The " Justice " enigma !

The word " Justice " means different things to different people.   Those who have just endured a vicious civil war and seen loved ones brutally killed are more likely to want the summary execution of those who ordered the killings.   In the rest of the world, the pedantic progress of indicted criminals through the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague offers a more civilized outcome.

We are still clearing up the atrocities that emerged from the Balkans wars when ethnic cleansing led to the wholesale murder of about eight thousand Muslin men and boys in Srebrenica in July, 1995.   One defendant - Slobodan Milosevic died of natural causes before his trial ended and the trials of Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic are either about to start or are progressing slowly.   In most cases, all these trials take years to reach a conclusion - and then comes the sentencing controversy.

The death penalty is not an option to judges in the International courts.   The heaviest penalty they can impose is a determined number of years of imprisonment, and that incarceration will be in a western prison with all the amenities that the United Nations decrees must be available to prisoners.   It certainly bears no relations to the suffering they imposed on their victims when they held the reigns of power and dictated life or death decisions.

Just such a controversy involves Said Al-Islam, son of Libyan dictator Mummar Gaddafi.   The world body demands that he be tried and sentenced in the ICC.  The rebels who emerged victorious in Libya say he will get a fair trial in the country in which he committed his crimes - and the death penalty is a possible punishment if the court so decides.   It is heading into a clash between the right of the International Criminal Court to prevail over the jurisdiction of the court system in individual countries.

So far, no hard and fast law exists.   It is up to each country to make it's own decisions on whether to hand over criminals to the ICC when the world body decides that the crime is of such magnitude that it deserves an international judgement.    Waiting in the wings are legions of cases where rape and murder have been inflicted on civilian populations by those trying to impose religious or political oppression by force of arms.

Civil war is still raging in Syria.   Eventually, it will come to a conclusion and then the winner will try and inflict punishment on those who formed the opposition.   Whether the rebels or the government is the winner, the losers will pay a heavy price.  It is a fact of life that in war - the victor gets to write the history book.

The United Nations could probably declare the ICC paramount if the General Assembly voted along those lines, but getting the world to respect it's decisions is another matter.  As long as just five nations hold the power of veto, it is a very uneven chamber.

The difficulty in resolving the Syrian massacre illustrates this point !