David Luban: The ICJ should have been harder on Serbia
[David Luban is professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown University Law Center.]
This week, the International Court of Justice released a disappointingly wishy-washy ruling on whether Serbia bears responsibility, as a state, for genocide in Bosnia during the Bosnian war. Hannah Arendt famously complained 45 years ago, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, that international law had yet to come to grips with the notion of a criminal state. This week's ICJ decision raises the question anew. Can the government as a whole—rather than individual officials—be brought to account for monumental crimes? The ICJ ruling offers a far from coherent answer.
To be sure, the ICJ found that in principle states can be held responsible for violating the 1951 Convention Against Genocide. But it cleared Serbia of genocide or complicity in genocide, despite the country's notorious backing of a proxy army, the Bosnian Serb militia known as the VRS. The VRS committed numerous atrocities in its 1992 campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Serbs and Croats—atrocities that included the massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, and the establishment of Nazi-style concentration camps and "rape motels." All of this has been exhaustively documented and adjudicated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The ICJ had the ICTY materials at its disposal. The court's exoneration of the Serbian government nonetheless—and after the case dragged on for 14 years—undercuts the principle of state responsibility that it endorsed. If Serbia's actions don't amount to state complicity in genocide, it is hard to envision what would.
The court's reluctance to hold a state accountable for crimes goes to the very heart of international law, which is itself a creature of states. States don't like to be accused of criminal wrongdoing. It offends their sovereign dignity and majesty. Nuremberg experimented with declaring organizations, like the SS, to be criminal. But that experiment was a failure: The judges were skeptical of the idea of collective guilt and trimmed the law back substantially. All the subsequent international criminal tribunals (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, Sierra Leone, Cambodia) have prosecuted only individuals.
The law against genocide is also partly to blame. It defines the crime narrowly and in a way that makes it difficult to prove. The Genocide Convention says that genocide requires a specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. (Protected groups are national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups.) As such means "destroy them because they are who they are, not for any other reason." To prove genocide, prosecutors thus have to show that a massacre was specifically intended to destroy the victims as a group—not to grab their land, or as part of a military strategy, or to teach rebels a lesson. If prosecutors can't make this showing, a large-scale ethnic massacre can still be a "war crime" or a "crime against humanity." But it's not a genocide. The legal definition has thus come loose from what the word means to everyone other than a handful of international lawyers, as I've argued in a recent article. Prosecutors in the Yugoslav Tribunal have seldom prosecuted for genocide, because the other crimes are invariably easier to prove. And the narrow definition has other bad effects. A couple of years ago, a U.N. commission concluded that Darfur wasn't a "genocide" because there was no evidence of specific intent to destroy the non-Arab "black" tribes in Darfur "as such." The result was reduced political pressure to do something about Darfur....
Read entire article at Slate
This week, the International Court of Justice released a disappointingly wishy-washy ruling on whether Serbia bears responsibility, as a state, for genocide in Bosnia during the Bosnian war. Hannah Arendt famously complained 45 years ago, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, that international law had yet to come to grips with the notion of a criminal state. This week's ICJ decision raises the question anew. Can the government as a whole—rather than individual officials—be brought to account for monumental crimes? The ICJ ruling offers a far from coherent answer.
To be sure, the ICJ found that in principle states can be held responsible for violating the 1951 Convention Against Genocide. But it cleared Serbia of genocide or complicity in genocide, despite the country's notorious backing of a proxy army, the Bosnian Serb militia known as the VRS. The VRS committed numerous atrocities in its 1992 campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Serbs and Croats—atrocities that included the massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, and the establishment of Nazi-style concentration camps and "rape motels." All of this has been exhaustively documented and adjudicated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The ICJ had the ICTY materials at its disposal. The court's exoneration of the Serbian government nonetheless—and after the case dragged on for 14 years—undercuts the principle of state responsibility that it endorsed. If Serbia's actions don't amount to state complicity in genocide, it is hard to envision what would.
The court's reluctance to hold a state accountable for crimes goes to the very heart of international law, which is itself a creature of states. States don't like to be accused of criminal wrongdoing. It offends their sovereign dignity and majesty. Nuremberg experimented with declaring organizations, like the SS, to be criminal. But that experiment was a failure: The judges were skeptical of the idea of collective guilt and trimmed the law back substantially. All the subsequent international criminal tribunals (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, Sierra Leone, Cambodia) have prosecuted only individuals.
The law against genocide is also partly to blame. It defines the crime narrowly and in a way that makes it difficult to prove. The Genocide Convention says that genocide requires a specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. (Protected groups are national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups.) As such means "destroy them because they are who they are, not for any other reason." To prove genocide, prosecutors thus have to show that a massacre was specifically intended to destroy the victims as a group—not to grab their land, or as part of a military strategy, or to teach rebels a lesson. If prosecutors can't make this showing, a large-scale ethnic massacre can still be a "war crime" or a "crime against humanity." But it's not a genocide. The legal definition has thus come loose from what the word means to everyone other than a handful of international lawyers, as I've argued in a recent article. Prosecutors in the Yugoslav Tribunal have seldom prosecuted for genocide, because the other crimes are invariably easier to prove. And the narrow definition has other bad effects. A couple of years ago, a U.N. commission concluded that Darfur wasn't a "genocide" because there was no evidence of specific intent to destroy the non-Arab "black" tribes in Darfur "as such." The result was reduced political pressure to do something about Darfur....