AT Neg

AT: China
China’s security council veto thumps ICC investigations
Rizvi 20 [Alina Rizvi, associate Editor at Jurist, 7-10-2020, "Uighur Crisis Highlights Flawed Structure of UN Security
Council", Jurist, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/07/alina-rizvi-unsc-reform-uighurs/]
One crucial aspect of international law is failing the Uighurs and it is the structure of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The persecution of the Uighurs is just
one example of a State-committed human rights abuse that led to little prevention or relief for victims because of the structure of
the UNSC. The UNSC is an essential part of international law, but it needs reform. History of the Uighurs and China’s Human Rights Abuses Since around 2017, China’s
government has detained at least 1 million Uighurs in internment camps in the northwest province of Xinjiang. According to satellite images, there are at least 85 camps in the
province. Uighurs are an ethnic and religious minority in China native to Xinjiang, which used to be known as East Turkestan. Uighurs are Muslims, members of the Turkic
people, and speak the Turkic language. China annexed East Turkestan and renamed it Xinjiang (“New Territory”) in 1884 following the end of a war. Xinjiang is home to other
affected ethnic Muslim minorities such as the Kazaks, Kyrgyz, Tatars, Uzbeks, and Tajiks. China’s government, ruled by the Communist Party of China (CCP), claims the camps
are “re-education camps” to deliver “a curriculum that includes standard spoken and written Chinese, understanding of the law, vocational skills, and deradicalization.” The CCP
claims that the camps are an effort to battle terrorism and enhance national security and point to attacks committed by Uighur militants in 2013 and 2014. Reports indicate that
Chinese authorities forcibly removed Uighurs from their homes and put them in arbitrary detention without criminal charges in internment camps. There are reports of torture,
sexual harassment, and forced labor at the camps, in an effort to coerce Uighurs to denounce their culture and religion. In addition, Chinese authorities are imposing forced birth
control on Uighur women, such as inserting IUDs, forced abortions, and sterilizations, which is a genocidal attempt to suppress the population. It is also reported that the CCP
used software hidden in apps as well as websites to stalk and gather data on the Uighur population as early as 2013. China’s Violations of International Human Rights Law
According to this mounting evidence, China is violating international human rights law. China has ratified several human rights treaties including the Convention against Torture
and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).
China’s ratification of these treaties means it is legally bound to their general purpose as well as their provisions, excluding any reservations. Moreover, China’s abuses against
the Uighurs are rising to the level of genocide and crimes against humanity, both of which violate jus cogens. Jus cogens are peremptory norms under international law and no
State can derogate from these norms. China is violating its obligations under international law with little avenues of accountability. Limited Legal Remedies Are
Available Decisions of the International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as UNSC resolutions, are legally binding under international law. The ICC prosecutes 4 crimes:
genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. In order for the ICC to bring charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against
humanity against a State or a State national, that State must consent to the jurisdiction of the ICC. However, the ICC may exercise
jurisdiction over these crimes if the crimes were referred to the ICC prosecutor by the UNSC pursuant to a resolution adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. There are
two main avenues under international law that would hold China accountable for its crimes against the Uighurs but both avenues are blocked because of the
structure of the UNSC. China has not consented to the jurisdiction of the ICC, but Chinese authorities can still be put on trial if the UNSC adopts
a resolution and refers the resolution to the ICC prosecutor. A UNSC resolution should be adopted that halts the operation of the camps and that resolution should also be
referred to the ICC prosecutor to prosecute the Chinese authorities involved. These pathways of legal accountability would be open if China was not
a permanent member of the UNSC. Recently, two Uighur groups have filed a complaint against Chinese officials at the ICC and urged the prosecutor to
investigate genocide and crimes against humanity. The groups argue that since China pursued unlawful arrests in or deportation from Cambodia and Tajikistan, that the court
has jurisdiction. Cambodia and Tajikistan are members of the ICC. In an interview with JURIST, Rodney Dixon, the lead lawyer on the case, believes jurisdiction “shouldn’t be a
barrier at all.” In 2018, the ICC ruled it had jurisdiction on Myanmar’s criminal activity against the Rohingya because part of that activity occurred in Bangladesh, an ICC member
state. Dixon mentioned that the 2018 ruling is in the “early stages of the ICC developing and setting the precedent, but this (Uighur case) would reinforce it.” The ICC has, so far,
acknowledged receipt of the complaint. Flawed Structure of the UNSC and Its Implications Chapter V of the UN Charter created the UNSC. The UNSC has 15 members: 5
permanent members (“P5”) and 10 non-permanent members. The P5 includes China, France, the US, the UK, and Russia. The 10 non-permanent members are elected for a
term of 2 years by the UN General Assembly. To pass a UNSC resolution, at least 9 members must vote in the affirmative including all permanent members. If even 1
permanent member vetoes a resolution, the resolution does not pass. Moreover, Taiwan, not China was one of the original members of the P5 from
1946 to 1971. In 1971, China raised the argument that it should represent the government of China at the UNSC, not Taiwan. The UN subsequently expelled Taiwan from the
UNSC and replaced it with China. Taiwan is currently not a member of the UN because the UN does not recognize it as a sovereign state. Permanent members’ veto
power has become a mechanism to feed political and economic interests, rather than protect human rights. In addition, it is
questionable whether the rotation of the 10 non-permanent members provides a proper global representation. The reason why the UNSC, compared to other organs of the
UN, is important is because its resolutions are binding (for example, UN General Assembly resolutions are not binding). China has stopped all talks of
drafting a resolution on the Uighurs, saying it is an “internal matter.” Even if a resolution was drafted, China would veto it.
Therefore, getting international justice for the Uighurs poses a challenge. To be clear, China is not the only P5 member that protects its own interests. In the past,
this is why the US has vetoed resolutions on the Israel-Palestine conflict and why Russia has vetoed resolutions on the Syrian
war. The list can go on. While it is impossible to expect political and economic interests to be absent among inter-governmental relations, these interests should not play this
big a role at an institution that was founded to promote human rights. Reform of the UNSC Is Essential The UNSC needs to be reformed and should not exist to serve the
interests of the P5. It should serve the interests of the most vulnerable it intended to protect, such as the Uighurs. To reform the structure of the UNSC, the UN Charter needs to
be amended. Article 108 provides the general rule to amend the charter; an amendment is adopted by a vote of 2/3 of the members of the General Assembly and has to include
the vote of all permanent members of the UNSC. Thus, amending the UN Charter to re-structure the UNSC is difficult. However, recently, UN delegates have argued that the
UNSC “must expand, adapt to current realties or risk losing legitimacy.” Inter-governmental negotiations on reforming the council have begun; the issues include enlarging the
size of the council to include more representation, abolition or extension of veto power, and expansion of both permanent and non-permanent members. The most necessary
reforms include abolishing the veto power and adding more permanent members to allow for greater representation. It is unclear how long these negotiations will go on, but it
could be years. In the meantime, the only international legal remedy available to the Uighurs is a hopeful yet uncertain pathway to the ICC. While the US has imposed sanctions
on China and the overall international community has expressed concern, it will not be enough to stop the irreparable harm to the Uighurs. It is imperative that the UNSC is
reformed and the negotiations to do so aren’t unnecessarily prolonged. It is also imperative that P5 members are willing to negotiate. Reform is vital not only to protect the
Uighurs but to protect other vulnerable populations, and to fulfill the UN’s mission to protect international peace and security.

The ICC won’t investigate China – they lack jurisdiction

Hernández 20 [Javier C. Hernández, China correspondent for The Times and graduate from Harvard, 12-15-2020,
"I.C.C. Won’t Investigate China’s Detention of Muslims,” NYT,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/world/asia/icc-china-uighur-muslim.html]
The International Criminal Court has decided not to pursue an investigation into China’s mass detention of Muslims, a setback
for activists eager to hold Beijing accountable for persecution of ethnic and religious minorities. Prosecutors
in The Hague said on Monday that they would
not, for the moment, investigate allegations that China had committed genocide and crimes against humanity regarding the
Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, because the alleged crimes took place in China, which is not a party to the court. The
abuses described “have been committed solely by nationals of China within the territory of China,” said a report by the court’s chief
prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda of Gambia. For months, Uighurs in exile had urged the court to investigate China’s repressive policies against Muslim minorities, the first attempt by
activists to use the force of international law to hold Chinese officials accountable for the crackdown. They accused the Chinese government of carrying out a campaign of
torture, forced sterilization and mass surveillance against Muslims, among other abuses. China has faced growing international condemnation for its harsh treatment of Muslims,
including the construction of vast indoctrination camps in the western region of Xinjiang. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign described China’s actions in Xinjiang as
genocide, a position also taken by other Western leaders. China has denied that the camps are abusive, describing them instead as job training centers aimed at countering
religious extremism and terrorism, despite a preponderance of contradictory evidence. Many Uighurs said on Tuesday that they were disappointed in the court’s decision not to
investigate. They vowed to continue to lobby global leaders to punish China for the abuses. “The I.C.C. was formed for one and only one reason: to confront the most horrific
international crimes,” said Fatimah Abdulghafur, a Uighur poet and activist who lives in Australia. “The atrocities of the Chinese regime toward Uighurs are countless.” The
complaint against China was filed by two Uighur exile groups, the East Turkistan Government in Exile and the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement. In addition to
abuses against Muslims inside China’s borders, the Uighur groups had also lobbied the court to investigate Beijing for pursuing the repatriation of thousands of Uighurs through
unlawful arrests in or deportation from other countries, including Cambodia and Tajikistan. In its report on Monday, the prosecutor’s office said there was “no
basis to proceed at this time” because there did not appear to be enough evidence to show that Chinese officials had
committed crimes over which the court had jurisdiction. “Not all conduct which involves the forcible removal of persons from a
location necessarily constitutes the crime of forcible transfer or deportation,” the report said. Lawyers representing the Uighur groups said they
were still hopeful that the court would open an investigation after considering new evidence. “We have explained we’ve been hampered by Covid restrictions,’’
said Rodney Dixon, who is the lead lawyer in the case. “The prosecutor needs further and concrete evidence from Cambodia and Tajikistan to
establish jurisdiction, and we will be providing that early in the year.” Lawyers following the court said that the prosecutor, whose mandate is coming to an end, had been
under time pressure to present her final report to the annual assembly of court members now meeting in The Hague. A new prosecutor will be elected in the coming weeks.
Rights activists said they would continue to fight to hold China accountable for its actions in Xinjiang. Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said the
decision was not a judgment on whether abuses were taking place. “The facts remain: The Chinese government is committing grave violations on a
massive scale in Xinjiang, and those responsible should be held to account,” she said.

China doesn’t care about international humanitarian law

Williams 20 [Robert D. Williams, senior research scholar, lecturer, and the executive director of the Paul Tsai China
Center at Yale Law School, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor at Lawfare,
October 2020, “International Law With Chinese Characteristics: Beijing And The “rules-based” Global Order,”
Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2020/10/FP_20201012_international_law_china_williams.pdf]
Human rights China’s approach to multilateral human rights regimes follows a similar pattern: Beijing rhetorically endorses many human rights norms
while advocating self- serving interpretations of their meaning and future development.92 China has joined a number of major human rights
conventions including the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The PRC has also signed but not ratified the ICCPR.93 Where China has adopted
legislation to implement these human rights protections in its domestic legal system, those rules “frequently prove difficult to enforce and are sometimes
even illusory in practice.”94 More broadly, law and legal institutions have little power to protect human rights in areas that are
“politically sensitive” for the Chinese party-state.95 Against this backdrop, China’s government has perpetrated massive human
rights abuses even as its legal and policy reforms have smoothed the path for hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens to rise out of poverty and stimulated improvements
in the transparency, responsiveness, and professionalism of Chinese governance across a range of issues.96 Among the most egregious of China’s human rights violations is
the ongoing campaign against Uyghurs and Turkic Muslims in its Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region — reportedly ranging from arbitrary detention of hundreds of thousands of
Chinese citizens in indoctrination camps97 to population-reduction measures such as forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning policies.98 Such
practices meet the definition of genocide under the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which China has ratified.99 Beijing has denied
the reports of forced birth control as “baseless” and, amid growing international criticism, released a white paper in September 2020 seeking to defend the Xinjiang internment
camps as “vocational training centers.”100 Because China has not accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of international judicial
mechanisms for individual complaints over human rights abuses, international legal oversight is limited to “periodic reviews” by treaty
bodies and other means of public pressure — work which can be made difficult by Beijing’s lack of transparency and retaliation against
critics.101 Other human rights violations in China span a wide range: repression of Tibetans and other indigenous peoples; curbs on
free expression, association, and religion; crackdowns on dissidents, human rights lawyers, and other reform advocates;
strict limits on labor rights; and an intrusive surveillance state with few if any reliable legal constraints.102 Analysts are now exploring the extent to
which certain of these practices are being exported — intentionally or otherwise — to countries that receive Chinese investment through the Belt and Road global infrastructure
initiative.103 Of course, Beijing does not admit to being a serial human rights violator. Instead, as Jerome Cohen has explained, in their public
statements Chinese officials emphasize “the sovereign independence of each country; the differing economic circumstances, values, traditions, and priorities of different
countries; and the relativity of various human rights, as though the PRC had not adhered to any binding multilateral arrangements calling for compliance with prescribed
universal standards.”104 In the realm of civil and political rights, this does not necessarily require rewriting international human rights law, but instead promoting interpretations
that render those norms hollow.105 At the U.N. Security Council, General Assembly, Human Rights Council, and elsewhere, Chinese diplomats have found
various ways to insulate China against criticism for its human rights record and to promote its “statist, development-as-top-priority view” of human rights
— in some cases through “distorting procedures, undercutting institutional strength, and diluting conventional human rights
norms.”106 Variations on this theme may include pressuring other countries to submit positive reviews of China’s human rights
record at the U.N.107 and running political training programs for African officials to “share lessons” from China’s domestic
governance in an effort to bolster the legitimacy of Beijing’s human rights perspective.108 At the Human Rights Council, China has
advocated for a hierarchy of human rights values that gives priority to an amorphous “right to development.”109 It has also emphasized that there is “no
universal road for the development of human rights in the world.”110 These developments are fueling growing concerns that under Beijing’s vision of
international human rights governance, “sovereignty, non-interference, ‘dialogue and cooperation,’ ‘mutual respect,’ and multilateralism would be prioritized as
fundamental, non-negotiable principles, and the promotion and protection of human rights of individuals rendered an afterthought.”111 Climate change

China abuses ilaw and will exploit the ICC for its own advantage
Foley 24 [Jordan Foley, Department Head for Operational Law at the Navy’s Office of the Judge Advocate General
National Security Law Division, 5-28-2024, "Multi-Domain Legal Warfare: China’s Coordinated Attack on International Rule
of Law", Lieber Institute West Point,
https://lieber.westpoint.edu/multi-domain-legal-warfare-chinas-coordinated-attack-international-rule-law/]
Law has emerged as an integral element of gray zone competition. State and non-State actors alike increasingly view law as a means to shape operational spaces, forge
perceptions of legitimacy, constrain potential adversaries, and refashion the international system, whether in lieu of, in preparation for, or in conjunction with the use of military
force. This is perhaps most pronounced in the Indo-Pacific where the People’s Republic of China (PRC) remains the United States’ pacing challenge and continues to engage in
controversial lawfare. The PRC is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological
power to do it. To carry out its intent, the PRC exploits and misrepresents international law for its own benefit and at the expense of
other nations. This post examines China’s worrying lawfare in the domains of cyber, maritime, air, and outer space. Chinese Lawfare In October 2023, the U.S. Department
of Defense (DoD) released its annual report on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” which “serves as an authoritative assessment on
military and security developments involving the PRC.” That year’s report spotlighted the PRC’s misuse of international and domestic law under the People’s Liberation Army’s
(PLA) three warfares concept. This includes “legal warfare” as a component of broader political influence operations. Among many examples of legal warfare, the report cites to
the PRC’s propagation of legally baseless maritime claims, conflation of its “One China principle” with foreign “One China” policies, and a “double standard” in the “interpretation
and enforcement of international law” in relation to foreign military activities in the exclusive economic zone. To anticipate and counter China’s political influence, we must
understand and appreciate China’s use (and misuse) of law in strategic competition. The PRC masterfully leverages its
competitors’ compliance with international law in several ways. Sometimes the PRC engages in the legitimate use of legal processes to achieve a strategic
end. For example, China has ratified numerous legally binding international agreements. Like other countries, it has a strong incentive to commit itself in this way and create a
favorable legal framework for trade and investment. But there are examples of blatant appropriation and exploitation on the fringes of law. In October
2020, China and Cambodia officially signed The Free Trade Agreement, which allows for greater and more open trade relations between the two countries despite the
Cambodian government’s poor human rights and antidemocratic record. Cambodia has a significant trade deficit with China, importing over $3.9 billion compared to its exports
of $830 million. In 2021, China accounted for 443% of Cambodia’s foreign debt. As part of repayment, the Cambodian government gave over 4.6 million hectares in concessions
to 107 Chinese-owned firms between 1994 and 2012. There is now speculation that China will establish a naval base in Cambodia. If established, the military presence will be
on the northern portion of Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand, and China’s second overseas outpost. Finally, there is the PRC’s blatant
departure from the law. On July 12, 2016, the arbitral tribunal adjudicating the Philippines’ case against China in the South China
Sea ruled overwhelmingly in favor of the Philippines. The tribunal determined that major elements of China’s excessive maritime claims, including its nine-
dash line, were unlawful. China reacted negatively to the ruling, calling it “null and void.” As these three examples highlight, when convenient
and in its interest, China adopts and abides by international law. But it also exploits the law as an instrument of coercion to
gain strategic advantage over others, upends international law, and destabilizes regions. Excessive maritime claims, violations of
sovereignty by high-altitude balloons, and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, for example, represent threats and challenges to the rule of law. China also employs
its double standards and its opportunistic approach to international law to achieve strategic effects in anticipated domains of warfare. The fixed
nature of physical domains—two surface domains with unique challenges on land and sea, two vertical domains defined by atmospheric versus orbital effects, and cyberspace—
can all be impacted by legal warfare. These whole-of-government efforts by the PRC are intended to provide the perception of legality and legitimacy behind their coercive and
unlawful actions. China is acutely aware of domain interplay in legal warfare; maritime claims affect air space, outer space impacts ground communications, and even terrestrial
borders shape cyberspace. Cyber Domain

BRI already failed

Bennon and Fukuyama 23 [Michael Bennon, Research Scholar and Manager of the Global Infrastructure Policy
Research Initiative at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for
International Studies at Stanford University, and Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman
Spogli Institute for International Studies and Director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy at Stanford
University, September/October 2023, "China’s Road to Ruin", Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/belt-road-initiative-xi-imf]
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, the largest and most ambitious infrastructure development project in human
history. China has lent more than $1 trillion to more than 100 countries through the scheme, dwarfing Western spending in the developing world and stoking anxieties about the
spread of Beijing’s power and influence. Many analysts have characterized Chinese lending through the BRI as “debt trap diplomacy” designed to give China leverage over
other countries and even seize their infrastructure and resources. After Sri Lanka fell behind on payments for its troubled Hambantota port project in 2017, China obtained a 99-
year lease on the property as part of a deal to renegotiate the debt. The agreement sparked concerns in Washington and other Western capitals that Beijing’s real aim was to
acquire access to strategic facilities throughout the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the Americas.

But over the last few years, a different picture of the BRI has emerged. Many Chinese-financed
infrastructure projects have failed to earn the returns that
analysts expected. And because the governments that negotiated these projects often agreed to backstop the loans, they have
found themselves burdened with
huge debt overhangs—unable to secure financing for future projects or even to service the debt they have already accrued.
This is true not just of Sri Lanka but also of Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, Montenegro, Pakistan, Tanzania, and many others. The
problem
for the West was less that China would acquire ports and other strategic properties in developing countries and more that these countries would become dangerously indebted—forced to turn to
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other Western-backed international financial institutions for help repaying their Chinese loans. In many parts of the developing world, China
has
come to be seen as a rapacious and unbending creditor, not so different from the Western multinational corporations and
lenders that sought to collect on bad debts in decades past. Far from breaking new ground as a predatory lender, in other words, China seems to be
following a path well worn by Western investors. In so doing, however, Beijing risks alienating the very countries it set out to woo
with the BRI and squandering its economic influence in the developing world. It also risks exacerbating an already painful debt crisis in emerging
markets that could lead to a “lost decade” of the kind many Latin American countries experienced in the 1980s. To avoid that dire outcome—and to avoid spending Western taxpayer dollars to
service bad Chinese debts—the United States and other countries should push for broad-based reforms that would make it more difficult to take advantage of the IMF and other international
financial institutions, imposing tougher criteria on countries seeking bailouts and demanding more transparency in lending from all their members, including China. HARD BARGAINS, SOFT
MARKETS

China lacks capital and support for more BRI loans

Lu 23 [Christina Lu, energy and environment reporter at Foreign Policy, 02-13-2023, "China’s Belt and Road to
Nowhere", Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/13/china-belt-and-road-initiative-infrastructure-development-
geopolitics/]
Nearly a decade after its inception, momentum behind China’s sweeping Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) appears to be slowing as lending slumps
and projects stall—forcing Chinese President Xi Jinping to again rethink a floundering initiative that he once hailed as his “project of the century.” After doling out
hundreds of billions of dollars, experts say China’s lending for BRI projects has plummeted, largely a casualty of the COVID-19
pandemic and the country’s own economic slowdown. Support has also waned as partner countries drown in debt and
fractures emerge—literally—in projects, fueling uncertainty about the future of the sprawling initiative. In 2022, 60 percent of
China’s overseas lending went to borrowers in financial distress, compared to just 5 percent in 2010, said Bradley Parks, the executive
director of the AidData research group at the College of William and Mary. “At its peak, it was really looked at as the centerpiece of China’s economic engagement with the rest
of the world,” said Scott Kennedy, an expert in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Now, he said, it
is a “shadow of
its former self.” Xi launched the BRI in 2013 as an ambitious infrastructure development campaign that would span more than 140 countries and export China’s industrial
overcapacity, boosting China’s diplomatic clout and enhancing its global influence. Given its sheer scale and scope, many referred to it as China’s version of the Marshall
Plan—only bigger and bolder. But Beijing’s vision has also been murky, intensifying scrutiny and controversy over the initiative and the contracts involved. “No one really knows
for sure what Beijing is trying to get out of it,” said Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center and the writer of Foreign Policy’s South Asia
Brief. “That sort of has lent this mystique to it that has led to a significant amount of suspicion, particularly from those governments that worry about China’s rise.” Instead
of
a sleek geopolitical campaign, researchers describe the BRI as a decentralized jumble of deals and projects that all loosely
fall under the same banner of infrastructure development. Hong Zhang, who researches Chinese public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said that
the BRI should be seen as a slogan, not a single program. “A lot of things were happening in the name of Belt and Road,” she said, adding: “Beijing has little control
over things going on on the ground.” China’s lending had already slipped before COVID-19 hit, a trend that was accelerated
by the pandemic’s fallout and then China’s own economic slowdown. For many countries, taking on Chinese loans also quickly
became unsustainable—particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up prices in the global marketplace—stoking backlash
against Beijing’s lending habits. One of the most glaring examples is Sri Lanka, which defaulted on a mountain of debt last year as it grappled with a
spiraling economic crisis. But cracks emerged far earlier: After struggling to cough up enough money to Beijing in 2017, it signed over the rights to a strategic port, fueling alarm
of the dangers of China’s lending practices. In Pakistan, which owes nearly one-third of its foreign debt to China, protests have erupted around a major port project.
And in recent weeks, debt-laden Zambia has been tensely wrangling a restructuring plan with China, its biggest bilateral creditor. The BRI has
“fallen on hard times,” Kugelman said. “I think that many, many countries have realized that they simply don’t have the luxury of an
economic structure that can withstand the type of loans that have been coming in from China for so long.” Some of that can be attributed to
the haphazard way in which the BRI was executed. To advance the initiative, many Chinese firms were so focused on administering projects that issues of
economic feasibility and risk were not prioritized, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center. “The Chinese did not think through the
economic viability of a lot of these loan projects because their priority was [to] glorify BRI, to implement projects to ensure that BRI materializes and is happening
all over the world,” she said. As Sri Lanka buckled under its debt, China officially gave it a two-year debt moratorium in early February—and it’s just one of dozens of countries
that have now been offered at least a partial reprieve. In 2020, China delayed debt repayments for 77 nations. But that has also left Chinese
lenders swimming in risk, Parks said, leaving Beijing in a precarious economic position. “They’re in a kind of firefighting
mode,” Parks said. “They are frankly ill-equipped for the challenge that they’re up against right now because they don’t have a long history of
being an overseas lender in times of crisis.” Still, for many countries with few other options, Beijing has a lot to offer. Bangladesh, for instance, has been on a
Chinese-funded infrastructure investment spree that has been quite popular, Kugelman said. In Latin America in particular, China has made new inroads and ramped up
investments, according to the Wall Street Journal. In an effort to contest China’s expanding influence through the BRI, many Western nations have been scrambling to offer up
their own alternative development initiatives—with little success. By 2027, the United States and G-7 aim to funnel some $600 billion into their Partnership for Global
Infrastructure and Investment—a revamp of the Build Back Better World campaign that they unveiled in 2021. Despite being launched more than a year ago, the European
Union’s 300-billion-euro answer to BRI, called the Global Gateway, has failed to make much of a splash on the global stage. “To be quite candid, I don’t think any country,
whether the U.S. or any other nation, can hold a candle to what China has been able to do with its infrastructure investments,” Kugelman said. “It has such a deep footprint in so
many parts of the world.” Beijing now appears to be recalibrating its approach, softening its rhetoric around the BRI’s capabilities, focusing on smaller projects, and shifting
course to offering debt-ridden countries emergency loans. In 2021, Xi also announced a Global Development Initiative (GDI), a small and vaguely defined program that
emphasizes China’s position as one of the world’s developing countries, while focusing on education, clean energy, and poverty—all in conjunction with the United Nations. To
further the GDI, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has urged cooperation with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The GDI reflects a more multilateral approach
to development—potentially signaling Beijing’s effort to diversify its strategy in the long run, said Sun of the Stimson Center. Parks said that the GDI could simply be an effort to
rebrand the BRI amid mounting criticism. “I think it’s mostly smoke and mirrors,” he said. But for all of its problems, don’t expect Beijing to abandon the BRI—or its underlying
goals—given how deeply intertwined it is with Xi himself. In 2017, the initiative was even enshrined in the party constitution. “Officially, you would never hear the Chinese
government admitting that the Belt and Road was a mistake, or the way we approached Belt and Road was a mistake,” Zhang said. “That would not happen because Belt and
Road is so closely tied to Xi Jinping’s personal political legacy.”

AT: Ukraine
Russia wins Ukraine war under Trump
Kakissis 24 [Joanna Kakissis, NPR Ukraine reporter and visting professor at Princeton University, 11-6-2024, "What
will Trump's presidency mean for Russia's war on Ukraine?", NPR,
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/07/nx-s1-5181985/2024-election-trump-russia-ukraine-war]
After Donald Trump's resounding election win, Ukraine
could lose the continued support of its most crucial ally, the U.S., which has spent $108
billion on military, humanitarian and economic aid to help Ukrainians since Russia's February 2022 invasion. Trump has criticized
the amount of aid for
Ukraine and claims he will end the war in 24 hours, though he hasn't elaborated how. Many Ukrainians do not trust Trump because of his professed
admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants to occupy Ukraine. Trump has blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, not Putin,
for starting the war. Trump was also impeached in 2019 for pressing Zelenskyy to open criminal investigations into Joe Biden and
his son Hunter for business dealings in Ukraine. On Wednesday, Zelenskyy brushed all that aside and congratulated Trump, even speaking with him by phone in what he called
an "excellent" conversation. Zelenskyy said he embraced what he called Trump's "peace through strength" approach in global affairs.
"America and the whole world will definitely benefit from it," Zelenskyy said in his evening video address. "People want certainty, they want freedom, a normal life. And for us,
this is life without Russian aggression and with a strong America, with a strong Ukraine, with strong allies." The Kremlin, meanwhile, claimed it wasn't celebrating Trump's
victory, citing the U.S.' ongoing assistance of Ukraine. Putin did not immediately congratulate him. "Let's not forget that we're talking about an unfriendly country that is both
directly and indirectly involved in a war against our state," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday in his daily briefing with reporters. Ukraine faces
immense challenges as the war closes its third year. Its economy, strangled by war, is highly dependent on foreign aid. Russian
forces are advancing on the eastern front line, joined by thousands of soldiers from North Korea, according to Ukrainian defense officials
and the Pentagon. Russia strikes Ukrainian cities and towns every day with attack drones, ballistic missiles and glide bombs.
Russian attacks have destroyed much of Ukraine's energy grid, leaving millions vulnerable as winter approaches. Not far from the eastern
city of Pokrovsk, which is now under fierce Russian attack, soldier Maksym Sviezhentsev insists nothing Trump says suggests "his victory will bring
anything good for us." "That is, only if we judge by nothing other than words," Sviezhentsev told NPR by text message. "The reality is, we simply don't know what will
happen. Trump is unpredictable." The soldier says he's focusing on keeping his crew warm, well-equipped and mentally prepared for battle against invading Russian troops.
"Whatever Trump does, we have no other choice but to fight the enemy," he said. Many Ukrainians fear Trump will force them to give up land occupied by
Russia in exchange for ending the war. Vice President-elect JD Vance has promoted that idea, which is unpopular in Ukraine. In Kyiv, 53-year-old
Oksana Tsupii, who works in trade, says Ukrainians have already sacrificed so much to win back their territory. "It's difficult to look at the graves of our boys who have been
killed, to think of all our cities Russia wiped off the face of the Earth," Tsupii says. "But we are so small in this world of politics, and unfortunately, our lives
are worth nothing." Solomiya Khoma of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a think tank in Kyiv, says the U.S. remains Ukraine's best chance at ending the
war on its best terms. Other peace proposals from countries like China or Brazil "will lead to a temporary cessation of war, but not to the achievement of a lasting peace."
Ukraine's fight for survival became highly politicized last year, when congressional Republicans who support Trump blocked a $61 billion military
aid package for several months, leaving Ukrainian soldiers short on weapons and ammunition on the front line, before the
legislation eventually passed in April. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainian lawmakers and business leaders have reached out to Senate and
congressional Republicans for bipartisan support.

ICC can’t solve Ukraine

Servettaz 24 [Elena Servettaz, journalist on Russian politics and graduate of the French Press Institute and Moscow
State University 5-1-2024, "Putin’s one-way ticket to The Hague: international law experts, judges, and diplomats on a
hypothetical trial of the Russian dictator", https://theins.ru/en/politics/271233]
Vladimir Putin cannot evade trial before an international tribunal because the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has already opened an investigation into war
crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine by the Russian army. Putin is certainly liable to be found responsible for these crimes. Of course, the most important
crime he could be charged with is the
crime of aggression [a crime committed by a state or individuals in an armed conflict against a sovereign state]. This is a
crime that the ICC cannot try because Russia has not signed the Rome Statute, which sets out the definition of this crime. So the
international community would have to set up a special tribunal for Ukraine. Putin is certainly a war criminal. I see analogies with Slobodan
Milosevic [the former president of Serbia who was put on trial at the ICC for failing to prevent genocide in Bosnia]. When Putin calls Ukrainians terrorists while boasting about
fighting terrorism himself, this is exactly the same terminology used by Milosevic in the 1990s. Many
conditions would have to be met [for Putin to be
brought to justice]. First of all, there would have to be peace. The war has to end, but justice can move forward in parallel with a peace process.
Justice itself can also promote peace. Take what happened in the former Yugoslavia with Milosevic: he was still president when the peace talks were happening [in early 1999 in
Rambouillet, France]. But he wasn’t there. Why not? Because he knew that he was under international investigation and that there could be an arrest warrant out against him.
He didn’t know if there was one or not, but he knew the risk was there. So it was clear that the investigation against Milosevic facilitated talks for a peace agreement. Can we
use the term ‘genocide’ to describe the killing of Ukrainians by the Russian army? There is a very precise definition of the word ‘genocide.’ International law is very specific
about this: for genocide, you have to show intent and will. And it is very complex to investigate. I wouldn’t use these terms for the war in Ukraine. By contrast, the crime of
aggression has already been proven and doesn’t require any evidence beyond what we already have. This is a crime for which Putin is responsible. In his speeches, he
admitted that he is the commander-in-chief of the Russian army and that it was he who led the aggression against Ukraine. The Ukrainian government’s cooperation with the
international judiciary facilitates any investigation of war crimes committed in Ukraine. In the former Yugoslavia, we received zero cooperation from the country’s authorities,
which made it very difficult to gather evidence. Civilians are the ones who have suffered the most in this war. You can see that by the number of mass graves. This is something
unimaginable. And it’s going to be difficult to get them out. You have to do examinations, autopsies, and DNA analysis, and determine whether they were civilians or the military.
Many of these victims were buried with their identity cards, and that of course makes it easier to identify them. If you do a serious investigation, there will be no doubt left about
who the perpetrator is. First of all, the Ukrainian prosecutor will take over the investigation. A Ukrainian court has already convicted a Russian soldier, but of course, this is only
a first step. The ICC should be able to investigate quickly. The best solution would have been to set up a specific tribunal for crimes
committed in Ukraine. But this sort of thing is difficult to obtain because of Russia’s right of veto in the UN Security Council.
Putin does not have diplomatic immunity for international war crimes and crimes against humanity under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, but what is
needed at this point is an independent international tribunal for the crime of aggression, as that crime is not prosecutable
under the existing legal frameworks. That is where Putin has immunity. One could draw parallels with Bashar al-Assad. In both the cases
of Assad and Putin, the international community indulged in a culture of criminality and impunity. For example, the international
community did not intervene when Russia assaulted Chechnya, invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea, and bombed Syria. Putin
might well have thought that if the international community did nothing at each of these points of assault, then why should it
care if Russia invades Ukraine? Ukraine, in Putin’s thinking, was not an independent state in any case; it had to be “de-Nazified” and was part of Russia. In fact,
Russia is in standing breach of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in three areas: first, in its direct and public incitement to genocide, a
standing breach of the Convention, whether or not acts of genocide follow, as the Supreme Court of Canada has declared; second, that genocidal intent may be inferred from
Russia’s planning and execution of mass atrocity crimes; and third, that the crime of aggression, the direct and public incitement to genocide, and the condition of mass atrocity
crimes, have created a risk of genocide, and so state parties to the Genocide Convention are therefore under an obligation to prevent and protect the potential victims. It is a
stand-alone obligation that does not await the actual commission of genocide itself. In an ideal world, we would be securing justice for victims and accountability for the violators.
In our world, there are several initiatives that we are pursuing and others that need to be pursued. These include the International Court of Justice initiative, which, in a
provisional judgment, has called on Russia to cease and desist from its acts of aggression and to withdraw from Ukraine; second, ongoing investigations for prospective
prosecution at the ICC; third, prosecutions under the principle of universal jurisdiction; fourth, the ongoing prosecutions by Ukraine itself; and finally, the establishment of an
independent tribunal for the prosecution of the crime of aggression, which is not now under the jurisdiction of any of the existing approaches. History teaches us that there’s
a time of conflict, then a time of peace-making, and finally, a time for justice. As we witness the atrocities in Ukraine, as blood is still flowing, we
all feel a need for justice — it’s hard to accept our own powerlessness to stop the crimes. But we have to face the facts: now is not yet the time for
justice. The moment for the law will certainly come, but when? And in which court? The ICC has the most universal jurisdiction. But countries whose authorities
risk being pursued by the ICC have not adopted its Rome Statute, which created the Court. Russia is not party to the Rome
Statute — nor, by the way, is the United States — so it’s hard to imagine that Moscow would now willingly accept a special tribunal, a new
Nuremberg Trials. Russia is no more likely to recognize the legitimacy of a “21st-century Nuremberg” than that of the ICC. In the history of humanity,
the Nuremberg Trials represent immense progress, but the legitimacy of a court must be recognized by everyone — both victims and
accused. Since Nuremberg, international justice has made significant advances in guaranteeing a fair trial and, importantly, curbing the impression that victors impose the
verdicts. Of course, the question of the legitimacy of these trials came up. And it did again much later, notably in France during the trial of Klaus Barbie [head of the Gestapo in
Lyon, Barbie was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison in 1987]. Contesting the legitimacy of judges can be a line of defense, but it lacks honor or
effectiveness. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Nazi defendants had little choice. Today, the legitimacy of a special tribunal would be bitterly
debated. There’s also the issue of Russia’s veto power in the UN Security Council, where it would be supported by China.
Any UN initiative would face that obstacle. The idea of justice in the near future is obviously appealing, but is it likely or realistic? What seems certain to me is
that Ukraine has legitimate grounds to try these crimes, and international law allows it. Since the victims are primarily Ukrainian, the country’s courts indisputably have
jurisdiction. Ideally, Ukrainian courts would act with the assistance of the UN and maybe the technical support of the ICC. Ideally, if a case can’t be referred to the ICC, an ad
hoc tribunal would be established, as has been proposed. It would have clear benefits legally but also for history. Ultimately, I think Ukrainian courts are best placed to try the
crimes: they have the information and the names, they know the language, they have a good grasp of the facts, the victims are local — it all happened on their soil — and,
above all, they have perfectly integrated the requirements of a fair trial. Their legitimacy is indisputable. If Ukraine issues an international arrest warrant, the person in question
will no longer be able to travel beyond Russia’s borders. There’s another option that might seem unimaginable but could become a reality: the Russian justice system. At some
point, the people who committed these crimes will have to answer not only to Ukrainian courts, but also to Russian ones, which have jurisdiction too. This presupposes, of
course, a regime change in Russia. Everything I’ve seen and heard throughout more than 100 missions around the world leads me to believe that even the most opaque and
closed regimes contain fracture lines, which are as deep as they are hard to detect. There are obviously people in the Kremlin who don’t agree with Putin. We’ve seen the
unbelievably courageous reactions among a segment of Russian society — and the bravery of journalists who are starting to express themselves. A great many people have
been affected directly or indirectly by the war. At some point, they will break their silence. In the current context, there’s talk of bringing Vladimir Putin to justice.
Since he’s the head of state, he should be the target of any proceedings. He has decision-making power, so he’s seen as having overall responsibility for what’s happening.
However, it’s a bit of a fantasy. The ICC statute lays down that there is no immunity for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The states that have
ratified the Rome Statute have thus agreed to waive this customary-law immunity for their highest authorities. The ICC can only prosecute the heads of state
or government or the foreign ministers of countries that are party to the Rome Statute. The question of whether immunities also apply to the heads of non-
party states when the UN Security Council refers a situation to the ICC remains controversial. The only case that has occurred so far is that of Sudan, with the indictment against
the then-president Omar al-Bashir. Importantly, the Security Council resolution didn’t target an individual person, but rather all the acts committed in Darfur. The Security Council
didn’t mention specific people and said nothing about immunities. So can immunities be considered to apply, or not? The question will always remain open with regard to Darfur,
as al-Bashir lost power before being tried. As soon as someone is no longer head of state, head of government, or foreign minister, they can be brought to trial, including for acts
committed while in office. So the only way of prosecuting Putin today, or for example [Russian Foreign Minister] Sergei Lavrov, would be if they
ceased to hold office. What are the chances of Putin being brought to justice in the near future? For years people said about [former Serbian and Yugoslav
president] Slobodan Milosevic: “It’s impossible, you’ll never get him.” But one day he lost power, he was arrested, he was transferred to the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and he was tried. So it’s possible. It’s important here to adopt the point of view of a criminal lawyer and investigator and not a
political ‘I want to try Putin’ approach. Because if we focus on Putin, what do we do next? What are we accusing him of, in terms of his criminal responsibility, rather than for his
political or moral responsibility? He has never been on the battlefield himself, shooting civilians, raping and looting, or who knows what else. You may say that Hitler never
operated a gas chamber himself. But there is a nuance: Hitler committed suicide and so escaped any proceedings. This raises the whole question about leaders, who bear
different kinds of criminal responsibility from the direct perpetrators. A certain number of elements have to be proven before leaders can be incriminated and, if applicable,
convicted. But just as it’s questionable to try only the perpetrators while letting the leaders off the hook, prosecuting only the leaders without dealing with the perpetrators is also
problematic. Determining the actual facts on the ground will be crucial. The missile that fell on a school, a maternity ward, a hospital, killed civilians and caused documentable
damage — you have to determine where it came from. You can then establish who launched it, and once you’ve identified the unit responsible, you’ll be able to identify the chain
of command above it and see how far back you can go to engage the possible criminal responsibility of the superior. A lot will depend on the level of evidence that can be
collected. Crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide are extremely complex offenses. Clearly, they cause a large number of victims, but it’s easy to forget that they are
the result of a large number of acts committed by a large number of people — hence the difficulty of establishing the individual criminal responsibility of each potential
perpetrator in connection with each act and victim. To charge someone with genocide, there must be proof of intent to destroy all or part of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious
group as such. If this is not the case, there is no genocide, no matter how many people die. Ukraine has been calling for the creation of a special court to try Russian crimes and
the people responsible for the war for more than a year. Personally, I’m not in favor of this. Ukraine referred the case to the ICC already back in 2014, recognizing its jurisdiction,
and it was only much more recently that it called for a new body to be created. When the ICC was established, the goal was to change tack and avoid setting up ad hoc courts
for a particular conflict after the event, as this would undermine the legitimacy of the ICC. What’s more, I don’t see how, legally speaking, we could create a new body to judge
acts committed in Ukraine by Russian soldiers or agents without Russia’s consent. It is a question of sovereignty. This seems to me to be a wrong good idea that will complicate
matters further. We already have the primary jurisdiction of the very active Ukrainian national courts, the universal jurisdiction of any other country, the international jurisdiction of
the ICC, a number of other investigative bodies set up by third states in cooperation with the Ukrainian authorities, and European bodies such as Eurojust, which are also taking
action. Adding yet another player could lead to total confusion. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry for Ukraine set up by the UN Human Rights Council
released its first report very recently, and it’s a very strong indictment of Russia’s war crimes. They have been able to catalog a lot of such crimes, including the use of explosive
weapons in populated areas, targeting around schools and hospitals, endangerment of civilians, and a whole list of violations of personal integrity — for example, summary
executions, unlawful confinement, torture, and wounding of captive persons, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and of course, all the deportations and Russia’s renowned
“filtration” operations. Normally, all of the underlying information can be shared with prosecutorial authorities around the world. This would include national-level prosecutors, for
example, in Ukraine. But also there are prosecutors elsewhere in Europe, many of whom have opened their own investigations into the situation in Ukraine with an eye to
potentially bringing war crimes cases should Russian defendants come within their jurisdictional reach. All of this information can be shared with the International Criminal Court,
which has opened an investigation into the situation in Ukraine. So the Commission of Inquiry is one part of a larger effort around the world. It is remarkable that Ukraine could
keep its war crimes unit fully operational. As soon as there are incidents around the country and there are potential war crimes, they are able to send a team of both national and
international experts to the field to start immediately collecting evidence. Ukraine has also issued a few indictments already and conducted trials in their domestic courts. While
Ukraine has some war prisoners in custody, many of the architects of this campaign of war crimes are located in Russia. We may have to wait for some time until these
perpetrators begin leaving the safety of Moscow. It is very important to emphasize that the laws of war and the prohibitions against war crimes apply equally to the aggressor
state and to the victim state. When it comes to this conflict in particular, that is where this equivalence ends. The data and information related to Russia’s war crimes are vastly
larger than allegations against the Ukrainian forces. We also see huge disparities between the reaction of the two states. Russia reacts to these claims and the allegations
against it with denials and lies, whereas Ukraine has acknowledged that its forces have committed some abuses and has promised to investigate them. You would expect to see
a high degree of violence and destruction in any war, even if it is fought in strict compliance with international law. But what we saw in areas from which Russian troops retreated
was violence of a different order. That was interpersonal, gruesome violence — we saw bodies of people killed execution-style, with their hands tied behind their backs. There
were credible reports of sexual violence against women and girls, and men and boys. So this is not just the typical sort of destruction you would expect from war, but really
violent interpersonal abuses. And that is extremely difficult to see and hear.

AT: ICC Credibility

Material interests outweigh ICC hypocrisy – countries care whether a country is reliable now,
not past behavior or rhetoric
Polansky 24 [David Polansky, research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy with a Ph.D. in political
science from the University of Toronto, 6-21-2024, "Hypocrisy Is Not a Real Problem in World Politics", War on the Rocks,
https://warontherocks.com/2024/06/hypocrisy-is-not-a-real-problem-in-world-politics/]
Somewhat amusingly, other powers like China have begun to take this same line. Of course, this is hardly new — such accusations were a staple of Soviet rhetoric during the
Cold War. Nor is the United States a unique target, historically speaking. The British were notorious for what George Orwell called their “world-famed hypocrisy,” particularly
where their empire was concerned. A recurring theme of these charges is not just that hypocrisy is undesirable on its own terms, but that to engage in it is
somehow bad or dangerous to a state’s international position. This is a claim so often assumed that it has by now become an article of
faith. Whether it has been proven is another question.
Almost everyone has had personal experience with hypocrisy — both displaying and observing it — but it appears to be especially acute in the domain of international politics. In
a much-cited work, Stephen Krasner described the sovereign state system itself as one of “organized hypocrisy,” meaning that it rests upon certain fictions of authority and
control that fall short of the reality. In her famous work, Ordinary Vices, political theorist Judith Shklar takes up the theme of hypocrisy at some length, noting: No occasion
reveals the incoherence of our public values more than war… That is why war is psychologically and morally so revealing, as all readers of Thucydides know. In our age it is
also the occasion on which charges of hypocrisy may be exchanged with unmatched virulence. Clearly, there is something here, but why and how does it matter? First, it must
be said that pointing out hypocrisy is easy — especially when it involves the other guy. As Shklar also remarks, “It is easier to dispose of an opponent’s character by exposing
his hypocrisy than to show his political convictions are wrong.” There’s a reason, after all, that tu quoque is considered a fallacy. This rhetorical habit has extended itself into the
geopolitical sphere, where identifying instances of hypocrisy on the part of foreign governments, however trivial, has become a kind of parlor game for public commentators —
particularly where they already bear some antipathy toward the state or leader in question. Beyond its rhetorical value, however, accusations of hypocrisy do seem to derive
from certain intuitions about justice and injustice — much the same way we find ourselves offended by instances of hypocrisy in daily life. Hedley Bull referred to this logic as the
“domestic analogy,” in which states in the international system are akin to individuals in society. The trouble here is that in liberal democracies we take for granted the basic
equality of persons. That concept of equality forms the bedrock principle of rule of law, ensuring that the poorest and weakest do not lose their due protections and the
wealthiest and strongest do not assert undue prerogatives. But states are simply very different entities. Just compare the global interests and obligations of the United States
with those of, say, Belgium. Something similar goes for sanctioning behavior on the part of our allies that we would be loath to countenance among enemies or rivals. This sort
of unequal treatment under the law is at best corrupt and nepotistic and at worst a miscarriage of justice when practiced at home — for it flouts the rule of law that we mutually
rely upon. But in the world of international politics, states do have larger interests and goals that they can pursue in concert with allied countries, and it
hardly serves them to spite those interests for the sake of some abstract notion of equality among states — particularly when it is
doubtful that rival states enjoy any commitment to that principle in the first place. (This of course says nothing about the wisdom of any particular policy,
or even the wisdom of maintaining an allied or client relationship with a given country at all, but that has no bearing on the underlying logic here.) Another problem with
attributing such significance to hypocrisy is that it posits a kind of imaginary audience for one’s actions comprised of members who are
not themselves also actors on the international stage. If there is such an audience, who might it be? Many argue that the answer is the countries that
comprise the so-called “Global South.” Trita Parsi and Branko Marcetic provide an exhaustive rundown of instances in which the perceived hypocrisy of the United States
is mooted as a reason to abstain from joining its support of Ukraine’s defense against Russia. But beyond highly public rhetoric, there is little evidence
that anger over U.S. hypocrisy was a decisive factor in their calculations, or why it would override any consideration of
material interests at stake. One is left pondering the rather implausible counterfactual of a perfectly sincere great power whose commitment to principle commands
loyalty among distant states irrespective of their own several interests. Indeed, there is a kind of condescension at work in these discussions, as though the countries of the
Global South were not capable of operating from the logic of interests in their own right. And at a minimum, it seems to presuppose that such countries are not themselves
capable of displaying hypocrisy. After all, the “non-aligned nations” during the Cold War (many of which now comprise the Global South) were particular offenders — for
example, decrying the invasion of Egypt by the British-French-Israeli coalition but remaining virtually silent about the Soviet Union’s concurrent invasion of Hungary. Meanwhile,
there are still many who suppose that international organizations might offer an alternative to the dirty business of geopolitics. This is a long-standing liberal position, which holds
that formal institutions, with their embedded norms of cooperation, can replace the calculations of power politics with more pacific modes of managing global security. This view,
however, overlooks how such institutions are hardly immune to the interplay of power and interest. Just consider the list of members of the U.N. Human Rights Council over the
years, which is long and distinguished primarily by irony. Perhaps the most well-known attempt to justify hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy was Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s landmark
essay, “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” which was widely viewed as establishing much of the logic of policymaking under the subsequent Reagan administrations, in which
the United States would favor friendly (typically anti-communist) non-democracies over unfriendly ones. Kirkpatrick in fact justified these policies by emphasizing their continuity
with conventional practice: Inconsistencies are a familiar part of politics in human society. Usually, however, governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with
the national interest. What makes the inconsistencies of the Carter administration noteworthy are, first, the administration’s moralism, which renders it especially vulnerable to
charges of hypocrisy; and, second, the administration’s predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States. The administration’s
conception of national interest borders on doublethink: it finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as
beneficial to America’s “true interests.” In other words, some form of inconsistency with respect to principles was built in to geopolitics, and Kirkpatrick was arguing that if the
United States was going to display inconsistency anyway, they might as well do so in ways that, as Polemarchus put it in The Republic, benefits friends and harms enemies.
Now it must be said that much of America’s support during that period both for right-wing anti-communist insurgents and for authoritarian regimes (El Salvador comes to mind)
looks highly questionable in retrospect. But here too, the central problem wasn’t hypocrisy per se, but that the United States provided diplomatic and material aid to
some very nasty people, thus making itself complicit in their crimes without deriving much obvious benefit in many cases. The central problem then was strategic miscalculation:
overestimating both the dynamism of Soviet-backed communism and the geostrategic importance of regions like Central America. Now, it may be that hypocrisy is just a
particular problem for great powers — especially the great power. Martha Finnemore makes just this point in a thoughtful article on the matter. She readily accepts that
hypocrisy “pervades international politics.” But while this may not be a problem in itself, she argues that it may be a specific problem for a unipolar or hegemonic power that
relies upon remaining legitimate in the eyes of other states to maintain its status. Hence the judicious application of hypocrisy can be useful, but when unrestrained, it
“undermines respect and deference for the unipole and for the values on which it has legitimized its power.”
This claim, like our general sense that hypocrisy matters, is intuitively plausible, but Finnemore does not actually demonstrate what the costs are for hypocritical behavior or how
these are traced to perceptions of hypocrisy by other states. Moreover, legitimacy is a notoriously elusive concept. It is assumed, it seems, that hypocrisy must
ultimately blow back on the one who displays it — e.g., America’s global authority is somehow irreparably damaged in the eyes of those who can plainly see
the distance between its rhetoric on behalf of the liberal international order and its actions. It is never quite clear, however, how this cashes out. In this way,
hypocrisy is not unlike that other bugbear of international politics: credibility. The loss of credibility is intuitively thought dangerous to a nation’s security. The operating
assumption here is that a given state’s past behavior may invite future threats. But as Daryl Press has persuasively argued, states are far more likely to base
their decisions on a combination of their own interests and their assessment of their adversaries’ material capabilities, than
on an evaluation of past actions. Thus, whatever impact past hypocrisy may have on a given state’s credibility, it likely matters
less than people presume for present and future dealings with other countries. Now, it should be noted that Press’ argument is not above
criticism, both because states are not purely rational utility maximizers and because, in the absence of certain knowledge of others’ intentions, states are bound to at least
consider their past actions in determining the best policy. But here is the larger problem: As with credibility, there is that same implicit analogy to
interpersonal relations. We would, after all, not put our trust in someone who repeatedly failed to honor their word, nor would we much like someone who displayed
blatant hypocrisy in their day-to-day behavior. But arguments about the risks of hypocrisy in world politics should ultimately issue in material conclusions. That is to say, the
social externalities of being viewed as a hypocritical actor ought to eventually involve material costs to a state’s economic and security interests — much in the way that a private
individual with a reputation for hypocrisy might lose out on job promotions or business opportunities. The causal relationship between a state’s hypocrisy and material damage to
its international position has been more assumed than argued. However plausible, it has not really been demonstrated in any empirical or quantifiable way (and it is striking how
many of the relevant discussions rely upon predictive rather than retrodictive arguments). In the absence of a clear understanding of those material costs, observers tend to
fall back on what amount to rhetorical critiques. To take a recent example, Secretary of State Tony Blinken claimed in an interview, “Our purpose is not to contain
China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to.” This led to inevitable criticism by members of the smart set, to
the effect that the United States has always made its own rules, and that it was historically absurd to equate supremacy with international rule of law. This is to treat global
politics like an academic seminar, in which students are exposed for their shaky knowledge. Blinken, however, is not a student but a diplomat making a public statement. What
really matters is whether putting it this way is useful or not. Of course, it might not be. But one likely can’t go around saying bluntly that U.S. policy is to hold China down at all
costs. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine the critics in this instance preferring such a bald statement of primacy. To return then to the examples raised at the outset, was it
hypocritical of Washington to lend rhetorical support for the International Criminal Court when they prosecuted Slobodan
Milošević or issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, but then criticize it for doing the same thing with Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant?
Perhaps. But it was also simply a case of the United States treating an institution as useful when directed against perceived enemies and not useful when directed against allies.
Of course, one can argue that an international institution like the International Criminal Court should simply not be allowed to aggrandize itself against leaders of sovereign
states lest it grow too powerful altogether, or that the United States shouldn’t be providing diplomatic cover to Israel’s political and military leaders in the first place, but in either
instance the hypocrisy involved is a comparatively trivial matter. All of this seems to presuppose that other states would be
satisfied with the same (to them, unjust) outcomes provided that the United States or other powers were less hypocritical about it.
But we might remember that hypocrisy is hardly the worst of vices, at least when compared with cruelty. Otherwise, it assumes that what states really
care about is fairness as such. That is, they are offended by the failure of the United States to be impartial rather than by its failure to be partial in their favor. Needless
to say, both of these are dubious propositions. Arguably, the real danger is that the practice of resorting to hypocritical rhetoric produces sloppy thinking and poor mental habits
where geopolitics is concerned. In an essay in Esquire, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the
same time, and still retain the ability to function.” And while America has unquestionably benefited from public servants who were also first-rate minds, from John Quincy Adams
to George Kennan to William Odom, it is not really feasible or prudent to rely exclusively on such figures. The execution of a global foreign policy relies upon a vast bureaucratic
network of diplomats, foreign service officers, analysts, and so on. On the one hand, the absence of strategic clarity as expressed in public statements at the highest level
hampers their ability to perform. On the other, that same lack of clarity has a tendency to filter back up through higher channels resulting in a general confusion of purpose.
Though this is another way of saying that the problem isn’t hypocrisy at all but sincerity. That the continued reliance on rhetoric concerning the “rules-based international order”
had the result of changing its users’ perception of reality, Sapir-Whorf style, in ways that proved damaging to their foreign policy judgments. Beyond this, there is another way
that hypocrisy might matter, but it is again domestic. For, it may be that the normalization of deeply hypocritical behavior is damaging to the social and political cohesion that is
necessary for any society to function. The question is not whether a given state is straightforward in all its dealings with other states — the question is whether its own people
continue to believe in their country and are prepared to sacrifice for it. If by hypocrisy, we mean a kind of pure expediency in our dealings with others, with little adherence to
steadfast principles, one can see how this is acidic to the ordinary bonds of loyalty and belief that hold a nation together through good and ill fortune. The political theorist Laurie
Johnson explains: Thucydides’ History teaches that as the Athenians came to believe and act on their [cynical] theory of human nature and state action, their legitimacy declined
among their allies and empire and their domestic political order became corrupt and disintegrated amid politicians who each followed his own self-interest. This may be an
extreme case, but something like this is a legitimate concern for (particularly democratic) governments that are obliged to explain their reasoning to their own publics, who might
in turn believe that there have to be limits to pragmatism. Ultimately, however, the consistency or hypocrisy of a given country’s (including America’s)
international behavior is really a second-order problem, and focusing on it functions as a proxy for a more substantive issue, be it avoidable evils or ill-
advised policy choices. And one suspects that so many dwell on it because it is easier than addressing the first-order questions: What are our interests here, if any, and what
should we do about them? Otherwise, even where hypocrisy appears to be the main problem, there is an imprecision in how we discuss
it: The exact nature of the harm it does — whether to ourselves or others — remains vague. And in such discussions, it almost invariably gets
caught up with other imprecise terms like “trust” and “credibility,” which are of similarly dubious significance in the arena of international politics.
Indeed, what almost always matters when it comes to a policy that was pursued in a manner deemed hypocritical by others is whether it ultimately
proved successful. But this, too, is testament to its irrelevance. For, people rarely highlight the hypocrisy of successful policies. The fact that it
succeeded surely suggests it was at least prima facie advisable. Conversely, its failure and associated costs are surely more important than the
fact that hypocrisy was somehow involved. In the end, though primacy or superiority accounts for much behavior we perceive as hypocritical, it is by no means
the cause of it — the cause being rather the inevitable diversity of interests across different states, and the equally inevitable disagreement about the legitimacy of those
interests. That these varied and not-infrequently opposed interests do not lead to the perpetual war of all against all is frequently attributed to the establishment of international
law and international institutions. But it has far more to do with the credible authority of a hegemonic power in conjunction with the tools of diplomacy and statecraft, both of
which entail in no small part — yes, hypocrisy.
Organizational hypocrisy isn’t immoral - organizations lack individualizable blame and unitary
thought
Lipson 6 [Michael Lipson, researcher at the Department of Political Science at Concordia University, 2006, “Dilemmas
of Global Governance: Organized Hypocrisy and International Organization,” Canadian Political Science Association,
https://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2006/Lipson.pdf]
Krasner’s rulers are rational, unitary actors, relatively autonomous from societal influences and pursuing exogenously given preferences (to remain in power and promote the
interests of the constituencies that maintain their position). They are closed-rational systems in organization theory’s terms, clearly bounded and distinct from their 14
environments, with goals set exogenously from their environments.16 In fact, although they act through states, Krasner’s individual rulers—the “ontological givens” of his
analysis and the actors exhibiting organized hypocrisy—are not themselves organizations. Thus, organized hypocrisy as portrayed by Krasner is largely devoid of organizations.

In Brunsson’s formulation, organized hypocrisy is fundamentally about organizations. Organizations, not rulers, face competing logics of
consequences and action. These organizations, in turn, are not unitary actors but collectivities constituted and endowed with
social agency by their social environments (Meyer and Jepperson, 2000). Thus, Brunsson’s perspective falls within the “open systems” approach to
organization theory, which regards organizations as possessing porous boundaries, and as constituted by and reproduced through
their interactions with their environment (Katz and Kahn, 1966; Ansell and Weber, 1999; Scott, 2003). In such organizations, organized hypocrisy
often arises unintentionally as a byproduct of uncoordinated responses to conflicting environmental pressures by loosely
coupled or decoupled internal organizational elements.17 Thus, the negative moral connotation usually attached to hypocrisy
does not apply in this understanding of organized hypocrisy. Condemnations of hypocrisy, in the normal sense of the term, assume that the
hypocrite is a coherent, unitary actor. The moral stigma attached to hypocrisy flows from this assumption. Just as it makes
little sense to speak of an individual afflicted with schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder (i.e., multiple personalities)
as hypocritical, the censure associated with the term is inappropriate to consideration of organized hypocrisy in open
systems organizations. Brunsson introduces two significant innovations. First, he offers a distinction between decoupling of divergent internal aspects of an
organization, which he terms “the organization of hypocrisy,” and decoupling of inconsistent organizational outputs—for which he reserves the term “organized hypocrisy.”18
Second, he revises the conventional understanding of decoupling by interpreting organized hypocrisy in terms of an inverse, rather than absent, causal relationship between
rhetoric and action.19 The concept of “the organization of hypocrisy” (OOH) builds on Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) classic argument that organizations in institutionalized
environments reflect their organizational environments in their internal structure. In environments characterized by contradictory
imperatives, these contradictions will be incorporated into organizations’ internal structures. Brunsson refers to such organizations—
those operating in institutional environments characterized by conflicting values and preferences—as “political” (as opposed to action) organizations.20 If a
political organization’s structures and processes for responding to these pressures are decoupled, they can each independently respond to their
corresponding external demands, and—because they are 16 decoupled—not be significantly affected by the inconsistency between them. Thus, the
inconsistent pressures of the organization’s environment are “reflected in organizational structures, processes, and
ideologies,” within the organization, and “these incorporated inconsistencies define the ‘organization of hypocrisy.’”21 Because the inconsistencies stem from the
organizational environment, OOH is a property of open systems. Organized hypocrisy, as opposed to OOH, refers to inconsistencies between organizational
outputs. Brunsson identifies three fundamental types of organizational output–talk, decisions, and action.22 In organized hypocrisy, talk and decisions are inconsistent with
action. But they are not decoupled. Rather, as Brunsson (2003: 205- 206) explains: In the model of [organized] hypocrisy talk, decisions and actions are still causally related, but
the causality is the reverse: talk or decisions in one direction decrease the likelihood of corresponding actions, and actions in one direction decrease the likelihood of
corresponding talk and decisions. The model of [organized] hypocrisy implies that talk, decisions and actions are “coupled” rather than “de- coupled” or “loosely coupled,” but
they are coupled in a way other than usually assumed.

Perceptions of western hypocrisy are inevitable

Lehne 24 [Stefan Lehne, Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe, 9-18-2024, "The Rules-Based Order vs. the Defense
of Democracy", Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/09/rules-based-order-vs-the-defense-of-democracy?lang=en]
The way the rules-based order relates to public international law is indeed somewhat unclear. There is no generally accepted definition of the concept. European governments
and the EU often use the term as essentially synonymous with international law and frequently combine the two concepts in the same sentence or paragraph. The U.S.
understanding of the rules-based order appears to be broader, encompassing not only international law but also nonbinding norms and standards, potentially including some
that are not universally accepted. In statements about the rules-based order, U.S. politicians sometimes evoke broad values, such as respect for sovereignty, self-determination,
or human rights, rather than concrete legal norms. Another
problem that limits the attractiveness of the concept for countries in the Global
South is the West’s severely damaged reputation. The legacy of the colonial period remains a heavy burden, but it is now
combined with accusations of double standards and hypocrisy. For example, the initial reluctance of Western governments to
share COVID-19 vaccines triggered a wave of criticism in Africa. Southern governments also contrast the West’s engagement for
Ukraine with its neglect of conflicts and challenges in the South. Most recently, Western support for Israel in the Gaza war has further
sharpened this resentment. The problem is compounded by persistent economic inequality. From a Southern point of view, Western
states continue to impose unfavorable trade and investment rules on the South while turning increasingly to protectionist
strategies. Against this background, it is unsurprising that Western sermonizing about the rules-based order is often perceived as an
attempt to shore up an inequitable global status quo based on rules that are shaped by the U.S.-led West and serve to protect its
interests and power. And of course, China and Russia are working hard to reinforce this perception. Enhancing the Appeal of the Rules-Based Order

Ilaw fails – norms are so widely broken that its impossible to enforce. Domestic human rights
measures are comparably better
Brunk 17 [Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk, Helen Strong Curry Professor of International Law at Vanderbilt Law School, 4-10-
2017, "Does International Law Have a “Broken Windows” Problem?", Default,
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/does-international-law-have-broken-windows-problem]
Many norms of international law, especially international human rights law, are widely violated. The international legal system as a
whole may suffer as result. International human rights law has changed international law. The two primary sources of international legal obligations—treaties and
custom—have become more expansive and looser so as to bring more human rights norms into the ambit of international law, despite wide-spread non-
compliance with those norms. In one sense, the success of the effort is clear: international law now regulates a vast array of human-rights-related conduct. Whether
the expansion is an effective way to promote human rights is widely-debated. The broader, unacknowledged problem, however, is the potential effect of the expansion on
international law as a whole, as I discuss in detail here. Today, international law includes a broad range of human rights norms which are
routinely violated, from the U.N. reporting requirements to gross violations of human dignity. Wide-spread violations of some
legal norms may, in turn, make it harder to enforce others. As a (very) imperfect analogy, consider the “broken windows” theory of crime
prevention: widespread violations of human rights law may be a symbol of unaccountability, a signal that no one cares about
violations of international law and that no one is in charge. Accountability is a fundamental concern of public international law because the system lacks a
centralized enforcement mechanism. Whatever the merits of the “broken windows” argument in the context of domestic law enforcement, behavior which signals a
lack of accountability may be especially damaging to international law writ large. Theoretical literature on compliance with international law
suggests that non-compliance in some areas makes other norms of international law harder to enforce. Work on rational choice posits, for
example, that states comply with international law in part to protect their reputations. If states as a whole tend to expect non-compliance from each
other, the costs of entering into treaties or developing norms of customary international law become higher for all states. A
baseline reputation of non-compliance among states generally harms interstate cooperation because it means that states will
have to do more in a treaty agreement to generate trustworthy commitments (such as monitoring non-compliance), and because it makes
some agreements not worth the time or effort. To be sure, these effects depend upon states having reputations for compliance which are not entirely issue-
specific or compartmentalized, a plausible assumption for reasons explained here (pages 103-06). Other theories of compliance with international law, including constructivism
and organizational sociology, also suggest that widespread non-compliance with human rights will make the rest of international law less
effective. For example, constructivists Jutta Brunnée and Stephen Toope argue that international legal obligations arise from communities of practice which have shared
understandings and which generate norms with specific characteristics of legality. Lack of congruence between a norm and behavior impedes the
development of a community of practice. They reason in the context of torture (page 232) that “a widespread failure to uphold the law as
formally enunciated leads to a sense of hypocrisy which undermines fidelity to law.” Research from domestic law and social psychology,
including the work of Tom Tyler, suggests that widespread lack of faith in government and its ability to solve problems undermines peoples’ sense of their own obligation to
follow the law. If international law does have a problem along these lines, one solution is to more effectively enforce international human rights law: Doing so would not only
benefit human rights, but also international law as whole. Yet creating
a truly effective international human rights enforcement system seems
unlikely. A more complicated possibility is to find ways to promote and protect human rights that do not depend upon binding norms of
international law, including regional human rights courts and tribunals, domestic statutes and constitutions, capacity building
and iterative interactions with review bodies, the enforcement of soft obligations, and so on. Thanks to the successes of the international
human rights movement, there are a wide variety of tools designed to improve global human rights practices. While we have yet to see whether those mechanisms will work if
they are de-coupled from binding international legal commitments, it is clear that we should understand international human rights law as part of a broader international legal
system. The debate around international law and human rights should be re-framed to consider not just potential benefits to human rights but also the potential costs to
international law as a whole.

Too much focus on hypocrisy removes governmental flexibility and causes policy paralysis and
apathy
Spektor 23 [Matias Spektor, professor of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo and a
Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 7-21-2023, "The Upside of Western
Hypocrisy", Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/upside-western-hypocrisy-global-south-america]
Those in the global South who shout against Western hypocrisy should also beware of the risk of being hypocritical themselves. Many critics tend to denounce the West
selectively, criticizing only those instances of Western hypocrisy that hurt their interests directly but keeping quiet whenever it benefits them. India for decades loudly protested
Washington’s refusal to lead a global process to rid the world of nuclear weapons, only to toe the line the minute it secured concessions and signed a civil nuclear agreement
with the United States in 2005. Finally, countries in the global South should recognize that too
much criticism of hypocrisy can endanger international
cooperation by breeding cynicism and political paralysis. Hypocrisy can sometimes be useful. It provides governments a pragmatic
way out in situations when valuable principles are in conflict. Take the case of the Inflation Reduction Act introduced by the Biden
administration. The law provides subsidies for industries to transition to low carbon energy sources and thereby reflects a commitment
to mitigating climate change for the entire planet. But the IRA also violates the norms of free trade that the United States so forcefully applies
to others. Hypocrisy in this case allows the White House to proclaim the value of both protecting the planet and maintaining free
trade, even if the administration is not able to reconcile the two. A LITTLE HYPOCRISY, WELL DONE

AT: Gender-Based Violence

ICC fails at stopping gender-based violence
Godsiff ND [Natasha Godsiff, trainee solicitor at Clifford Chance and Law graduate from the University of Cambridge, No
Date, "The Failure of the International Criminal Court to Prosecute Sexual and Gender-Based Violence", Cambridge
University Law Society,
https://www.culs.org.uk/per-incuriam/the-failure-of-the-international-criminal-court-to-prosecute-sexual-and-gender-based-vio
lence]
Introduction The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC Statute) is a crucial piece of legislation for the advancement of women’s rights in explicitly
recognising and condemning sexual and gender-based violence. It refers to any act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and it is based on gender norms and unequal
power relationships. Sexual and gender-based violence can target any gender, yet women are disproportionately affected. These crimes are fundamentally a form of gender
discrimination, effectively nullifying the rights of females to exercise their human rights. Despite this step forward on paper, the victims
are often left unheard and
lack access to justice in practice. This article will take a women’s-centred analysis of sexual and gender-based violence during armed conflict, tracing the legal
landscape of such crimes and outlining the failures of the ICC in holding States accountable. It will be concluded that reform is necessary to challenge
the deeply ingrained subordination and violence perpetuated against women. Sexual and Gender-Based Violence
Traditionally, rape was dismissed as a “natural and inevitable” aspect of armed conflict. While other abuses, such as murder and torture, have long been denounced as war
crimes, rape has been downplayed as an inevitable consequence of sending men to war. Rape was merely perceived as a crime of “honour”, rather than a breach of law that
necessitated international attention. Recent conflicts, such as the Yugoslav Wars, demonstrate rape being employed as a “weapon of war” in campaigns of genocide. The
inherent gender-specific character of rape - being perpetrated by a man against a woman - has led to the narrow portrayal of these crimes as sexual or personal in nature. The
issue of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict is subsequently depoliticised and results in it being ignored as a war crime. Sexual and gender-based violence is often
dismissed as private, “opportunistic” crimes of rebel soldiers which are not officially sanctioned, subsequently obscuring the role of military and political leaders in the
perpetuation of these crimes. These misconceptions disregard the pervasiveness of sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflict. A recent UN report found that 1,429
incidents of gender-based violence were reported in Democratic Republic of Congo within one 12-month period, with 68% of survivors being children. In Yemen, there has been
a 70% increase in reports of sexual violence, including rape. Yet, the exact prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence is difficult to ascertain, particularly due to
underreporting for fear of intimidation and stigmatisation of survivors. In fact, the UN estimates that in conflict zones, for every rape that is reported, between 10 and 20 rapes
are unreported. The increasing attention paid to sexual and gender-based violence risks isolating the issue from other abuses occurring during armed conflict. The reality,
however, is that sexual violence often occurs in connection with other forms of violence. In many instances, women are raped as men are beaten or forced into hard labour. In
the 1992 case of Jahura Khatu, after her husband was taken by soldiers for forced labour, Khatu and three other women were marched to a nearby military camp where they
were raped repeatedly for twenty-four hours. Once the soldiers are satisfied, women are often murdered or left to die by their attackers. Sexual and gender-based violence has
also been used to displace “undesirable” groups from communities and to seize contested land and other resources. In South Sudan, for example, soldiers raped women and
girls as part of a campaign to drive opponents out of southern Unity State. It is therefore clear that sexual and gender-based violence rarely occurs as an isolated form of abuse,
and will often be utilised to achieve a further military goal. The Failure of the ICC
The end of the 20th century proved to be a turning point where much deserved and long overdue international attention was given to crimes of sexual and gender-based
violence. The ICC Statute has been praised for expressly recognising sexual violence and categorising gender persecution as a crime against humanity. The Statutes of the
International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) included rape as a “crime against humanity”. The 1998 prosecution of Jean-Paul Akayesu
before the ICTR held that rape and sexual violence constituted a form of “genocide”, and, in 2001, the ICTY widened the definition of “slavery” to include sexual slavery. Several
human rights documents, such as the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) General Recommendation No. 19, seek to uphold women’s
rights through equal access to justice under humanitarian norms and international criminal law. Nevertheless, these developments are limited. The international criminal law
engages sexual and gender-based violence not because it is a crime of violence against women, but because it is an assault on the community. The
violation of a
woman’s body is therefore “secondary to the humiliation of the group” and “relegates women to the role of symbolic
embodiments of community”. This construct of sexual and gender-based violence creates a pattern of gender inequality which
perpetuates a gender-biased system of prosecution and accountability in the ICC. In its 15-year history, only eight cases in this
area have reached the trial stage, and only two have led to convictions. In the investigation of crimes, there is a perception that
sexual and gender-based violence is too difficult to investigate, due to victims being unreliable or unlikely to testify. In the
Lubanga case, for example, the need for expediency led the Prosecution to pursue child soldier charges, instead of gender-
based violence charges. The result is the silencing of gender-based narratives of victimisation behind the guise of other war
crimes. Another notable case is the prosecution of Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta in 2014. Despite reasonable grounds to believe that he was
responsible under article 25 of the ICC Statute for rape and other forms of sexual violence, the Prosecutor had no alternative but to withdraw
charges given the refusal for the Kenyan government to cooperate. Similarly, in 2015, the ICC brought charges against Simone
Gbagbo for four counts of crimes against humanity (including rape and other sexual violence) committed in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010 and 2011. After a refusal to
transfer Gbagbo to the ICC, she was granted amnesty by the High Court of Cote d’Ivoire. The strict impunity for crimes during armed conflict leaves many
unanswered questions about the Government’s role in such atrocities and deprives the victims of an opportunity to obtain justice. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that many
victims will never gain access to the justice system in the first place. It is common for victims to express reluctance to report the violence owing to stigma, rejection by their
families and communities, and lack of confidence in the justice system. Survivors often require immediate healthcare and psychological support, but, in many countries, post-
abuse support is unavailable or insufficient. Even where support is available, survivors often do not seek help due to fear of stigma and community pressure, or simply lack of
awareness about services. The limited capacities for investigating sexual and gender-based violence in conflict, in conjunction with the deeply
rooted gender bias against women, can impede the effectiveness and sensitivity of investigative and judicial authorities. The Need for Reform
The prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence has been identified as a key priority for the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet it is increasingly evident that
the current prosecutorial landscape fails to address the ICC’s aims of accountability and deterrence. The ICC must rectify the
flaws and inconsistencies within its approach in order to advance the prosecution of these crimes. These advancements are “critical to the process of empowering
victims, marginalising perpetrators, recognising the severity and gravity of sexual violence, eliminating the historic misunderstanding of rape and sexual violence, and
contributing to the elimination of sexual violence altogether.” The primary consideration must be the needs of the survivors. Victims must have access to justice, protection and
support before, during and after the trial. Measures may include creating specific victim and witness protection units to encourage participation in the trial. The
mechanisms for reporting sexual and gender-based violence must be strengthened, and awareness increased in an endeavour to reduce the
stigmatisation of these crimes. Perpetrators must be charged with the full range of their crimes, instead of side-lining gender-based
violence for easier-to-prove offences. A broader understanding of the political function of rape as a military strategy is necessitated for adequate remedies.
Reparations must be integrated into accountability mechanisms, and States should consider how to support reparations initiatives globally. Crucially, the prevention of future
cases of sexual and gender-based violence requires the advancement of substantive gender equality before, during and after conflict. This includes women’s full and effective
participation in political, economic and social life and ensuring accessible and responsive justice and security institutions. There
has been a “profound
systemic failure to recognise that sexual violence is, at its core, an instrument of the subordination of women.” The only way forward is to promote equality
for women and to ensure that sexual and gender-based crimes are given equal status to other crimes under the ICC Statute.
Conclusion Although the international response to sexual and gender-based violence has improved in recent decades, the limited prosecutorial response of the
ICC fails to stand up to scrutiny. The situation remains inauspicious whilst there is persistent stigma attached to these crimes, a lack
of understanding of the complexity surrounding the motivations of sexual violence, and a reluctance to reform the investigative process to make it more
appropriate for sexual violence cases. The unfortunate consequence for women is that they lack access to justice, their narratives
remain unheard, and they rarely receive reparations for the abuse that they have suffered. The challenges and inconsistencies within the
ICC’s approach must be effectively addressed to meet the increasing demand for accountability for such crimes, and to promote gender equality under norms of humanitarian
and international criminal law.

ICC involvement causes more sexual violence

Broache and Kore 23 [M. P. Broache, researcher at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Juhi
Kore, researcher at University of Oxford, 1-31-2023, "Can the International Criminal Court prevent sexual violence in
armed conflict?", Taylor & Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14754835.2022.2150517#d1e1165
Results and discussion The models reported in Table 2 suggest that the ICC jurisdiction, sexual violence cases, and global actions do not prevent sexual
violence by government forces in intrastate conflicts, and that general ICC interventions may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate,
sexual violence by government forces. Models 1–2 and 4–6 indicate statistically insignificant relationships between the respective ICC
variable and sexual violence. Accordingly, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the relevant ICC variable in each model—Rome Statute membership (Model 1);
ICC jurisdiction (Model 2); sexual violence cases (Model 4); and global actions, whether general (Model 5) or focused on sexual violence (Model 6)—had no effect on sexual
violence. To illustrate this dynamic, Figure 1 compares the predicted probabilities for each category of sexual violence prevalence for country-years under the Rome Statute
versus country-years not under the statute, based on Model 1 (setting other variables at their means). As illustrated in this figure, the predicted probabilities for each category of
sexual violence prevalence are essentially equal for Rome Statute = 1 and Rome Statute = 0. Moreover, Model 7 indicates that the results for Rome Statute are robust to
correcting for selection dynamics using a two-stage model. Whereas Models 1–2, 4–6, and 7 report insignificant effects for the ICC variables, Model 3 indicates a
positive, significant relationship between ICC intervention and sexual violence. This suggests that governments in situations under
ICC preliminary examination or investigation perpetrate sexual violence at significantly higher levels than governments in
situations in which the ICC has not intervened. Figure 2 illustrates the substantive effects of ICC intervention on sexual violence prevalence by comparing
predicted probabilities of ICC intervention = 0 versus ICC intervention = 1 across categories of the dependent variable. As illustrated in this figure, the predicted
probability of no reported sexual violence is substantially lower (.31) in situations under ICC intervention versus situations in which the ICC has
intervened (.56). Moreover, the predicted probabilities for all positive values of reported sexual violence are greater for situations under ICC intervention than for situations in
which the Court has not intervened. These findings suggest that the logics of deterrence and social learning do not apply to sexual violence by
government forces in intrastate conflict. Why might this be the case? One initial hypothesis is that preventive effects might be obscured by the consistently
significant relationship between battle deaths and sexual violence prevalence. For example, if ICC jurisdiction directly influences conflict intensity, as
measured by battle deaths, and conflict intensity in turn affects sexual violence, our estimates of the impact of ICC jurisdiction would be biased
downward by including battle deaths. To test for this, we reran the models in Table 2, omitting battle deaths. However, even when omitting this variable, the sign and significance
of our ICC variables remained the same, suggesting this is not a plausible explanation for our findings (see Online Appendix, Table A5). Other particularities of our data and
modeling strategy might have influenced our findings. Most notably, our analysis was limited to government forces involved in intrastate conflicts as the primary belligerent,
which constitute approximately 40% of the conflict-actor-years for government forces in the SVAC, version 3.0. As such, our analysis excluded secondary belligerents in
intrastate conflicts and government forces in international conflicts. Furthermore, our analysis focused specifically on the average, unconditional effects of ICC jurisdiction on
CRSV. Given findings in the deterrence literature on civilian killings suggesting that the effects of international justice initiatives may depend on various factors, such as domestic
rule of law or external support (Jo & Simmons, Citation2016; McAllister, Citation2020; Meernik, Citation2015), it is possible that our focus on the direct impacts of ICC jurisdiction
has obscured more conditional effects. Beyond specifics of our sampling and modeling strategies, there are various plausible explanations for our mostly null findings. Perhaps
most importantly, the ICC has had minimal success in prosecuting sexual violence crimes by government actors. As of July 1, 2022, the
Court had issued public arrest warrants or summonses for sexual violence crimes for 21 suspects. However, the Court had
secured only one final conviction for sexual violence crimes, for Bosco Ntaganda, a rebel commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
More broadly, including the Ntaganda case, the Court had returned just four final convictions for substantive crimes—all for members of rebel groups, and the ICC had yet
to secure the arrest of a sitting government official for any crime.Footnote16 There are several possible reasons for the ICC’s limited success in
prosecuting CRSV and crimes by government actors. First, the ICC remains a relatively new institution, and it has experienced significant
“growing pains” during its first two decades, including persistent issues relating to funding, management, and relations with state
governments, inter alia. This suggests that the Court’s record in prosecuting sexual violence and crimes by government actors might improve as it “matures” as an
institution and addresses these issues (Bassiouni, Citation2015). More fundamentally, however, sexual violence crimes are potentially more difficult to
investigate and prosecute than other crimes under the Court’s jurisdiction, due to challenges in collecting evidence and
stigmatization of survivors (Temkin, Citation2000). Furthermore, it may be more difficult to prosecute government actors (whether for sexual
violence or for other crimes), as incumbents can leverage the instruments of state power to shield themselves from arrest (Cronin-
Furman, Citation2013; Krcmaric, Citation2020; Mendeloff, Citation2018; Prorok, Citation2017), and the ICC depends on cooperation from state
governments to conduct investigations and execute arrest warrants (Tiemessen, Citation2014). To the extent that both deterrence and social
learning require a record of effective prosecutions, the ICC’s limited success in prosecuting CRSV by government actors may explain the null effects of
ICC jurisdiction, sexual violence cases, and global actions in our analysis. With respect to deterrence, the ICC’s record provides little reason for
sitting government officials to fear arrest and punishment for sexual violence crimes, even in situations where the ICC has
jurisdiction and/or it has initiated sexual violence cases. At the same time, the Court’s lack of success in prosecuting CRSV by state actors may also
undermine any effects of global ICC actions, which—rather than signaling an increased risk of prosecution—effectively demonstrate that the
probability of arrest and punishment for government officials is low. Similarly, with the Court’s limited success in prosecuting CRSV by state actors,
there have been few high-profile, symbolic events—such as arrests and convictions—to dramatize and communicate anti-
CRSV norms for government officials, per the logic of social learning. Furthermore, there have been multiple, high-profile examples of
incumbent and former government officials who have avoided arrest (e.g., Omar al-Bashir of Sudan) or whose cases have been
dismissed (e.g., Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya) or ended in acquittal (e.g., Laurent Gbabgo of Côte d’Ivoire). In this context, rather than reinforcing
anti-CRSV norms, the ICC’s record might signal that these norms are weak and/or not relevant for government actors. Although the ICC’s limited
success in prosecuting CRSV by government actors may partially explain our mostly null findings, it might also be that the logics of deterrence and/or social learning are less
applicable to CRSV than other crimes under the ICC’s jurisdiction. For example, to the extent that CRSV is not primarily motivated by strategic or tactical considerations—as
recent research critiquing the framing of sexual violence as a “weapon of war” would suggest (Cohen, Citation2013)—the logic of deterrence is unlikely to operate. Relatedly,
insofar as gender norms that sustain CRSV are deeply embedded in sociocultural practices (Berry & Lake, Citation2021; Kreft, Citation2022),
even successful prosecutions may have limited effects on underlying logics of appropriateness relevant for social learning.
Although these dynamics might explain why ICC jurisdiction, global actions, and sexual violence cases have negligible effects, it remains less clear why ICC interventions—
preliminary examinations and investigations—are associated with increased sexual violence by government forces. One plausible explanation focuses on the ability of
governments to initiate ICC interventions by self-referring situations on their territory or, for nonstates parties, lodging Article 12(3) declarations. Indeed, eight of the ICC’s 17
investigations—including six in which the ICC subsequently opened sexual violence cases—have resulted from this process. Because the Court relies on government
cooperation to conduct effective investigations, the prosecutor may be reluctant to target government officials for prosecution in such situations. Indeed, in interventions self-
initiated by states, the Court has yet to issue a public arrest warrant or summons for any sitting government official. This allows governments
to initiate ICC
interventions strategically to undermine domestic opponents (Ba, Citation2020; Hashimoto, Citation2020; Hillebrecht & Straus, Citation2017) and
may embolden government forces to escalate sexual violence (and other crimes) in such situations. Conversely, global actions are not within the
direct control of any individual government, and sexual violence cases can only be initiated by the Court itself after an investigation is opened. Furthermore, the primary
mechanism by which states accept the Court’s jurisdiction—ratifying the Rome Statute—enables the ICC to intervene but still requires further governmental or Court action to
initiate investigations and prosecutions. Accordingly, ICC jurisdiction, global actions, and sexual violence cases may be less likely to embolden
escalation by government forces. Conclusion Using the SVAC dataset, we have examined the effects of ICC jurisdiction and actions on CRSV
by government forces in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2018. Contrary to the claims advanced by proponents of prosecutions, we found that we cannot reject the null
hypothesis that ICC jurisdiction, sexual violence cases, and global actions have negligible effects on sexual violence, and we found that ICC interventions are
associated with increased sexual violence by government actors. On one hand, these findings will be disappointing for advocates and practitioners
who have placed faith in the ICC and other legal mechanisms to prevent CRSV. The findings suggest that legal interventions are no panacea for wartime
sexual violence and that prevention might require alternative—and, in some cases, potentially more costly—approaches. At the same time, the
finding that ICC jurisdiction (although not interventions) has negligible effects suggests that jurisdiction, at least, “does no harm” in exacerbating sexual violence and might be
worthwhile to pursue from a consequentialist perspective. More generally, we have adopted an admittedly narrow focus on the ICC’s immediate effects on CRSV. In doing so,
we have ignored the possible long-term effects of ICC jurisdiction and interventions on outcomes such as gender equality, economic development, and the rule of law that have
potentially important implications for future sexual violence. More broadly, prosecutions may serve much broader purposes than prevention, such as validating the experiences
of survivors, and cannot be evaluated in solely consequentialist terms (Aukerman, Citation2001). This, in turn, points to the critical importance of engaging with CRSV survivors
and other stakeholders and considering how prosecutions may serve broader purposes beyond prevention.

Humanitarian law ignores non-masculine experiences

Dutton and Sterio 22 [Yvonne Dutton, Professor of Law, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law,
and Milena Sterio, Professor of Law at Cleveland State College of Law, 2022, “Prosecuting Gender Persecution at the
Icc: Definitions, Policies, and Practice,” Fordham International Law Journal,
https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2863&context=ilj]
I. INTRODUCTION As Beth Van Schaack, now Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, has aptly noted: “[f]or most of human history, the rape and
sexual abuse of women associated with the enemy was an expected spoil, inevitable by-product, or legitimate tactic of war.
Where gender violence was condemned, humanitarian law—which primarily reflected the male experience with armed
conflict—conceptualized such conduct as an offense against a woman’s dignity or a family’s honor.” 1 Indeed, history has demonstrated
that although “war-time abuses against women, girls, lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, queer, non-binary and gender
nonconforming persons” are common, perpetrators of such abuses are rarely held accountable. 2 Although the crime of gender
persecution has been long-recognized, charges have rarely been pursued. 3 There is, however, hope that the course of human history will change. With the
adoption of the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court (“ICC”), the international community has made great strides in finally recognizing that sexual and gender-
based crimes (“SGBV”) are amongst the gravest and most serious crimes worthy of condemnation. 4 As discussed below, the ICC statute was the first international criminal
instrument to contain the definition of gender. 5 As compared to other international criminal tribunals, the ICC is authorized to investigate and prosecute a wider range of SGBV
crimes, and the first to expressly recognize the crime of gender persecution as a crime against humanity. 6 Moreover, for at least the past decade, the ICC’s Office of the
Prosecutor (“OTP”) has been focused on investigating and prosecuting SGBV crimes, including the crime of gender persecution. 7 That office is aiming to draw the worlds’
attention to the many SGBV crimes that are being committed and to provide justice to the victims of those crimes. The OTP announced its intention to focus its resources and
attention on SGBV crimes with the publication of its 2014 Policy on Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes (“2014 Policy Paper”). 8 With the launch of its Policy on Gender
Persecution (“Gender Persecution Policy”) in December 2022, the OTP signaled its intention to continue the path of pursuing accountability for SGBV crimes, specifically the
crime of gender persecution. 9 This Article, like other commentaries, 10 applauds the OTP’S recent launch of its Policy on Gender Persecution and remains hopeful that the
policy will lead to robust development of this specific area of international criminal law and do justice for gender persecution victims. As Lisa Davis, Professor and Special
Adviser to the ICC’s OTP, has stated: By definition, gender-based crimes target women, men, children, LGBTIQ, non-binary and gender non-conforming persons, on the
premise of gender discrimination. At its core, gender-based crimes are used as punishments against those who are perceived to transgress assigned gender narratives that
regulate “accepted” forms of gender expression manifest in, for example, roles, behaviors, activities, or attributes . . . . Gender-based crimes may meet the threshold for
persecution when, for example, underlying crimes such as rape, enslavement, torture, or murder are used as punishments for deviating from gender narratives, or when the
crime itself is the narrative, as it often is in the case of enslavement and forced marriage. 11 By committing to investigate and prosecute the crime of gender persecution, the
OTP continues the positive trajectory outlined above in its commitment to hold perpetrators of SGBV crimes accountable. One hopes that the practice will live up to the policy’s
goals, and lead to the protection and recognition of the fundamental rights of women, girls, lesbian, gay, transgender, intersex and queer people, and any and all persons who
defy gender norms and stereotypes. This Article’s primary goal is to highlight the OTP’s Gender Persecution Policy, while also demonstrating its place in the trajectory of the
ICC’s progress in changing the course of human history as relates to the recognition of and prosecution of SGBV crimes. To that end, some background is necessary to
contextualize the ICC’s current policy and practice as relates to the crime of gender persecution. Part II of this Article discusses the Rome Statute’s unique contributions to the
development of international criminal law regarding SGBV crimes, including the crime of gender persecution. Part III moves from codification to practice, addressing the OTP’s
2014 Policy Paper, and some of the investigations and prosecutions of SGBV crimes that resulted from the Office’s specific decision to develop and devote resources to ensure
that such crimes were not overlooked—as they often had been historically. Part IV turns to the 2022 Gender Persecution Policy which was released in December 2022, detailing
the Policy’s key features. Part IV concludes by addressing implementation and some key challenges that may arise. As past practice demonstrates, achieving
positive outcomes in terms of convictions is no easy task. Nevertheless, this Article commends the OTP for plainly stating its intention to engage in
training, and to educate their staff and others to ensure the successful implementation of the policy. II. THE ROME STATUTE: DEVELOPING INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL
LAW AS RELATES TO INVESTIGATING AND PROSECUTING SEXUAL AND GENDER-BASED CRIMES

Current ICC leadership deprioritizes women’s voices and obscures sexual violence
Davies and Flummerfelt 24 [Harry Davies, investigations correspondent at the Guardian, and Robert
Flummerfelt, investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, 10-27-2024, "ICC prosecutor allegedly tried to
suppress sexual misconduct claims against him", Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/oct/27/icc-prosecutor-karim-khan-allegedly-tried-suppress-sexual-misconduct-claims]
The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court allegedly responded to a formal complaint of sexual misconduct by trying
to persuade the alleged victim to deny the claims, the Guardian has been told. Multiple ICC staff with knowledge of the allegations
against Karim Khan said the prosecutor and another official close to him repeatedly urged the woman to disavow claims about
his behaviour towards her. The alleged attempts to deter the woman from formally pursuing the claims took place in phone calls and in person, and came after Khan learned
court authorities had been made aware of allegations of misconduct, four sources said. At the time, the chief prosecutor had been advised to avoid one-on-one contact with the
alleged victim after an aborted internal inquiry into the matter. Contacted by the Guardian for comment, Khan denied asking the woman to withdraw any allegations. His lawyers
said: “Our client denies the whole of the allegations and we are most concerned the exposure of a confidential and closed internal matter is designed to undermine his high-
profile ongoing work at a delicate time.” After reports of alleged sexual misconduct began to circulate in the media in recent days, Khan denied the claims in a public statement
that said he and the court had been “subject to a wide range of attacks and threats”. In anonymous briefings, court officials close to the prosecutor have suggested he may have
been the target of a smear campaign. “There is no truth to suggestions of such misconduct,” Khan’s statement said. “I have worked in diverse contexts for 30 years and there
has never been such a complaint lodged against me by anyone.” The woman at the heart of the allegations – who ICC colleagues describe as a well-regarded lawyer in her
30s who worked directly for Khan – has declined requests for comment. But multiple sources familiar with the situation said she told colleagues she declined the alleged
requests to disavow the claims. She believed the alleged approaches by Khan and another ICC official were part of an attempt to make
her say that the claims against the prosecutor had been fabricated, the sources added. According to a document seen by the Guardian, the
accusations against Khan, 54, include unwanted sexual touching and “abuse” over an extended period. They include an alleged incident in
which he is said to have “pressed his tongue” into the woman’s ear. Khan denies such allegations of misconduct. Four ICC sources familiar with the allegations said they also
include coercive sexual behaviour and abuse of authority. The Guardian has interviewed 11 current and former ICC officials familiar with the case, as
well as diplomatic sources and friends of the alleged victim. All declined to be identified because they were not authorised to discuss the allegations, or because they wanted to
protect the woman. Multiple sources said misreporting about the allegations and efforts to politicise the situation have been deeply distressing for the woman, who is said to
have initially held back on pursuing a complaint against Khan over concerns about reprisals, and fears it could be exploited by Israel or opponents of the court. Sources who
know the alleged victim said she has been left traumatised by the situation and is “experiencing severe emotional distress”. “She never wanted any of this,” one person close to
her said. “But the complaint filed against her wishes, followed by Khan’s denials and attempts to suppress the allegations, have forced her into a very difficult position.” The
public emergence of the allegations comes at an intensely sensitive moment for the ICC, a court of last resort that prosecutes individuals accused of atrocities. A panel of three
ICC judges is weighing politically explosive requests by Khan to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza.
The ICC, which is headquartered in The Hague, now faces an unprecedented crisis amid growing internal strife over the handling of the
allegations and apparent attempts by the court’s opponents to weaponise them. Critics of the court have seized upon the allegations, which Khan first learned about weeks
before his announcement in May requesting arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his defence minister and three Hamas leaders. Khan has
stopped short of explicitly accusing Israel of being behind the allegations, but in his statement denying misconduct he noted that he and the court have been the target of “a wide
range of recent attacks and threats” in recent months. The Guardian revealed earlier this year how Israel’s intelligence agencies ran a decade-long campaign against the ICC
that included threats and attempts to smear senior staff. Against this backdrop, ICC officials close to Khan are strongly hinting the allegations may be part of a smear campaign
by Israel. However, in a months-long investigation into the allegations against Khan, the Guardian has found no evidence that Israel, or any other country, had any involvement
in the underlying allegations – although there does appear to have been a subsequent effort by anonymous actors to brief journalists and post leaks online. Online leaks

AT: Prosecute Russia

Russia deleted and manipulated all the ICC war crime evidence to avoid blame Neilsen 24 [Rhiannon
Neilsen, Cyber Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University,
former postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University, former research consultant for the Institute for Ethics, Law
and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford, and former visiting fellow at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of
Excellence, 5-14-2024, "File Not Found: Russia Is Hacking Evidence of Its War Crimes", War on the Rocks,
https://warontherocks.com/2024/05/file-not-found-russia-is-hacking-evidence-of-its-war-crimes/]
It is often quipped that history is written by the victors. But, as the bloodshed in Ukraine drags into a third year, Russian President Vladimir Putin does not have to win
his unjust war to rewrite the events of the conflict and undermine post-war justice. Russian hackers from the Federal Security Services
and Main Intelligence Directorate are reportedly targeting the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, the entity responsible for
documenting war crimes committed by Russian combatants on Ukrainian soil. At the same time, the International Criminal Court
declared that it had been hacked, having “detected anomalous activity” in its systems. The hackers’ aim? To obtain — even delete — evidence of
war crimes and help Russians arrested in Ukraine to “avoid prosecution and move them back to Russia.” Russia’s interest in
meddling with the prosecution of alleged war crimes is blatant. The International Criminal Court has a current arrest warrant out for Putin himself for the forcible transferal of
Ukrainian children to Russia (a violation of the genocide article of the Rome Statute). It also has ongoing investigations regarding Russian war crimes in both Ukraine and
Georgia. Russia is no stranger to doctoring its official records. For example, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin famously blotted out from photographs those whom he ordered to be
purged. But that was Moscow manipulating itsown records. Today, Russia
is waging cyber attacks against others’ systems in order to alter
evidence of its atrocities and thus subvert war crime tribunals. Russia’s breach of the digital depositories of war crime evidence highlights two new,
troubling realities of 21st-century wars. First, it is widely recognized that perpetrators are using cyberspace and social media to organize, fund, execute, and celebrate their
atrocities. Indeed, Russia has consistently deployed cyber attacks as part of its unjust war against Ukraine. Some claim that such operations have had little effect and are even
backfiring. Others maintain that, despite their lack of “shock and awe”, Russia’s persistent cyber attacks form a strategically valuable part of
Putin’s offense. Either way, this recent revelation signals a worrying development: Perpetrators of atrocities are likely to employ offensive cyber
operations to cover up their battlefield crimes. Second, war crime trials are already fraught with complexity, accusations of
victors’ justice, legal exasperation, perfunctory showmanship, abortive reconciliation, and issues regarding postwar stability.
Cyber operations that contaminate evidence are yet another hurdle in the broader pursuit of justice — and they will continue after the
bullets stop flying. Lies, AI, and Tainted Trials Russia’s cyber incursions into war crime databases are alarming. If the Russian hackers can retrieve
information pertinent to war criminal cases, their goal (according to the Office of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General) will be to extradite accused
Russian-affiliated perpetrators to escape prosecution. However, there is an even scarier prospect that is not being reported. If Russian hackers
obtain access to sensitive evidence of war crimes, they can not only steal it, but also delete, manipulate, and supplant it with
fictitious, AI-generated evidence — entirely unbeknownst to system operators. Via the application of AI, individuals can “manipulate
images, video, audio and text in such a way that even the keenest observers can be deceived.” A prime example is deepfakes. There are
already widespread calls around the dangers of deepfakes in war — including in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict itself (although this quickly became a notorious failure). Less
has been said about deepfakes postwar and in war crime tribunals. The hackers — once in the system — could plant false (AI-
generated) images, videos, and audios that cast doubt on whether war crimes were committed by Russian combatants. Or
deepfakes could make it appear as though Ukrainian forces were perpetrating war crimes: mutilation of Russian corpses,
rape of Russian soldiers, or torturing Russian prisoners of war. Depending on quality and quantity, the fake photos or videos could
muddy the waters about what is true and what is false. The potential damage of misleading AI-generated content —
especially audio deepfakes, which may be harder to verify — is serious, and automatic deepfake detectors are still in development. Even breaching the
database without making any changes, or just the public sense that the database could hypothetically be breached (even if there is no evidence of sabotage),
could raise questions about the validity of the evidence. Russian disinformation campaigns are designed to elicit public
division and distrust — including when there is no viable proof of the claims being made. At the very least, hacking these
systems could lead to tribunal cases being painstakingly drawn out, delaying the justice owed to victims and their families.
Worse still, hacked information could lead to false accusations, acquittals, and cases being thrown out altogether due to
insufficient, unclear, or tainted evidence. Digital evidence pertinent to atrocities and violations of international humanitarian law, by any party to an armed
conflict, is strictly off limits. This is especially the case given states’ duties under customary international law to investigate and prosecute violations of the laws of war, crimes
against humanity, and genocide. The preservation of war crime data repositories is therefore critical to facilitate such obligations. Of course, this does not mean that all covert
cyber operations are inherently wrong. According to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Handbook on Psychological Operations, information operations that “influence, disrupt, corrupt,
or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making” can be “conducted … at all levels of war”. Elsewhere, I have argued for hacking into adversaries’ networks and
clandestinely tampering data resident in those systems to preventatrocities. Specifically, I suggested manipulating atrocity perpetrators’ information so that it delays their
operations. This includes subtly misrouting weapons shipments, editing concentration camp blueprints (such that they cannot be properly built), or slightly altering orders in a
way that does not “raise suspicion, but are sufficient to redirect, forestall, or confuse [the enemy’s] subordinates.” Further, I have suggested that cyber enabled psychological
operations — like the Ukrainian hacktivists’ “Patriotic Photoshoot” campaign last year — may be morally preferable to kinetic uses of force because they are less harmful
(although I also raised questions over who is a liable target in such cyber operations). Furtive hacking operations and (dis)information campaigns are an easier and quicker way
to thicken the fog of war than human intelligence operations — and, as others have highlighted, ambiguity can be an asset. Crucially, to reiterate, the cyber operations I defend
are to help parry the commission of atrocity crimes — not obfuscate them. Russia, by contrast, is
employing cyber operations to dodge
accountability for its grave abuses — torture, sexual assault, indiscriminate killing, inhumane treatment, and summary executions — of Ukrainians. All of this is
occurring against the backdrop of social media companies deleting videos and photos of potential war crimes uploaded by victims, witnesses, activists, journalists, and even the
perpetrators themselves (often as “trophies”). For years, corporations like Meta, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube have been using AI to rapidly removeposts that violate their
standards regarding gratuitous, gory, and gruesome content. But they have not been archiving this evidence. Crucial content that could help hold perpetrators to account is lost.
The War After

The ICC lacks jurisdiction and can’t guarantee retribution for past crimes.
McDougall 23 [Carrie McDougall, Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and barrister and solicitor of the
Supreme Court of Victoria and the High Court of Australia with a PhD in international criminal law from Melbourne Law
School, 3-20-2023, "The Imperative of Prosecuting Crimes of Aggression Committed against Ukraine", OUP Academic,
https://academic.oup.com/jcsl/article/28/2/203/7081290]
The only viable path to the prosecution of crimes of aggression committed against Ukraine is the establishment of a special international tribunal. The Rome Statute’s definition
of the crime of aggression was only adopted in 2010—12 years after the balance of the Rome Statute was agreed; 60 years after negotiations on the definition of an act of
aggression initially opened within the framework of the United Nations. The reasons for the lengthy debate are largely self-evident: as Theodor Meron neatly explained in the
midst of negotiations: ‘[t]he mission is more sensitive, the precedents fewer, the implications for the integrity of international law and the UN Charter deeper and broader, and
national security interests more directly involved.’33 As difficult as reaching agreement on the definition was, ultimately the real fight was over the scope of the ICC’s
jurisdiction over the crime. The result is a tailor-made regime that gives the ICC jurisdiction in a narrower range of situations compared to other Rome Statute crimes—
an outcome insisted upon by the Permanent Five (P5) and reluctantly accepted by other States as the price paid for the adoption of the aggression amendments.34 The
jurisdictional provisions
are complex and their interpretation remains contested.35 These unresolved debates are, however, irrelevant in the current
context for it is clear that, in
the absence of a referral from the Security Council (which, in the current context can be discounted because of
the Russian veto), the ICC is unable to exercise jurisdiction over a crime of aggression involving a non-State Party (such as Russia
or Ukraine36) as either aggressor or victim, as a result of a comprehensive non-State Party carve out.37 It has been suggested that the Rome Statute should be amended to
enable the General Assembly to activate the ICC’s jurisdiction to get around the veto.38 However, under Articles 10, 11, 12 and 14 of the UN Charter, the
Assembly’s
powers are limited to making recommendations: as confirmed by the ICJ in the Certain Expenses Case, the Assembly lacks the ability to take
coercive or enforcement action, which is the exclusive prerogative of the Security Council.39 As the ICTY Appeals Chamber has made clear, the creation of compulsory
criminal jurisdiction is a form of such coercive or enforcement action.40 As such, the General Assembly lacks the power to create criminal jurisdiction where it would otherwise
be lacking.41 It would, at least in theory, be possible, indeed desirable, to amend the Rome Statute to remove at least some of the jurisdictional limitations that are unique to
aggression. Indeed, ICC States Parties have already committed to reviewing the aggression amendments 7 years after the beginning of the Court’s exercise of jurisdiction (ie
2025).42 Experience suggests, however, that securing the necessary support for a broader jurisdictional regime will be exceeding difficult. Even if the
necessary support materialises, under Article 121(4), the
amendment would have to be ratified by seven-eighths of States Parties to enter into
force.43 Thereis also a real question as to whether the amendment could be given retroactive effect.44 In other words, the ICC is not a
realistic option for the prosecution of crimes of aggression committed against Ukraine. Domestic prosecutions are clearly being contemplated. Ukraine has
criminalised aggression,45 it enjoys territorial jurisdiction, and it has opened investigations into the crime.46 Among others, Lithuania and Poland have also opened relevant
domestic investigations.47 Any domestic prosecution of crimes of aggression, however, will face significant hurdles.

ICC Russia prosecution fails

Mcdougall 23 [Carrie Mcdougall, Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and barrister and solicitor of the
Supreme Court of Victoria and the High Court of Australia with a PhD in international criminal law from Melbourne Law
School, 3-20-2023, "The Imperative of Prosecuting Crimes of Aggression Committed against Ukraine", OUP Academic,
https://academic.oup.com/jcsl/article/28/2/203/7081290]
An alternative version of the redundancy critique is that it is unnecessary to establish a second tribunal to prosecute persons who could be tried by the ICC
for other crimes. The ICC’s ongoing investigation into other serious international crimes—and its status as the only permanent international criminal court—is of vital importance.
For this reason, the proposed tribunal’s jurisdiction should be limited to the crime of aggression, and to the situation in Ukraine, so as not to undermine the ICC; ideally, a
partnership agreement would also be concluded to emphasise the joint justice project and to deal with practical matters such as the sharing of evidence, and the sequencing of
any trials of individuals wanted for prosecution by both institutions.110 However, the idea that a prosecution for war crimes or crimes against humanity (possibly even genocide)
would be a substitute for the crime of aggression overlooks the difficulty of establishing the criminal responsibility of those at the top table. President Putin
will not
himself have directly perpetrated any of the other three crimes. Thus, his liability would have to be established using complex
theories of (indirect) co-perpetration still being developed by the ICC,111 or on the basis that he ordered the crimes,112 or command
responsibility.113 While the trials of Charles Taylor, Radovan Karadzic, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan demonstrate that the responsibility of
puppet masters for crimes committed in the field can be established, the same examples (together with a string of acquittals before the ICC) demonstrate the inherent
difficulty of establishing guilt beyond reasonable doubt is a criminal law term of art. The argument also disregards the benefits of separately prosecuting aggression.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine opened the door to the commission of other crimes: it is the original and all-encompassing wrong. The victims of Russia’s invasion are,
moreover, not limited to civilians but also include Ukrainian combatants, as well as members of the Russian armed forces who have reportedly
been forced to fight a war on false premises. Indeed, it is arguable that the indirect victims of Russia’s invasion extend to all those who are being impacted by the
growing food and energy crises, and states whose interests have been threatened by the unprecedented attack on the international order. A prosecution for crimes other
than aggression simply could not deliver justice for the totality of the wrong committed. The third major criticism of the proposed tribunal is that it would
amount to selective justice, which would undermine the broader international criminal justice project. This argument has two major
variations: that it would be inappropriate to establish another justice mechanism for Ukrainians when the plight of victims in places such as Syria and Yemen have largely been
ignored; and that past crimes of aggression have gone unpunished, often coupled with a related assertion of hypocrisy—an argument that
assumes that those primarily responsible for past acts of aggression and neutering the ICC’s jurisdiction would be the first to support the
proposed tribunal.114 In my assessment, neither of these claims withstand scrutiny. In terms of geographic disparities: considering the unparalleled support provided to the
ICC’s investigation into the situation in Ukraine,115 the establishment of complementary accountability mechanisms116 and the number of domestic investigations that have
been opened, is beyond dispute that there has been a disproportionate criminal justice response to crimes committed in Ukraine compared to Syria and particularly Yemen (to
cite just two illustrative examples). I would also agree that the response to the crisis more broadly has been marked by racism, exhibited most clearly in relation to the
comparative treatment of refugees.117 It would, however, be an oversimplification to conclude that the criminal justice response reflects a view that Ukrainian
victims are more worthy of justice than victims in places like Syria or Yemen. In the first place, this overlooks the fact that, absent action on the
Security Council’s part, a relevant State’s consent is an integral precursor to justice, and Ukraine (unlike Syria and Yemen) is an enthusiastically cooperative partner.

AT: I-law Credibility

US not key – other holdouts and withdrawals
Wittner 22 [Lawrence Wittner, US Historian, BA from Columbia College, MA from University of Wisconsin, Ph.D from
Columbia University, 8-11-2022, "Why Should War Criminals Operate with Impunity?", CounterPunch.org,
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/11/why-should-war-criminals-operate-with-impunity/]
The development of a permanent international court dealing with severe violations of human rights has already produced some important results. Thirty-one criminal cases have
been brought before the ICC, resulting, thus far, in 10 convictions and four acquittals. The first ICC conviction occurred in 2012, when a Congolese warlord was found guilty of
using conscripted child soldiers in his nation. In 2020, the ICC began trying a former Islamist militant alleged to have forced hundreds of women into sexual slavery in Mali. This
April, the ICC opened the trial of a militia leader charged with 31 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur, Sudan. Parliamentarians from around
the world have lauded “the ICC’s pivotal role in the prevention of atrocities, the fight against impunity, the support for victims’ rights, and the guarantee of long-lasting justice.”
Despite these advances, the ICC faces some serious problems. Often years after criminal transgressions, it must locate the criminals and people
willing to testify in their cases. Furthermore, lacking a police force, it is forced to rely upon national governments, some with a
minimal commitment to justice, to capture and deport suspected criminals for trial. Governments also occasionally withdrew from the
ICC, when angered, as the Philippines did after its president, Rodrigo Duterte, came under investigation. The ICC’s most serious problem, however, is that 70
nations, including the world’s major military powers, have refused to become parties to the treaty. The governments of China, India, and
Saudi Arabia never signed the Rome Statute. Although the governments of the United States, Russia, and Israel did sign it, they never ratified
it. Subsequently, in fact, they withdrew their signatures. The motive for these holdouts is clear enough. In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the
withdrawal of his nation from the process of joining the ICC. This action occurred in response to the ICC ruling that Russia’s seizure of Crimea amounted to an “ongoing
occupation.” Such a position, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “contradicts reality” and the Russian foreign ministry dismissed the court as “one-sided and inefficient.”
Understandably, governments harboring current and future war criminals would rather not face investigations and possible prosecutions.

AT: Mideast Affs

Prosecuting terrorists is impeccably hard
Abbas 21 [Muhammad Sher Abbas, Additional District & Sessions Judge/ Senior Research, 1-5-2021, "Challenges To
The Successful Prosecution Of War Crimes", SSRN, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3760300]
Inadequate Contemplation for War-On-Terror The insufficient procedural consideration for the trials of those involved in terrorism also
poses a challenge to the prosecution of war crimes committed by them. International law applies to various situations including declared war
between two or more states and also may include armed conflict of non-international character initiated by non-state actors like terrorist organisations of ISIS and Al-Qaeda,
as envisaged by Article 2 of the Geneva Convention. The international armed conflict (IAC) is distinguishable from non-international armed conflict (NIAC) depending on the
nature of operations meant to counter terrorism. The UN Security Council and even the belligerents have deemed the same rules applicable to the situations which are different
from IAC. For instance, the US Joints Chief Staff Standing Rules enjoin upon the US forces to abide by those laws regardless of the character of operation.[32] The
farcical
notion that universal jurisdiction of the ICC only applies to the prosecutions of war crimes committed in international armed
conflicts stands nullified and the development of law admits of such jurisdiction in non-international conflicts as well. The customary law also lends
support to this concept which was further vindicated by the international tribunals of Rwanda, Cambodia and Sierra Leone. A
resolution of the Institute of International Law in the year 2005 urged that the prosecution of both international and non international armed conflicts were encompassed in the
universal jurisdiction in connection with the war crimes.[33] However, a
crime under International Humanitarian Law does not enable every state
to have jurisdiction on it for its prosecution. The criminal nature of an act and exercise of jurisdiction are two different
propositions to be dealt with accordingly. It is pertinent to point out that excuse of absence of implementing legislation after the act
perpetrated and defence of no violation of ex post facto rule, cannot be valid in prosecutions of such crimes of terrorism
particularly when such responsibility already finds mention in the international rules.[34] But the omission of competent trials, on
such excuse, was a treatment meted out to prisoners of Guantanamo which not only discredited domestic legislation of the USA but was also violative of human rights on the
pretext of security[35] and posed a serious challenge to the effective and transparent prosecution of war crimes. Even the reports of a perverse approach of the Northern
Alliance in Afghanistan to let the Taliban prisoners die in the shipping containers and suggestion of Rumsfeld[36] that unlawful combatants were not entitled to the treatment for
POWs is an outlook which must be taken care of and those prisoners involved in the terrorism ought to be put to the trial under the concurrent universal jurisdiction contemplated
by the Rome Statute. There is also a possibility that the prosecutors may prevent the investigation of these incidents on account of inherent
difficulties and lack of support by the UN Security Council due to the mighty powers like member countries of the NATO. Many
innocent villagers died when bombing was carried out by the Allies on December 1, 2001 in a village of eastern Afghanistan not far from Torah Bora[37] but no
investigation was carried out for the massive killings of the civilians. No illegality of intentional and wilful attacks and the
killings of civilians can be condoned under the International Humanitarian Law. Even the relevant provision of Article 57 of 1977‟s Geneva
Protocol explicitly makes it obligatory for a commander of the military force to exercise due care and caution to protect the civilian population as well as the civilian objects.
There is a pressing need for the doctrinal provisions to be applied to the complex situations like the war-on-terror for the effective
prosecution of the war crimes. Such a situation ought to be addressed within the purview of the Rome Statute. These are palpable challenges for prosecuting
the war crimes, committed in the scourge of global terrorism, require unequivocal supplementary legislative provisions to punish those
involved in the atrocious terrorist activities. Conclusion The potential deterrence of the ICC is essentially liable to be increased
failing which the very purpose of its creation may be frustrated and essence of the administration of International Criminal
justice may end in the smoke. It has been observed that many of the member states failed to discharge their obligation to cooperate with
the ICC which is lacking an independent enforcement mechanism, and non-cooperation by them further undermined the
authority this international organisation is supposed to wield. On many occasions the serious war crimes were neither investigated nor
the culprits were prosecuted before the national courts under the complementarity provision but there was no tangible attempt on the part of the
ICC to ferret out the reasons for their failure nor could it properly evaluate the political manipulations in prosecutorial process and the referral was also not even
made by its Office of the Prosecutor to make sure that no culprit of war crimes goes scot free. Therefore, the structural and procedural reforms as discussed above are direly
needed through legislative measures to evolve an effective monitoring and enforcement mechanism for the diligent prosecution of war crimes at both local as well as
international levels. The purpose of creation of the ICC depends entirely upon the successful prosecution of these crimes as such. The
failure of universal
recognition of the ICC has also circumvented the comprehensive and all-embracing dispensation of justice. The greater population of
the world habitats in the countries like China, India, Russia, USA, and Pakistan etc. that have been involved in many wars in the past but none of these
countries have ratified the Rome Statute so far despite the fact that all of them are in possession of the weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the criticism on
account of the focus of ICC on prosecuting the alleged war crimes in Africa only has also been characterised as selective
justice. These issues of sovereignty, universality, alleged selective justice and the absence of efficacious prosecutorial
mechanism to cater to war-on-terror are serious impediments to prosecute the war crimes and liable to be addressed imminently having
due regard to the very rationale the Rome Statutes were conceived on, otherwise it will not only be enormously difficult to successfully prosecute
the war crimes rather the commission of these crimes with impunity may also increase manifold and the politics of power at the cost of innocent lives across the world,
will continue to predominate at the international level

AT: Deterrence
ICC can’t achieve general deterrence. Too many restrictions exist
Jenks and Acquaviva 14 [Chris Jenks, Affiliate Research Professor of Law, B.S. from the US Military Academy West
Point, JD from the University of Arizona College of Law, PhD from the Melbourne University Law School, and Guido
Acquaviva, LLM in International and Comparative Law from Tulane, PhD in Law, History, and Theory of International
Relations from the University of Padua, 2014, “Debate: The role of international criminal justice in fostering compliance with
international humanitarian law”, International Review of the Red Cross,
https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/files/irrc-895_896-jenks-acquaviva.pdf]
Much has been written about the “deterrent” role of international courts and tribunals in preventing potential atrocities. Since the establishment of the ad hoc tribunals and the
International Criminal Court, the international community has sought to anchor the legitimacy of international justice in the “fight against impunity”. Yet recent studies have
suggested that an overly broad characterization of international courts and tribunals as “actors of deterrence” might misplace expectations and fail to adequately capture how
deterrence works – namely, at different stages, within a net of institutions, and affecting different actors at different times.1 The Review invited two practitioners to share their
perspectives on the concrete effects of international criminal justice on fostering compliance with international humanitarian law. Chris Jenks questions the “general deterrence”
role of international criminal justice, contending that the influence of complicated and often prolonged judicial proceedings on the ultimate behaviour of military commanders and
soldiers is limited. Guido Acquaviva agrees that “general deterrence”, if interpreted narrowly, is the wrong lens through which to be looking at international criminal justice.
However, he disagrees that judicial decisions are not considered by military commanders, and argues that it is not the individual role of each court or tribunal that matters;
rather, it is their overall contribution to an ever more comprehensive system of accountability that can ultimately foster better compliance with international humanitarian law.
This article contends that international criminal justice provides minimal general deterrence of future violations of international
humanitarian law (IHL). Arguments that international courts and tribunals deter future violations – and that such deterrence is a primary objective – assume an internally
inconsistent burden that the processes cannot bear, in essence setting international criminal justice up for failure. Moreover, the inherently limited number of
proceedings, the length of time required, the dense opinions generated, the relatively light sentences2 and the robust
confinement conditions3 all erode whatever limited general deterrence international criminal justice might otherwise provide. Bluntly stated, thousands
of pages of multiple Tadić decisions have not factored into any service member’s decision-making on whether to comply with
IHL. International criminal justice can play many roles,4 including fostering compliance with IHL, but not through general deterrence and the
threat of punishment. Adherence to IHL is an indirect byproduct of international criminal justice as a moral statement, an explication of how the international community
views certain actions in armed conflict. This statement, often translated by military legal advisers and conveyed to service members by military leaders through personal
example, briefings, training exercises, and military manuals and regulations, reinforces behavioural norms of how to conduct oneself in the most immoral of circumstances:
armed conflict. International criminal justice’s moral statement aids service members in navigating the moral abyss which results from a State lawfully ordering them to
intentionally direct lethal force against fellow human beings.5 The result is service members who, in the aftermath of armed conflict, can live with themselves and the decisions
they made during armed conflict. In the process, and in part as an indirect result of international criminal justice, the arc of service members’ behaviour tends towards complying
with IHL.6 This article first clarifies what is meant by “general deterrence” before reviewing how the claim that international criminal justice provides such deterrence is
relatively new and stems from misunderstandings of what the International Criminal Court (ICC) can achieve. From there, the article
explains how general deterrence is a challenging proposition for any criminal justice system and amounts to an unbearable burden at the international level. I then describe the
indirect role that international criminal justice plays in providing if not moral clarity, then at a minimum, less moral ambiguity in defining by exception the bounds of permissible
conduct during armed conflict. General deterrence?