Human Rights? What a Good Idea! From Universal Jurisdiction to Crime Prevention

FEIERSTEIN, DANIEL

Genocide Studies and Prevention

University of South Florida

Lugar: South Florida; Año: 2019 vol. 13 p. 9 - 20

1911-0359

One of humanity?s greatest achievements in the last century has been the creation of international courts of law to judge those responsible for state crimes such as genocide. These courts were originally a response to the wholesale destruction of European societies by the Nazis during WorldWar II. The human rights conventions which proliferated in the post-war period attempted to create an effective universal jurisdiction to limit the punitive power of the state, especially where large numbers of the civilian population were involved.The doctrine of universal jurisdiction grew out of the realization that certain state crimes destroyed the social fabric to such an extent that they were unlikely to be prosecuted in the territory where they had been committed. The only way of bringing the perpetrators to justice would be to start legal proceedings in international or regional courts or in the national courts of other countries. This, of course, was no easy task, but universal jurisdiction offered new hope to the victims of genocide and massacres by establishing that such crimes were no longer subject to amnesties or statutes of limitations.But the different attempts to prosecute and punish state crimes in InternationalTribunals have gradually evolved into a self-referential system that tends to invalidate or ignore national courts in favor of a new international criminal justice approach. Instead of complementing the work of national courts, these new international institutions have gradually transformed themselves into the main instruments for prosecuting human rights violations. This has happeneddespite their frequent ignorance of the history, language and culture of the countries concerned. The result is an inefficient and self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has significantly altered the original intention behind universal jurisdiction.However, the inefficiency of the ICC is less dangerous than the discourse of prevention that has developed parallel to it. Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of universal jurisdiction has shifted from prosecuting State crimes, which would otherwise go unpunished, to military intervention to ?prevent? crimes before they are committed. The worst example was the United Nations attack on Libya in 2011 in response to reports of ?possible? crimes against humanity ? attacks for which the UN invoked the new international principle of ?responsibility to protect? (R2P), approved in 2005. In fact, the attacks plunged Libya into anarchy, producing many more deaths than they were intended to prevent. Unfortunately, the clamor for ?intervention? comes not only from diplomats, politicians and the mass media but ? more alarmingly ? from manygenocide and human rights scholars and activists.This paper critically evaluates the use of international laws designed to punish genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity as legitimations for military intervention to prevent disasters that have not yet occurred. In other words, it deals with the thorny issue of atrocity prevention.It argues that the legitimation of ?pre-emptive? killing, far from defending human rights, has become yet another way to violate them. Indeed, the ?responsibility to protect? is being used to ensure control of oil and gas resources and geopolitical enclaves where previous discourses (e.g.the Cold War and the War on Terror) have lost their efficacy. It contrasts levels of violence in hotspots around the world with calls to protect civilian populations, and shows that intervention does not reduce violence and often achieves the opposite effect.