With the Russia-Ukraine war entering the third year (not to mention mass massacres elsewhere), an overwhelming question needs asking. Is the international community really interested in a rules-based world order?
The vast majority of the 193 nations of the world are, but the tyranny of the minority makes sure that it never gets done.
The League of Nations promised the world, well, the world, but it was killed off because it didn't serve the needs of a mighty few.
The United Nations came to replace it, but again a few made sure that it would only be for them. They sliced the UN into the all-bark-and-no-bite General Assembly and the law-making Security Council, where veto-wielding nations dictate what is right.
Ironically, the very same veto has come to maim the UNSC into inaction. The UNSC has been wrong for so long that it thinks it is right.
Clearly, it just doesn't know how to be just. Today, the UN is a walking dead. What else can it be?
Ironically, this and other international institutions were put together by nations ostensibly interested in ensuring a rules-based world order. Consider the case of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The Rome Statute that gives the ICC its legal life saw the light of the day because nations like the United States signed it, though former president George W. Bush "unsigned" it. But from the word go, the ICC seemed to have caught the UN's deadly virus.
During the leadership of its first chief prosecutor, mostly African leaders were tried, forcing many countries in the continent to withdraw from the ICC. The allegation that the ICC is only interested in hauling Africans to court is only partially true. The untold other half was that powerful nations were — and still are — stopping the ICC from going after them.
Today, it is no longer an untold story. The Guardian revealed yesterday that Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, allegedly threatened then ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning war crimes investigation.
Aiding the errant nations also is the concept of complementarity drafted into the Rome Statute, which prevents the ICC from being the first mover. National courts must first exhaust its jurisdiction before the ICC's kicks in.
Complementarity as a legal concept makes good sense in a Westphalian world of sovereign nations. Sadly, that is where good sense stops. Powerful nations and their allies either never do that or have municipal laws preventing international legal prosecution.
One more thing. The Rome Statute gives the UNSC an uncommon jurisdiction: it has the power to refer crimes that fall under the statute to the ICC. Little wonder that the first-ever UNSC referral to the ICC was for international war crimes allegedly committed in Sudan and not for ones in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
So long as the UNSC allows geopolitics to trump justice, it will never learn to be just. Without justice, there will only be impunity aka disorder.
The bullied and threatened nations of the world do not expect the international community to create a heaven on Earth, but they want it to at least prevent it from becoming a hell that it is for so many today.