Russia could be weighing the feasibility of ratifying the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) shortly after its entering into force in 2000, but recently it became clear that Moscow should refrain from the step. The Court demonstrated bias and unfairness by taking the role of warfare in the inter-Korean conflict which escalated this year. The situation evokes similarities with that of 1999 when the International Criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia handed out a sentence to S. Milosevic amidst NATO air raids against the country.
On December 6 ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo declared opening a preliminary probe into war crimes allegedly committed on the territory of S. Korea by N. Korea's army during the shelling of the Yeonpyeong Island on November 23 and the sinking of the Cheonan corvette in the Yellow Sea on March, 26, 2010. The Court is to decide whether the incidents entailed war crimes and thus belong to its jurisdiction. Perhaps it is worth noting in the context that the ICC President Song Sang-Hyun is a citizen of S. Korea.
The ICC is supposed to deal exclusively with the severest international crimes such as genocide or war crimes. The cases it is handling at the moment involve death tolls reaching either millions as in Congo or tens of thousands as in Uganda and Central Africa. For some reason, the ICC shows no signs of interest in the plight of Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan where civilian populations were exterminated in comparable numbers. As or the inter-Korean conflict, the incidents in question were nowhere nearly as bloody.
The Cheonan corvette and the military base on the Yeonpyeong Island being a military vessel and a military installation, attacks against them in any case do not count as a war crimes according to the ICC's own statute and therefore should not be treated as if they belong to its jurisdiction. Nevertheless, they are, and the fact that the current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is an S. Korean citizen as well may be a part of the explanation.
By the way, the UN Secretary Generals are notorious for occasional disrespect for countries' sovereignty over their domestic affairs. Formerly, Dag Hammarskjöld played a sinister role in the crisis in Congo, and Kofi Annan lobbied with undue pushiness the creation of a special court for Sierra-Leone under the UN auspices. Right now Ban Ki-moon is in the process of earning a spotty record in this regard: just days ago he intervened in the domestic affairs of Côte d'Ivoire, a UN member-country, by giving the stamp of approval to the country's controversial presidential elections in which its incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo declared himself the winner in the race against his chief rival, former premier Alassane Ouattara. By coincidence, the UN envoy to Côte d'Ivoire also happens to be a S. Korean citizen.
The UN onslaught on N. Korea is broadening. Of course, the central issue is N. Korea's nuclear program which is currently on the table at the UN Security Council. On top of that, N. Korea's human rights record features permanently on the agenda of the UN Third Committee on Human Rights and routinely surfaces at the UN General Assembly meetings. Last November, the Third Committee passed a resolution condemning N. Korea for serial human rights abuses including tortures and public executions. The resolution which added fuel to the tensions was floated by S. Korea with the Western support and won the vote with the 100:18 score, with 60 countries abstaining. Russia must be credited with voting against the resolution.
The UN Human Rights Council joined the campaign by appointing a group of Special Rapporteurs for N. Korea which collected under the cover of a single document various countries' demands concerning N. Korea's domestic legislation. The group's report served as the basis for a new resolution suggested by the same forces and carrying further criticisms over human rights leveled at Pyongyang. Finally we witness the ICC contribute to the pressure on N. Korea.
As the proponents of deepening Russia's involvement with existing and new international justice institutions are getting increasingly vocal, Moscow should take into account the obvious tendency to use international courts as instruments of interference with domestic affairs of sovereign countries and in some instances as warfare during armed conflicts. While the ICC's issuing an arrest warrant for Sudan's president over Darfur in 2010 was the first time the Court intervened in a country's domestic conflict, the prosecutor's move targeting N. Korea is the Court's first undisguised intervention in an international conflict. From now on, the international justice is going to be a player in international armed conflicts quite officially.
