ICC Arrest Warrant for Putin

When people think of the ICC, they might imagine something like a court room drama where the war criminal is served justice in the most satisfying way. Sometimes it does. Other times, its complicated.

I think a lot of people heard about the ICC a few weeks ago when an ICC judge issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the Russian commissioner for children’s rights. But many people might not be familiar with what the ICC is, how it works, nor understand the significance of the arrest warrant against Putin and Belova. To do that, we need to go back to 1998.

The ICC was created by the adoption of an international treaty known as the Rome Statute in 1998. The Rome statute established the International Criminal Court, the first and only permanent international criminal court in history. The Rome Statute was called the Rome Statute because the treaty was ratified at a UN conference in Rome, Italy. The Rome Statute has 137 signatories and 123 ratified states. 

Signatories are states which basically announced their desire to ratify the treaty while ratified states are states that have, in fact, ratified the statute. Ratification legally binds the state party to the Rome Statute by internalizing the contents of the treaty through domestic legislation. Simply put, the legislative branch of a state government passes a law that recognizes the Rome Statute as domestic law. In this way, a mere international treaty becomes legally binding. 

There are 195 states in the world, and 123 of them ratified the Rome Statute, which is actually impressive. It means that the contents of the Rome statute strongly reflect the normative moral values of the world. 

Here are some notable states that are non-signatories and non-ratified: Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and last but not least, the United States of America. 

The ICC investigates potential crimes, prosecutes individuals, puts them on trial, and if found guilty are sentenced to prison. It has a full suite of judicial functions. The ICC is headquartered in the Hague of the Netherlands, so that's where the actual court proceedings occur. It has its own judges and prosecutors. It also ensures that the defendants have lawyers who are independent of the ICC. The ICC only prosecutes specific crimes according to the Rome Statute. As of now there are 4 types of crimes the ICC has jurisdiction over: War crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, Crime of genocide, and Crime of aggression. They are all pretty straight forward.

The ICC is a court of last resort. It is the ratified state that is primarily responsible for prosecuting individuals who perpetrate these types of crimes. Only when that state fails to do so, because it is unwilling or unable, does the ICC step in. Or you could be like the Philippines and just simply un-ratify the statute and reject the jurisdiction of the ICC, although the Filipino government failed to remember that the alleged crimes occurred while Philippines was still state party to the statute, thereby granting it jurisdiction.  States that are not signatories nor ratified can invite the ICC, providing temporary jurisdiction over their country, which is what Ukraine has done since the Russian Invasion.

And that's where the arrest warrant for Putin comes in. The office of the Prosecutor applied for an arrest warrant for President Putin and Maria Belova for the unlawful deportation and unlawful transfer of population, especially children, from Ukraine to Russia. Simply put, Russia is accused of kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children. 

Once an arrest warrant is issued, it lasts forever. So, if Putin steps foot in the territory of a state party to the Rome Statute, he can be arrested and transferred to the court in Hague. Which is why he won’t do that. Then what was the point?

I don’t think the ICC prosecutors nor the judge who issued the arrest warrant realistically expected Putin to be arrested. Putin is never going to appear in the Hague voluntarily to defend himself, nor is anyone going to send a team of law enforcement agents to arrest Putin in Russia for numerous reasons, which is roughly about 6000 of them (nukes). Also, the ICC does not have law enforcement agents of its own.

The arrest warrant is symbolically significant. The thing about international law is that because there isn’t a super government that governs all the nation states of the world much like how a government that governs the individual citizens of a nation state, there is no dedicated law enforcement agency for international law. No one forced the 123 states to ratify the Rome statute. They did it because they wanted to, because they believed that the values codified in the treaty are desirable. So, when the ICC, an organization officiated by 123 states to represent their collective moral opposition to the most reprehensible crimes in the world, issues an arrest warrant against Putin, it's not insignificant. 

Imagine a bully in high school. It's one thing for individual students to call out the bully, but it's another for the majority of the students to form a student organization that publicly accuses him of bullying and releases a newsletter to the faculty and parents outlining actions of the bully and calling for an investigative committee. That's hardcore. 

That is probably why Putin seemed very upset at the ICC warrant, more so than the news of middling results of his war in Ukraine, or the news that Finland joined NATO. 

Putin won’t be marched into a court of justice anytime soon. That’s disappointing.

But it does mean that in the tribe of nation states on the planet of earth, Putin is now suspected by the majority as a criminal.