Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Power and Interests at the International Criminal Court

2008; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sais.0.0014

1945-4724

Darren Hawkins,

Military and Defense Studies

U.S. policy toward the International Criminal Court is disconnected from the central politics of the Court and focused on a mostly irrelevant sideshow. The Court’s fundamental political problem is its need for money and security forces to arrest suspects and try them. This feature makes the Court more subject to the control of powerful states than most have realized. Even if the United States cooperated with the Court, however, arrests and prisoners would likely be few and far between. Instead, the United States should work with the Court to refocus its efforts on capacity building in weakly democratic states. I f Google results can be used as a measure of importance, the United States has little to fear from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Type “ICC” into Google and the Court places a distant 11 th in Internet relevance, behind entities such as the International Cricket Council, the Internet Chess Club, and Illinois Central College. 1 In terms of influence over people’s lives, that ranking seems about right. The creation of the ICC stirred a tempest in U.S. policy and U.S. relations with other states. Yet the storm has blown over without much altering the landscape. Both proponents and opponents have oversold the importance of the Court. It may yet prove worthy of its hype, but the Court’s basic problem is that it lacks prisoners and has little means of getting them. The most direct way for the United States to influence the Court is to cooperate (or not) with Court requests to arrest suspects or to provide other assistance essential to any investigation and trial. In contrast, U.S. policy has focused on punishing mostly small states for working with the Court, an unfortunate sideshow that might reap some small benefits for the United States but also incurs significant costs and ultimately has little effect on the ICC. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and court supporters have been attracted by the same sideshow of influencing small- and medium-sized states around the world by encouraging them to ratify the Court’s statute, to implement the necessary domestic legislation, and to resist U.S. pressure to undermine the Court. To an extent, their instincts are correct. The more states that support the Court, the greater the Court’s legitimacy. Legitimacy, however, is necessary but insufficient for the functioning of the Court. Legitimacy will not bring suspects to the Court’s cells and trial chambers and Darren Hawkins is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University. He has published Delegation and Agency in International Organizations with Cambridge University Press, and articles on international human rights issues in International Studies Quarterly and Journal of Politics, among others.