The tyranny of ‘international justice’

My report for spiked on a conference that cross-examined the prosecution of presidents by international tribunals.

Should sitting heads of state be liable to prosecution by international tribunals?  That was the question at the heart of ‘Prosecuting Presidents’, a conference organised by the Royal United Services Institute and the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis in London last Friday.  The event presented a refreshingly open and critical debate about the role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the problems of pursuing ‘international justice’, but it also highlighted the fact that the various criticisms raised against the court are often contradictory.

Some of the criticism of the ICC came from surprising quarters.  In his opening keynote, ‘The charge of the law brigade’, Guardian journalist Jonathan Steele described the ICC’s recent decision to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan as an act of folly.  Arguing that it had been a ‘major setback’ to peace negotiations, Steele called for the United Nations Security Council to suspend the warrant.  Politics, he said, should trump law, since peace is more important than justice.

The next speaker was Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, formerly the lead prosecutor in the trial of President Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  More recently, however, Nice has been involved with an attempt – supported by leaders of Sudanese tribal groups said to be victims of genocide – to persuade the ICC judges not to issue the warrant against Bashir (1).  Telling us that ‘nobody should want to be ruled by lawyers’, Nice made a number of sharp criticisms of international courts, highlighting their potential for corruption and vulnerability to outside pressure; their rule-bending and relentless publicity-seeking; and the mediocrity of their personnel, chosen for political rather than meritocratic reasons.  Nice also attacked the ‘impertinence’ of Western lawyers and judges who assume superiority over those they prosecute, observing that the ICTY has no interest in the history, culture or even the humanity of the people it prosecutes.

Such was the critical tone of the opening sessions that Abdullahi El-Tom – representing Darfur’s rebel Justice and Equality Movement – seemed slightly incredulous that, as the sixth speaker of the day, he was the first to take an unambiguously positive view of the ICC.  El-Tom argued that it would be immoral to require the people of Darfur to live under a ‘war criminal’, and claimed that ‘genocide continues’ via the Sudanese government’s expulsion of aid workers from Darfur. His arguments and evidence were challenged from the floor by representatives from the Sudanese Embassy, who in turn raised allegations of war crimes against the rebels.

Yet the more powerful challenge came from El-Tom’s fellow panellist, Lam Akol Ajawin, a Sudanese member of parliament and former minister.  Ajawin spoke as a representative of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, an organisation which was at war with Bashir’s government for 16 years.  Arguing that regime change was the unstated agenda behind the indictment of Bashir, Ajawin pointed out that the regime had already changed significantly since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement which ended the civil war in the south.  Outside intervention, as sought by the Darfur rebels, would only prolong conflict and instability, he argued.  Like a number of other speakers, Ajawin also observed that by indicting the leader of a state which did not recognise the court, the ICC was violating its own rules; and he noted that in a recent interview chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo appeared to advocate the use of legally dubious methods to arrest Bashir (2).

The argument that in prosecuting Bashir the ICC has jeopardised peace efforts is undoubtedly a powerful one, but it raises an important matter of principle.  Should the law be applied selectively, to take account of political circumstances?  Many – including the ICC itself – would argue that it should not, and that a selective application of justice would undermine the universality of treatment which the law presumes.

Several of the African speakers at the conference raised the opposite objection: that in targeting only African countries the ICC is already highly selective in its application of ‘justice’.  ‘Give Africa a chance’, said Silas Chekera, a defence lawyer at the Special Court for Sierra Leone.  Chekera did not reject international tribunals outright, but simply called for them not to be imposed.  Instead, he argued, African governments should be able to call on institutions such as the ICC if wanted, but in other circumstances should be free to choose a different route, such as a truth and reconciliation commission, an amnesty, or local dispute-resolution mechanisms.

Similarly, Millius Palayiwa, registrar at Christ Church, Oxford, called for ‘African solutions for African problems’.  Arguing that the humiliation of Sudan’s head of state is a humiliation of the country and of Africa as a whole, Palayiwa angrily rejected what he described as ‘organised hypocrisy, orchestrated double standards, and a refusal by the Western world to see and treat Africans as equals’.

Yet while criticism of the ICC for choosing so far only to focus on Africa is compelling, it seems more an argument for reform than an in-principle objection.  As London School of Economics professor Tim Allen pointed out, ‘most criticisms of the ICC are really assertions that it should be able to do more’.  Many critics of the ICC’s double standards implied that, were it to bring an indictment against Israel or the US, the court would be far less problematic.

It was striking that speakers on the panel on Zimbabwe – the only one not to feature any critics of the ICC – saw no problem with calling for the indictment of President Robert Mugabe, despite all the criticism of Bashir’s indictment aired in earlier sessions.  Zimbabwean lawyer Derek Matyszak argued that the country’s justice system had become so compromised and corrupted that it was beyond reform: justice had to come from outside.  Wilf Mbanga, editor of The Zimbabwean, said that Mugabe’s government had ‘forfeited’ its sovereignty and could not ‘hide behind’ it.  If so, it was suggested from the floor, perhaps the logical next step would be for African heads of state to be appointed by the UN Security Council.  Bizarrely, the panellists denied that in calling for the indictment of a head of state they were effectively advocating regime change.

Two speakers at the conference made a more radical case against the ICC: John Laughland, author of a number of books on international tribunals, and Marc Glendenning, a member of the Libertarian Alliance and the director of ICC Watch.  Laughland examined the history of prosecutions of heads of state, arguing that the very fact of such a trial is itself a sign that a new political order is coming into being, since ‘prosecutorial power is political power’.  His main historical reference point was the post-war Nuremburg trial of Nazi leaders, which, he pointed out, was not an international tribunal with universal jurisdiction as is often claimed.  Rather, Nuremburg demonstrated that the power of prosecution is an attribute of sovereignty, since the wartime Allies were the de facto political authority after Germany’s unconditional surrender.

Seen in this light, complaints that the ICC is both politically selective in choosing its targets and insensitive to political circumstances can be understood as two sides of the same problem: the disconnection between institutions of ‘international justice’ and any framework of political accountability.  Within a democratic nation-state, the people’s elected representatives set the framework of law, which is then supposed to be applied equally to all citizens.  What is different about the ICC, as Mahmmood Mamdani has argued, is that it forces people to ‘contend with a legal regime in which the very notion of human rights law is defined outside of a political process … that includes them as meaningful participants.’ (3)

Glendenning developed this idea by locating the establishment of the ICC as part of a broader trend toward ‘postmodern governance’, a shift which he characterised as a ‘political counter-Enlightenment’.  Whereas in the modern era rulers were accountable to the ruled, today the elite is isolated from the demos, more concerned with technical ‘governance’ than with genuine self-government.  Modernity saw the rise of the concept of democratic, collective sovereignty and tended towards anti-imperialism, Glendenning argued, contrasting this with the way that figures such as European Commission president José Manuel Barroso now use the language of empire (4).  He concluded by calling for a ‘new anti-imperialist politics’.

Yet as someone once said, anti-imperialism begins at home.  It would be mistaken to think that supra-national institutions such as the ICC or the European Union are the source, rather than only a symptom, of the problems which affect national polities.  Nor should we forget that modernity produced imperialism, as well as anti-imperialism.  Societies which valued their own sovereignty also opened up the possibility of a critique of the denial of sovereignty to others.  Today, if it is widely accepted that prosecuting African leaders accused of war crimes is the ‘moral’ thing to do, this reflects the close relationship between our own sense of ourselves as autonomous, rights-bearing subjects and our ability to see others in the same light.

(1) Application on behalf of Citizens’ Organisations of The Sudan, 11 January 2009 (pdf)

(2) Arlene Getz, Rocking The Courtroom, Newsweek, 30 March 2009

(3) Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, New York, Pantheon Books, 2009, p288

(4) Bruno Waterfield, Barroso hails the European ‘empire’, Daily Telegraph, 18 July 2007

Links:

Prosecuting Presidents conference programme (pdf)

ICC Watch

Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies Working Papers

Published today, 30 March 2009, at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6410/

The rise of the laptop bombardier

Journalists and editors did more than simply cheer NATO’s bombing of Belgrade: they wrote the script for it.

Do you remember Mark Laity? Ten years ago he was on British television virtually every evening, covering the Kosovo conflict from NATO headquarters in Brussels for the BBC. Described by Robert Fisk as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’ (1), Laity faithfully relayed the claims of NATO spokesman Jamie Shea on the nightly news. Far too faithfully: after the war Laity quit his post as defence correspondent and went to work for NATO as Shea's deputy.

Identifying so closely with an official spokesman that you want to work for him is unusual, but it is emblematic of the way that many journalists embraced NATO's cause as their own. Explaining ‘Why Kosovo matters’, the Guardian said it was ‘a test for our generation’ (26 March 1999); columnist Polly Toynbee, describing Nato bombing as an act of ‘chivalry’ which could usher in a ‘new ethical world order’, said the war was a ‘test of our resolve to lay new foundations for policing tyranny’ (12 April).

As such comments suggest, for many commentators the significance of NATO bombing lay in what it said about the West. The war ‘blooded Tony Blair’, enthused the Independent, claiming that it showed he was ‘developing into a national leader of stature’ (12 June 1999). Similarly, the Guardian’s Martin Walker hailed the ‘potent generation of leaders’ who ‘lost their military virginity’ in Kosovo (7 June). In particular, the war was supposed to demonstrate what Walker called the ‘potent legacy’ of European values. The Independent’s Anne McElvoy gushed that the war would uphold ‘Western ideals’ and would help to create ‘a wider sense of what it means to be a European’ (24 March); in the Guardian Hugo Young predicted that ‘the value of “Europe” will be proved … decisively by the Balkan outcome’ (3 June). 

The claim that the US-led bombing was somehow a confirmation of European values chimed with the statements of NATO leaders. As the missiles rained down, Blair said he felt that ‘Europe is…a better place than it was before the military action began’ (The Times, 5 June), while NATO’s then secretary-general, Javier Solana, said the war was ‘a defining moment … for the kind of Europe we wish to live in at the beginning of the 21st century’ (Daily Mail, 14 April). Yet in elaborating on these themes, journalists were more than mere mouthpieces for official propaganda: in their coverage of the earlier war in Bosnia, reporters had already written NATO’s script for Kosovo. 

Rather than simply reporting on the 1992—1995 conflict between Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims, many Western journalists had taken sides in the Bosnian war, agitating for tougher military intervention against the Serbs. Former BBC correspondent Martin Bell famously coined the term ‘journalism of attachment’ to describe this selective and emotive style of reporting which, he said, would not ‘stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor’ (2). By 1999 Bell’s formula had become Blair’s explanation of Nato’s bombing as ‘a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship’ (Sunday Telegraph, 4 April 1999). 

Having felt frustrated for most of the Bosnian war at the West’s pusillanimity, the laptop bombardiers of the press corps were thrilled by the idea, in 1999, that NATO was finally going to fight a proper war against the Serbs. Recalling with shame how Western troops in Bosnia had been ‘forced … to scuttle around in armoured personnel carriers, dealing out charity’, the Independent hoped that ‘Now that humiliation may be over’ (25 March). Working themselves up at the sight of Western ‘potency’, liberal broadsheets started baying for blood. Even before the bombing started, the Guardian decided that ‘Air strikes are not enough’ and called for a ‘full-scale use of conventional force’ (19 March). And later, as NATO widened its targeting to take in civilian infrastructure, the paper demanded a ‘less conversational kind of war’, complaining that too few people were getting killed because: ‘We practically ring up the Serbs to tell them attacks are on the way so that they can get everybody out of the buildings’ (5 April). 

Such was their enthusiasm for war that the media were incapable of accurately reporting the preceding diplomatic shenanigans that provided its justification. Western-brokered talks were portrayed as a genuine effort to resolve the long-running conflict between Serbs and Kosovo Albanians. Yet these ‘negotiations’ presented a pre-ordained ‘agreement’, with an ultimatum to the Serbs that refusal to sign would trigger bombing. According to then US State Department spokesman James Rubin, the aim was ‘to create clarity … as to which side was the cause of the problem … and that meant the Kosovar Albanians agreeing to the package and the Serbs not agreeing to the package.’ (3) 

Initially, however, the Kosovo Albanians refused to sign, since the plan did not offer them full independence; whereas the Serbs accepted the political agreement, though arguing that it should be implemented by the United Nations rather than Nato. While diplomats worked on persuading the Kosovo Albanian delegation to accept the draft agreement, its terms were changed in ways which ensured its unacceptability to the Serbs. As a State Department official told journalists at the time, the US ‘deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept’ because they ‘needed … a little bombing to see reason.’ (4) 

As the bombing began, it was presented as a measure to prevent a refugee crisis. Rubin insisted that if Nato had not acted, ‘you would have had hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border’, and Blair declared: ‘fail to act now … [and we] would have to deal with … hundreds of thousands of refugees.’ (5) Once hundreds of thousands did indeed flee, Nato side-stepped this potential public relations disaster by insisting that the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovo Albanians was the result of a premeditated policy and would therefore have happened anyway. Right on cue, secret documents outlining just such a Serbian plan – codenamed ‘Operation Horseshoe’ – were revealed by the German government. 

This supposed ‘blueprint for genocide’ was exposed as a fake concocted by the German intelligence services – but only after the war (6). At the time, with a few honourable exceptions, journalists enthusiastically repeated and amplified NATO’s claims about genocide in Kosovo. Most needed little prompting, since they had already made up their minds that the Serbs were the new Nazis. Just as they had in Bosnia, reporters found ‘a horrific echo of the wartime Holocaust’ in Kosovo (Mirror, 1 April). On the same day that the Mirror was reporting ‘Nazi style terror’, the Sun heard ‘chilling echoes of the Holocaust’, the Guardian discovered ‘grim new echoes of Nazi horrors’, The Times described ‘genocidal operations in Kosovo’, and in the Independent, David Aaronovitch said that ‘when you examine the views of the man and woman on the Belgrade tram, it is easier to see how so many Germans in the Thirties bought the Joseph Goebbels version of the world.’ 

Like Aaronovitch, many explicitly demonised the Serbian people as a whole, rather than only their leaders. The Telegraph’s Patrick Bishop suggested that ‘“Serb” is a synonym for “barbarian”’ (26 March), the Sun said they should be ‘shot like wild dogs’ (14 April), and in the New Statesman Steve Crawshaw claimed that ‘many millions of Serbs’ had ‘become liars on a grand scale or gone mad, or both’ (31 May). In the same spirit, BBC Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman proposed a programme of ‘thoroughgoing imposed de-Nazification’ for post-war Serbia (29 April). 

At the end of the war, the BBC’s Paul Wood proclaimed that ‘for the Western allies, the steadily accumulating evidence of atrocities will be confirmation that this was a just war’ (Newsnight, 14 June). In fact the evidence did not bear out NATO claims that 10,000, or 100,000, or even more had been killed by Serbian forces. The true number of dead appears to have been closer to 5,000 – a figure which includes combatants as well as civilians, Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians (7). Yet even if all the atrocity stories had been true, it is hard to see how this would have justified the war, since the allegations related to the period when Nato was already bombing. 

Somehow journalists ‘forgot’ that there had been no refugee crisis or humanitarian disaster until Nato started bombing. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen explained that ‘Nato went to war so the refugees could come back to Kosovo’ (16 June), and Channel 4’s Alex Thompson crowed about ‘the success of the US policy’: ‘After all, the President fought this war so that these people could go home in peace’ (22 June). It was with some justification that the Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane boasted of how ‘it was the press reporting of the Bosnian war and the Kosovar refugee crisis that gave [Blair] the public support and sympathy he needed to fight the good fight against [Slobodan] Milosevic.’ (8) 

In promoting the case for war in 1999, journalists advanced many of the same arguments later made by Western leaders for invading Iraq, such as the idea that military action by a ‘coalition of the willing’ would uphold UN authority rather than undermining it. The Guardian complained that the UN’s ‘constitution is a recipe for inaction’ (26 March), while the Independent endorsed Blair’s assertion that ‘when the international community agrees certain objectives and then fails to implement them, those that can act, must’ (26 March). 

Indeed, in 1999 the Independent pointed to the example of Iraq as an argument in favour of intervention in Kosovo, comparing critics of NATO bombing to ‘those who say that the sanction Saddam Hussein should face for trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction is a telling-off’ (22 March). Back then it seemed so self-evident that Iraq ought to be bombed that this could be offered as a clinching argument in favour of also bombing Serbia. Today, the Iraq war has few defenders, but Kosovo is still widely regarded as a successful and ‘moral’ intervention. For that, we have the media to thank.

(1) Robert Fisk, Taken in by the NATO line, Independent, 29 June 1999

(2) Martin Bell, The Journalism of Attachment, in Matthew Kieran (ed.) Media Ethics, Routledge, 1998, p16 

(3) Moral Combat: Nato at War, BBC2, 12 March 2000 

(4) George Kenney, Rolling Thunder: The Rerun, The Nation, 14 June 1999

(5) BBC News, 25, 26 March 1999 

(6) John Goetz and Tom Walker, Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake, says general, Sunday Times, 2 April 2000 

(7) UNMIK Office of Missing Persons and Forensics, Press Release, 3 February 2003

(8) Charles Glass, Hacks versus Flacks: Tales from the Depths, Z Magazine, 1 August 1999

Published today, 24 March 2009, at: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6386/ 

Indicting Bashir won’t bring peace or justice

Predictably, the ICC’s arrest warrant for Sudan’s president has created a backlash against aid workers and crippled hopes of an end to war.

The recent decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, over his and his allies’ actions in Darfur, has been widely understood as illustrating the difficult tension between justice and peace (1). In reality, the ICC’s decision has little to do with either peace or justice in Sudan. Rather, it is about asserting the moral authority of the court and its Western sponsors.

At first glance, Khartoum’s condemnation of the court as a ‘mechanism of neo-colonialist policy used by the West’ may seem off target (2). The ICC itself lacks any means of enforcement and no-one else looks set to send in the gendarmes. Three of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (Russia, China and the United States) have not even ratified the treaty establishing the court. In contrast to their more gung-ho attitude on Darfur when they were out of office, leading figures in Barack Obama’s administration now appear cautious, and Western diplomats reportedly acknowledge privately that ‘the warrant could compound an already “difficult and complicated situation” in Sudan’ by derailing shaky peace agreements (3). 

Concerns about the impact of the arrest warrant on peace negotiations are well founded. One of the main rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement, which last month agreed to peace talks, reacted to the ICC’s decision by rejecting any further negotiation with the Khartoum government (4). Any peace agreement must depend on compromise between the parties – but by lending moral support to the Darfur rebels and criminalising the government, the ICC and other international actors have made any such conciliation far less likely. Perhaps even worse, in signalling that the government of Sudan is not a legitimate negotiating partner, the ICC’s decision may also sabotage the fragile agreement which ended the decades-long conflict in southern Sudan (5). 

None of this is surprising; the ICC has form in this area. In Uganda, where the ICC indicted the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army, the government asked that the court’s charges be dropped in order to facilitate a peace settlement. (6) In committing the same error in Sudan, the ICC seems to think it can act with impunity, pursuing its indictments and warrants regardless of their impact on weak and unstable states. 

For the ICC and its supporters, the idea that the court is above practical political considerations is a point of pride. When asked about the impact of the arrest warrant on the peace process in Sudan, ICC spokesperson Laurence Blairon insisted that ‘The findings of the judges are made on purely legal criteria. This is really important – the court is not a political institution. It speaks the language of the law.’ (7) 

Yet the problem is not simply that the court does not stoop to concern itself with the real world of politics in the states targeted by its prosecutions. In the case of Sudan, disrupting peace negotiations appears to have been intentional, rather than just an accidental side-effect of the indictment of Bashir. In a recent interview, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, argued: ‘We need negotiations, but if Bashir is indicted, he is not the person to negotiate with. Mr Bashir could not be an option for [negotiations on] Darfur, or, in fact, for the South. I believe negotiators have to learn how to adjust to the reality. The court is a reality.’ (8) 

As Sudan adjusts to the new reality, the most immediate effect of the arrest warrant has been to prompt the government to expel foreign aid workers, worsening the situation for refugees from conflict in Darfur. To some observers, this is simply further evidence of the wickedness of the Khartoum regime, but Moreno-Ocampo surely bears at least some responsibility. As seasoned Sudan analysts Julie Flint and Alex de Waal note, the prosecutor has repeatedly hinted that he obtained the information for his indictment of Bashir from humanitarian agencies (9). Moreno-Ocampo’s careless, high-handed conduct does not show that he is somehow above mundane political considerations, but that the ICC’s agenda is shaped by the politics of the West. 

Advocates of the ICC claim that the local peace process cannot succeed and that long-term peace can only be brought about by ‘justice’ imposed from without (10).  No wonder that in Africa the ICC is widely seen as a neo-colonial institution.  The idea that weaker states must be regulated and policed by the ‘international community’ has provided the justification for Western wars and interventions from Somalia at the start of the 1990s to Iraq a decade later. 

The proposition is always packaged in the most strident moral rhetoric and, in arguing for the prosecution of Bashir, Moreno-Ocampo has acted more like a propagandist than a lawyer, making unfounded claims about ‘ongoing genocide’ and comparing the Sudanese government to the Nazis (11). Moreno-Ocampo has also exaggerated the extent of the violence, claiming that genocide claimed 5,000 lives a month in Darfur during 2008, when the true figure for violent deaths, according to the UN, was 150 a month, more than half of them soldiers, militiamen, rebels or others engaged in armed conflict (12). 

In a decade which has seen the Middle East torn apart by violence, the worst of it initiated by the US and its allies, the ICC has chosen to focus exclusively on conflicts in Africa. Evidently the court still operates according to the principle expounded by the late Robin Cook, Britain’s Foreign Secretary when the ICC was being established, who ventured: ‘If I may say so, this is not a court set up to bring to book prime ministers of the United Kingdom or presidents of the United States’. (13) 

Double standards are now so well ingrained that they pass virtually unnoticed: one commentator recently urged President Obama to seek a ‘guarantee that American soldiers and officials will not be the target of political prosecutions’, in order that the US could ratify the court’s founding treaty (14).  It seems that only hypothetical prosecutions against Western governments are regarded as inevitably ‘political’, whereas actual prosecutions targeting weak states are seen as impartial justice. 

Such thinking exposes the fiction of ‘international law’ as it is currently understood: it is supposed to operate independently of political realities, but in fact simply serves to obscure the sources of power and the inequalities between states. This is how activists can become convinced that they are ‘anti-war’ as they call for Western troops to be sent ‘Out of Iraq, Into Darfur’. Indeed, the ICC’s indictment of a sitting head of state even rehabilitates the notion of ‘regime change’, so discredited by the Iraq war, by re-presenting it as the pursuit of justice. 

(1) Amber Henshaw, Will warrant tip Sudan into abyss?, BBC, 4 March 2009 

(2) World reaction: Bashir warrant, BBC, 4 March 2009 

(3) Simon Tisdall, What now for Bashir?, Guardian, 4 March 2009 

(4) Marlise Simons and Neil Macfarquhar, Court Issues Arrest Warrant for Sudan’s Leader, New York Times, 4 March 2009 

(5) Alex de Waal, What Should Obama Do About Darfur?,New Republic, 5 March 2009 

(6) See International tribunals: not fit for purpose?, by David Chandler 

(7) David Charter, ICC issues war crimes arrest warrant for President al-Bashir of Sudan, The Times (London), 4 March 2009 

(8) Prosecuting Sudan, Foreign Policy, February 2009 

(9) Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, To put justice before peace spells disaster for Sudan, Guardian, 6 March 2009 

(10) The Enough Project, What the Warrant Means, 12 February 2009 

(11) Sudan: an indictment of liberal intervention, by Tara McCormack 

(12) Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, To put justice before peace spells disaster for Sudan, Guardian, 6 March 2009 

(13) More to it than Milosevic, by Mick Hume 

(14) James Bone, America’s day in court, thanks to Omar al-Bashir?, The Times (London), 4 March 2009

Published today, 12 March 2009, at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6346/