Last Wednesday, Professor Ohlins lead a discussion during the Becker-Rose Café about international criminal law with a very current focus. I was surprised by how interactive the talk was, especially because he jumped straight into questions. The discussion started off with talking about the hospital attack. I do like to take the time to read newspapers online, but sometimes I read the headline and assume that I know the gist of the situation. Turns out, knowing that Doctors Without Borders was clearly unhappy about the situation barely grazes the surface of the issues with the event. As people mentioned what should be considered war crimes, it was interesting to think about the fact that we even have to define war crimes and that war itself is not illegal. It was also interesting to hear him talk about collateral damage, as at one point, when he mentioned a small military target with a large number of affected civilians not being worth it, I immediately thought about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He talked about how the ICC tends to not deal with cases of collateral damage because there is too much grey area.

I had never really thought about how war criminals were charged. Perhaps I had just assumed that they were brought in front of the UN like how a President is brought in front of the Senate for impeachment. Apparently, the judicial body is separate from the UN and has existed for less than two decades. I hadn’t heard much about the International Criminal Court and I know a lot less about the Middle East than I probably should, but I was surprised to hear about their arrest warrants. The UN had suggested that al-Bashir be tried for genocide and the ICC had put out an arrest warrant for him. South Africa, a signatory to the founding of the ICC, was obligated by the ICC to arrest al-Bashir if possible. Somehow, al-Bashir was invited to South Africa, and when people started to mention the idea of arresting him, the South African government flew him out without arresting him. This is where it gets fuzzy. If the South African government claims that they didn’t arrest him because of diplomatic immunity, they shouldn’t have rushed him out of the country, but they did. Also, it seems like having an international war criminal arrest warrant should have a higher priority than the fact that he’s a visiting dignitary.

Someone asked Professor Ohlins what he thought about Putin and whether or not he should be classified as a war criminal, and that’s an interesting topic because of the history of Putin’s power and his relations with other world leaders. While there is also a lot of grey area about what Putin has been pushing for in Ukraine and Syria and whether or not international war crimes are being broken, Professor Ohlins mentioned the example of the Malaysian airplane which got struck down over Ukraine, and how that incident could be tied to Putin based on the resources that contributed to the event.

Someone else asked a question about the US’s tendency to intervene in conflicts that might not be of particular American interest. This is a question I’ve thought about a lot because the US is strange when it comes to which conflicts it wants to get involved in. Professor Ohlins mentioned that the typical European thinking is to not get involved, which I tend to agree more with. However, he talked about the need for humanitarian intervention. While this sounds like a good idea, it can also seem quite hypocritical at times for the US to get involved in certain conflicts. I would have liked a bit more discussion on the topic, because it seemed like the person who posed the question wanted to address the problems with intervention rather than simply the moral high-ground of wanting to help others.

Overall, I learned a lot more about current issues in international criminal law than I thought I would. I enjoyed the discussion style of the talk because it worked well with the topic, because at the end of the day, there is a lot of grey area when it comes to war and fuzziness when dealing with the aftermath.