Bad People

the African Union, from which position he was able to lobby against the ICC and to encourage a safe passage through Africa of al-Bashir, after he was indicted for genocide in Darfur.
But Gaddafi’s behaviour was so atrocious that by 2011 he had no powerful friends left – his crazed ramblings at the UN were an excruciating embarrassment to all the other world leaders. When ‘Arab Spring’ protests broke out in Libya in 2011, he ordered troops to march to liquidate the ‘rats’ of Benghazi in order to ‘purify all decisions from these cockroaches’.6 It cannot be doubted that they would have done so had NATO not commenced its attacks. His overthrow (if not his death) was a classic example of how the international community has a ‘responsibility to protect’. That is precisely what startled Russia and China, and they seem to have learnt from it never to cast their votes (or even their abstention) again so as to favour any reference to the ICC.
THE ICC IS VETOED
The problem of ICC vetoes became clear from the fate – in fact, the lack of it – of President Assad of Syria. In the immediate aftermath of resolutions 1970 and 1973, and demanding the benefit of an international justice that actually seemed to exist, protesters took to the streets of Damascus, with those banners demanding ‘al-Assad to The Hague’. Over that year, Assad had thousands of them gunned down and suffered no reprisal. Eight years later, after attacks on his people by an army that killed them with machine guns, tanks and sometimes poison gas, the death toll was estimated to be over 400,000 (with millions more driven to seek refuge abroad) but the UN Security Council had done absolutely nothing. Russia needed Assad to guarantee its navy access to their Syrian seaport on the Mediterranean, and it threatened to veto any move (one was made in 2016 by the UK) to refer the Assad regime to the ICC. Assad’s wife, a privately educated English woman, has continued to order from expensive Paris couturiers throughout his murderous rule, which has now wrested back control of the country from Western-supported rebels as well as from ISIS. Although human rights groups have amassed evidence of his regime’s crimes against humanity, there is no court to which they could take it – Syria has not ratified the ICC treaty, so its jurisdiction could only be triggered by a Security Council referral, forever stymied by the Russian veto. The lesson of Assad’s impunity is that international justice will never be visited upon the leaders of a country which has the support of one of the five Security Council superpowers, whether through political alliances or strategic advantages or agreements to exploit natural resources.
This means the ICC has notably failed to convict any state political leader – its main targets have been rebel warlords with brutal militias in central Africa. In the post-Gaddafi period, the ICC has

UN Security Council unanimously, if unwittingly, authorised a regime change in Libya. It did not do so in terms, of course, but Resolution 1970 imposed an arms embargo, a travel ban on Libya’s most powerful state officials and a freeze on the oil-rich assets of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his sons. Then, momentously, the Security Council referred the situation in Libya to the ICC prosecutor, with the support of Russia, China and the United States. This was historic because it was the first time (and, sadly, may be the last) that the ‘big five’ agreed to an ICC reference (in the case of Darfur, although the United States had proposed it, the US abstained on the vote, as of course did China and Russia – it was carried by the votes of the UK and France, and the non-permanent members). A few weeks later, as Gaddafi ignored the UN and his troops advanced on Benghazi, the Security Council (this time with China and Russia abstaining but not vetoing) passed Resolution 1973 authorising member states operating through NATO ‘to take all necessary measures to protect citizens under threat of attack’.
As Gaddafi’s vengeful troops closed in on Benghazi, it became evident that the measure necessary – indeed essential – to protect Libya’s citizens was to remove the dictator. The resolution gave no explicit mandate to use force, but President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy issued a joint statement: ‘Colonel Gaddafi must go, and go for good.’5 It was an invitation to tyrannicide. A NATO jet struck a convoy in which Gaddafi was travelling, and a group of rebels found him cowering in a roadside tunnel. They beat him, threw him across the bonnet of his jeep, and rammed an iron pipe through his sphincter. ‘What you are doing is not permitted’ were his last words before they shot him in the head.
The crimes of Colonel Gaddafi are far too many to list. Since assuming dictatorial powers in Libya in 1969, he had directed the assassination of ‘stray dogs’ – his opponents – wherever in the world they resided. He set up training camps for terrorist movements, from the Baader–Meinhof gang to the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization, and his oil wealth bought the Semtex that he donated to the IRA, which was then used to blow up Lord Mountbatten and for other atrocities. He provided training for Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh before their depredations in Sierra Leone, and his intelligence services blew up two jets loaded with passengers – the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie and an Air France plane over Niger. His greatest crime against humanity in Libya came in 1996, when he and his intelligence chief (his brother-in-law, Abdullah al-Senussi) arranged the slaughter of 1,276 prisoners, mainly political dissidents, at Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison. Gaddafi got away with all of these murders because of his wealth and his African political alliances – in 2009 he was, to its disgrace, elected as chairman of

by threatening to punish their perpetrators.
THE ICC
This delusion was bolstered by the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002, to which most states in the world adhered. The George W. Bush administration, although adamant that the court should never indict an American, asked the Security Council to put Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in its dock for directing genocide in Darfur. The court was invited by a number of African countries to investigate human rights atrocities, in Uganda (committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army) and in Kenya, where it accused leading politicians of authorising excessive force which led to the deaths of 1,300 demonstrators during the 2008 elections. Unlike al-Bashir, the Kenyan leaders cooperated and respectfully attended the court in The Hague to seek and be granted bail. The human rights movement, encouraged by these developments, moved on to urge that UN members had a ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) the citizens of states that could not or would not protect them from large-scale loss of life caused by crimes against humanity. This responsibility was to be exercised by ‘humanitarian interventions’, inevitably military interventions, ‘in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action’, such as the ethnic cleansing which induced NATO to bomb Milošević’s forces in Kosovo.4 But this notion could not survive the Bush–Blair invasion of Iraq without Security Council support, and when R2P was adopted by the UN in 2005, its definition was weakened by being made to depend on a determination by the Security Council (i.e. by unanimity among the five veto-wielding powers).
Nonetheless, the first decade of the twenty-first century gave many reasons to hope that international criminal justice would make the world a safer place. The 2000–01 Lockerbie tribunal, of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands, convicted a Libyan intelligence officer of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 passengers and crew and eleven residents of the town. In the same year, Slobodan Milošević was handed over for trial in The Hague; and in 2002 the UN set up its court to try war crimes in Sierra Leone and the ICC commenced work.
In 2005 the Security Council referred the Darfur situation to the ICC, which had its first defendant in 2008 when Democratic Republic of Congo warlord Thomas Lubanga was put on trial, just as Charles Taylor was returned to Sierra Leone to face justice. Then Radovan Karadžić was captured, and two years later a UN-backed court in Cambodia sentenced the chief jailer of the Khmer Rouge to thirty-five years in prison for the torture and killing of tens of thousands of his prisoners. As 2010 drew to a close, the Arab Spring had its beginning with the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in Tunisia.
But 2011 was the true annus mirabilis, when for the first time the