest warship. Once the ship is captured, the liklihood, in spite of recent events to the contrary, is that the ransom will be paid. Only a proactive response can hope to make a genuine impact by reducing or even eliminating the ability of the pirates to launch attacks in the first place.

The international legitimacy for an invasion to eliminate the pirates’ bases on shore - granted by UNSC Resolution 1851 - is now in place. The will of Somali politicians for that to happen is also there. The ever-increasing economic, and more importantly human cost of allowing the piracy problem to continue unabated should convince the international community of the very real need to act on this problem, and to act on it soon.

The extradition of four men wanted by the Rwandan High Court was blocked today by two British judges on the grounds there is a “real risk” they will suffer a “flagrant denial of justice”.

The men, Dr Vincent Bajinya, Emmanuel Nteziryayo, Charles Munyaneza and Celestin Ugirashebuj are wanted on charges of Mass Murder committed during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu “sympathisers” were massacred in 100 days.

The concerns aired by the judges are not unreasonable, particularly since Rwanda is currently ruled by Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front that eventually overthrew the genocidal Hutu regime. The right of every human being to a fair trial, as proclaimed by Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights means they should not go.

However, it is a shocking indictment of the international criminal justice system that no other court exists in which they can be tried, meaning that these men have effectively been granted impunity for the forseable future. As things stand at present, only if the Rwandan government seeks, and obtains, an order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that the United Kingdom hand over the men will they stand trial in Rwanda. This does not, however, solve the problem that that trial probably would not be fair.

There has also been mention of an Early Day Motion being submitted to the British Parliament calling for a change in legislation that would allow for the men to be tried in the UK. This idea has actually been put forward by one of the four, Vincent Bajinya. However, the chances of this succeeding are slim and the suitability of such a course of action is anyway highly questionable.

The obvious alternative court in which to try the men would seem to be the UN mandated International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), but the ICTR’s jurisdiction only extends to high level figures in the genocide. Lower level figures such as the four men in question are tried by the national courts. Besides which, the ICTR has only managed to sentence 39 individuals to date, and it is due to wind up its work in 2010, though this date may be extended. It could reasonably be argued that perhaps the authority of the ICTR should be extended to cover lower level criminals, but that is not the case at present. Besides which, the ICTR is a very specific body with a very specific geographical and temporal mandate. There needs to be a permanent body with a mandate to try the most serious crimes no matter where and when they were committed. That body is, or rather should be, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague.

Unfortunately the ICC is hamstringed in a number of different ways. The first problem is the so-called rule of complimentarity, which stipulates that the ICC can exercise jurisdiction over a serious international crime only if no state is willing and able to prosecute the crime itself. The second problem for the ICC is that its jurisdiction only extends to those citizens of the 108 countries that have signed up to the court or to individuals whose crimes were committed on the territory of a member state.  The only other ways by which the ICC  can derive the jurisdiction to prosecute a crime is through the express request of the United Nations Security Council or if a non-member state permits the ICC to exercise its jurisdiction in the case of a particular crime. None of these conditions are met in the case of the four men in question. Not only that, but at present the ICC is only mandated to prosecute crimes committed after it came into existance on 1 July 2002 or in the case of a new member, after it has ratified the Rome Statute.

As it stands at present, the international justice system is wholly inadequate for the task it is supposed to fulfil because the most inviolate principle of post-1945 geopolitics - the absolute sovereignty of the nation state - still trumps what is supposed to be the second great pillar of the post-war international consensus:  the universality of human rights.

Those who argue that, for practical reasons as much as anything else, the ICC cannot become the first court of redress for all the world’s ills are of course correct. The ICC must remain a place at which only those charged wirh the most serious crimes can be tried. However, the court’s raison d’être, namely bringing individuals to justice from states that are either unable or unwilling to prosecute, needs to be extended to the point that the court’s jurisdiction is truly universal. Furthermore, it needs to be given the authority to try crimes committed before 1 July 2002.

Doubtless many international lawyers would object to these suggestions. International law has been founded upon consensus. At present, no state on earth is party to any international convention or organisation that it has not chosen to sign up to. There are many good reasons for this modus operandi, not least of which is that social, religious and cultural differences mean that internationally, laws vary. Yet the ICC does not deal with such laws, its jurisdiction covers only the most serious crimes, namely the crime of genocide; crimes against humanity; war crimes and the crime of aggression. Surely it is not beyond the realms of possibility to achieve consensus on the point that those accused of such crimes must stand trial, no matter who they may be and where on earth they may happen to live. Ideally, the prosecution of such crimes will be the responsibility of the individual state, but where a state proves unable or unwilling to prosecute, there must be an effective court of last resort. The International Criminal Court will continue to be a misnomer so long as as its jurisdiction stops at the borders of states that don’t want to play ball.

The issue of retroactive legislation is, if anything trickier still. One of the basic principles of law is that it must be certain. An action cannot be legal one day and then prosecutable the next. Legislation can be passed that makes an action that was once legal now illegal, but prosecutions of that action can and should only take place after the new law has come into effect. It would not be right for an individual to be hauled up on charges of filing his tax return incorrectly a year ago because the law on how to correctly file tax returns has changed since that point. Only if the tax return wrongly filed after the new law came into effect could that individual be prosecuted.

Yet this is not the case with the ICC. The crimes it was set up to try were crimes in 1994, they were crimes at the time of the inception of the ICC and they are crimes now. Some will point out that what constitutes the crime of genocide and what constitutes the crime of aggression is still not fully agreed upon, yet that is just as much the case now, after the establishment of the ICC with its authority to try such crimes, as it was in 1994.

It has been pointed out on more than one occassion that international institutions such as the ICC (or the UN for that matter) are only as effective as the most powerful states wish them to be. The biggest stumbling block for the ICC has so far been that for almost the entirety of its short existence it has been confronted by an American administration singularly opposed to the idea that any international institution should be able to exercise jurisdiction over American citizens without the express permission of the United States.

Such was the opposition of America to the notion of an ICC with universal jurisdiction under the Bush administration that on 30 June 2002, the day before the Rome Statute was to come into force, the US declared that it would vote against a resolution renewing for 6 months the mandate of the UN Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH) and threatened to do the same with respect to all other UN peacekeeping operations if US military personnel participating in such operations were not granted an exemption from the ICC’s jurisdiction.

The upshot of this was United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1422, which stipulated that in the case of UNSC mandated operations, any incidents involving personnel of contributing states not party to the Rome Statute would not fall under the jurisdiction of the ICC for a period of twelve months unless the UNSC (on which the US has a veto) expressly stated otherwise. Subsequent UNSC resolutions to the same effect have if anything weakened the authority of the ICC still further.

The announcement by President Obama on 31 March that America would seek a seat on the UN’s Human Rights Council has been hailed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as indicative of “a new era of engagement” on the part of the United States. The fact that it would be a struggle to be less engaged than the former Bush administration should not detract from this.

However, if the United States is really serious about engaging with the international community, then it also needs to ratify the Rome Statute as a matter of urgency. That being done, the US needs to use its considerable global influence - and President Obama his considerable global credibility - to push for a renegotiation of the Rome Statute to make the jurisdiction of the ICC truly universal and applicable to crimes committed no matter what their date.

Not only that, but the hitherto mentioned rule of conditionality also needs to be modified. International lawyers such as Kevin Heller have argued persuasively that the “unable or unwilling” clause of the Rome Statute that allows the ICC to step in if a state proves itself unable or unwilling to prosecute only applies if a state is making it more difficult to prosecute an individual. The statute does not permit the ICC to step in if a state’s inequitable legal process makes a conviction less difficult, as would be the case in Rwanda at present. Though there is disagreement amongst international lawyers on this issue, the very fact of such disagreement is argument enough to modify the statute so as to extend beyond question the ICC’s authority to cases where an inadequate respect for due process on the part of a nation state would make a conviction easier to obtain in addition to a conviction being made too difficult.

There is an unpleasant imbalance in the international justice system at present. The issue of the four Rwandans whose extradition has been denied by the British courts is paradigmatic of the problem. Had the extradition been granted, the system at present stipulates that they must stand trial in Rwanda, though they would certainly not receive a fair trial. With the extradition request refused, it now appears that these men may not face a court at all. This is what is known as international injustice. What is worse is that it is unnecessary international injustice, and it needs to change.