The World

I thought the FT leader on the Goldstone report got it about right. The report on Israel’s assault on Gaza is a serious bit of work and it’s fairly desperate to try to discredit it by calling its author a “self-hating Jew”.

The bigger problem lies with the UN Human Rights Council – which is clearly unreasonably obsessed by Israel, given all the other worthy targets it could select.

And lying behind that, is a still bigger problem with the very idea of impartial international law.

I once had an opportunity to discuss the issue with Goldstone himself at a seminar on the International Criminal Court in London. I asked whether international law really deserved the same status as domestic law? After all, the very basis of justice in a nation-state is equality before the law – anybody who commits a murder should be arrested and prosecuted, no matter how powerful they are. But this basic principle does not apply in the international arena. Almost all the people hauled before the ICC have been African leaders; and the UN special tribunal on the former Yugoslavia (where Goldstone was chief prosecutor) only got to prosecute the likes of Milosevic because Serbia was defeated in a war.

There are those who argue that Russia has been guilty of war crimes in Chechnya; that the US committed war crimes in Iraq; and that China is in in violation of international law in Tibet. But we will never see these accusations tested in court, because  the countries involved are simply too powerful to prosecute.

I put this question to Goldstone. Unfortunately, here the anecdote loses some of its force, because I can’t remember what he said in reply. As far as I recall, he looked faintly embarrassed and said words to the effect that – well better to prosecute some crimes than none; the system is imperfect, but you have to start somewhere; over the long run, we might be able to get to universal jurisdiction etc etc…

These are all reasonable lines of argument. The trouble is that it means that the system of international law that we currently have is as much about power in the international system, as about human rights or the law. And so the fate of the Goldstone report will ultimately hang not on whether Israel really has committed war crimes, but on whether Israel is powerful enough to shrug off the report.