Potentially Explosive Slippery Slope of Indifference
On 17 July, Foreign Policy reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was to shut down the Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, first opened under Secretary Albright’s watch in 1997. The office, which provides policy advice to top figures at State, also plays a crucial diplomatic role on the subject of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide alongside other countries and the international criminal legal complex. The prospect of shutting this office down not only indicates an unwillingness and indifference in State to deal with these types of issues, but also reflects a troubling history of inaction by the United States and the rest of the world towards international criminal justice issues — however, such inaction could now be characteristic of the future.
Look back a hundred years: The world sat paralyzed as 19th and 20th century wars brought widespread chaos, tragedy, and mass atrocities — aspects of war that modern international criminal justice seeks to deter. Following the Second World War, the United States helped to build the United Nations (UN), which to this day makes great strides towards building a global community. Of course, this world order has its flaws, but we have lived without major wars like we saw in Europe for decades. Almost ironically, the contemporary actions of the United States undermine the very world order it helped to build.
Throughout the 20th century, the UN managed highs and lows regarding the issue of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. After World War II, UN bodies passed a convention on genocide and a Fourth Geneva Convention, which defined and codified war crimes. Unfortunately, there were many instances where they did not deter atrocities, and the world again sat paralyzed. For instance, the genocides in Rwanda and at Srebrenica in 1994 and 1995, respectively, were met with little immediate international reaction. Yet remember, of course, that it was in the wake of the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia that Secretary Albright’s State Department established the Office of Global Criminal Justice.
One of the office’s major goals is to work with the international criminal legal complex mostly located in The Hague. Among the many organizations that compose that complex include those that dealt with and continue to deal with the suspected and convicted war criminals from the conflicts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Another such organization is the International Criminal Court (ICC), a treaty-based court founded on the 1998 Rome Statute that the United States withdrew its signature from. In fact, American aversion to the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court continues to represent the United States’ hesitancy to stray into dealing with war criminals, most specifically to the Bush 43 and Obama presidencies.
In late 2016, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN and notorious ICC critic John R. Bolton penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Cracks in the International Criminal Court.” This article featured a number of points that referenced the Bush and Obama Administrations’ decisions to keep away from the Rome Statute and questioned the court’s legitimacy altogether. Bolton further makes an assertion on the world order, saying that “the world is not one civil society, like a real country, within which disputes are resolved peacefully under the rule of law.”
Bolton’s worldview is similar to that of our executive branch; at the end of May, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn asserted in an op-ed to The Wall Street Journal that President Trump had gone abroad in the mindset “that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” If the reported closure of the Office of Global Criminal Justice is true, it seems that this ideology has, in the first 200 days of the Trump Administration, seeped deep into the organizational depths of the Department of State. And if the Department cements itself in this ideology, America stands at risk of forsaking its place as a leader in the international community that it considers itself in competition with.
Furthermore, the American aversion to the ICC compounded with the apparent planned closing of the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice indicates a disturbing lack of compassion for victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, as well as an even more disturbing indifference to those alleged to have perpetrated those crimes. The United States helped to build a world order based on peace and justice after the Second World War. Now, it may be poised to turn back the clock to a time where inaction to international crime was commonplace. The onus lies with the Department of State to be, as it was previously, an active and responsible actor that does not treat its allies like competitors and does not stand indifferent to norms of international criminal law. For the sake of the credibility and sheer responsibility of the United States on the world stage, we must strive to make sure that America remains a global voice for justice through advocacy for this kind of Department.
Zach P. Schwartz is a Communications Intern at Truman National Security Project and a student at Brandeis University, studying International & Global Studies, Anthropology, Italian Studies, and Politics. Views expressed are his own.
