Dn a framework document published on 30 November, the European Commission seemed in turn to take a stand in favor of setting up a special court to judge the Russian leaders responsible for the aggression against Ukraine. This is originally a strong request from kyiv, relayed by many personalities, in particular in a column published by The world on March 4, and carried by several pilot States.
Such a plea is of course perfectly understandable.
What are, at first sight, worth, the efforts undertaken before national courts and before the International Criminal Court (ICC) if these cannot deal with the crime of aggression [« La CPI n’est pas compétente pour le crime d’agression commis par des ressortissants d’un Etat qui n’a pas ratifié le statut de Rome instituant la CPI, ce qui est le cas de la Russie »] ? A central piece is missing from the mobilized judicial ecosystem when the very decision to use force, in clear violation of the United Nations Charter, escapes human justice.
Aggression is a bit like the crime that includes all the others, the matrix of abuses denounced on the spot. And, in this world undergoing major strategic recomposition, there are values whose transgression cannot go unanswered. Either. But proposing a special court – a first since Nuremberg [1945-1946] – nevertheless remains a tricky initiative politically and judicially uncertain.
Anti-Westernism
Tricky, first, in view of the double standard it reveals. Supporting justice on the menu and not on the menu has a cost, it would be wrong to be indifferent to it. Some will find it easy to oppose the passivity of the ” International community “ in the expected reactions to other manifestly illicit offensives, whether against Iraq or against Palestine, to take just two well-known examples.
Anti-Westernism feeds on this selective indignation, multilateralism is dying of it. The South regularly argues this, at the United Nations and in other forums. Everyone understands, moreover, that many of the powers of the North are uncomfortable with the promotion of such a jurisdiction, they who had worked so hard to restrict the jurisdiction of the ICC with regard to the crime of aggression and to ensure that it cannot easily seize it without the States involved having accepted the principle. It was then necessary to protect external operations, to guard against any strategic use of the law. Who would be ready to assume a reversal and then to support elsewhere the freedom that he grants himself here?
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