I found Professor Ohlin’s talk really interesting, especially the discussion we had about the recent incident in Afghanistan involving Doctor’s without borders. It became very clear that serving justice on the international state was both slow and ineffective.

It really is a battle between sovereignty of individual states vs justice. Not many countries want to give some international body the ability to persecute its citizens. However, I find that the current system of international justice leaves a lot to be desired.

The ICC has no authority to pursue charges against the citizens of countries that have strong military and economic might like the US, Russia, and China. These larger countries have had questionable incidents in the last decade or so. The counter would be that the worst crimes have occurred in less developed countries, and at least the ICC provides justice for those crimes. However, the people that have committed these crimes aren’t prosecuted equally, but instead it depends on whether a large country has interests in those countries. These shortcomings of the ICC don’t sound like justice to me.

Clearly, we are far away from equal justice for all entities on the international level