Courting Trouble

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | June 1, 2024

There is something called the International Criminal Court (ICC) located in The Hague in the Netherlands. It was organized by the Rome Statute in 1998 for the purpose of being an independent investigatory and prosecutorial body for what is considered the worst state-sponsored behavior; war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and wars of aggression.

Some 124 countries signed on, ceding some authority to the ICC. U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute in 2000 but never submitted it to the Senate to be ratified. In 2002, President George Bush notified the United Nations that we would not be a party to the ICC as we chose not to surrender our judicial sovereignty to any foreign entity and we considered the ICC to be illegitimate. We join China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen not signing on with the ICC.

The 18 ICC judges are elected by the Assembly of States Parties, the governing body of the Court, and serve a single, nine-year term. They even have their own detention center located within an already existing Netherland prison.

Finally functional in 2002, the ICC is not the most active of courts. They have prosecuted 30 cases since then and earned 10 convictions.

This all comes to mind as the ICC accuses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister of war crimes, including genocide for actions taken in Gaza. A conviction might constrain Netanyahu from traveling outside of Israel, as the Rome Statute would require signing countries to consider him a fugitive and arrest him.

It should be noted the ICC also accused three Hamas leaders of war crimes but to little effect, since their current location is unknown to most. The ICC has also accused Vladimir Putin of crimes for his aggression against Ukraine, and he will simply ignore them as he has done in the past, though Russia is a signatory of the Rome Statute.

This all means very little in terms of ending the war in Gaza as Hamas refuses to return 125 Israeli hostages it still has (121 taken Oct. 10 and four taken earlier) without a cease-fire, and Israel refuses to agree to a cease-fire until those hostages are returned. ICC influence over any of that is zero.

Meanwhile, we have our own judicial issues as respect for our Supreme Court has reached historic lows.

According to a September Gallup poll, only 41 percent of adult Americans approve of the job being done by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). Pew Research asked the question a bit differently in November, specifying a favorable or unfavorable opinion, but the results were pretty much the same. Only 44 percent of Pew respondents had a favorable opinion of the Court, a stunning 26 point drop from 2020 and a 32 point drop since they started polling the issue in 1987.

At least part of the SCOTUS approval decline results from a host of controversial issues decided recently managing to upset both the left and right of the political spectrum. They upheld extremely restrictive Texas abortion laws, split a pair of affirmative action decisions and a handful of congressional redistricting cases, legalized gay marriage, and overturned Roe v. Wade as examples. Much of Donald Trump’s legal issues will likely end up before SCOTUS, further alienating about half the country.

It isn’t helping that at least two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, seem conflicted when it comes to some issues surrounding Trump and the 2020 election.

Photos recently appeared of an American flag flying upside down at Alito’s Virginia home in the days following the 2020 election. Alito claimed he knew nothing about it and that it was his wife’s doing as part of a spat with the neighbors. His wife would say only that it was an “international signal of distress,” though she did not enlighten as to what that distress was. One flag controversy apparently not enough—another photo surfaced, this time of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag adopted by the stop-the-steal movement on and after Jan. 6. It was flying over an Alito New Jersey vacation home.

Justice Clarence Thomas has a more dire problem than just a couple of symbolic flags. His wife Ginny has been more than peripherally involved in that entire stop-the-steal nonsense.

Between the days after the November 2020 election and the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, Ginny Thomas sent 29 text messages to then Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows telling him, among other outrages, that certifying the Biden victory means, “This is the end of Liberty” and that Meadows should “Release the Kraken and save us from the left…”

Neither Alito nor Thomas have indicated the least willingness to recuse themselves from Trump-related cases likely coming their way. That won’t improve their approval ratings or increase our trust at all.