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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
South Africa has formally requested to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), according to a document seen by Reuters news agency on Thursday.
The move comes as several African countries have expressed concern that The Hague-based court has tried mostly African leaders.
Last year, South Africa said it planned to exit ICC after it faced criticism for not arresting Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, who is accused of genocides and war crimes, when he visited the country.
"The Republic of South Africa has found that its obligations with respect to the peaceful resolution of conflicts at times are incompatible with the interpretation given by the International Criminal Court," according to the document.
[...] The ICC, which opened in July 2002 and has 124 member states, is the first legal body with permanent international jurisdiction to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Another African country, Burundi, appeared set to become the first county to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty establishing the global court, after its parliament voted last week to leave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @07:22PM
They are a sovereign nation, they can just give them the middle finger. This 'world order' nonsense is really getting annoying.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @08:19PM
Also the hypocrisy of super power nations who expect and even hypocritically enforce such laws while exempting themselves...
Yes, I am looking you America, China, Russia and the rest.
This sort of thing is the price of acting like a self entitled bully.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @08:25PM
All those countries you named? This "price" doesn't even register on their balance sheets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @10:12PM
I never said it did?
Humanity, as per usual, pays the price.
One super power wipes its arse with UN rules and international laws. (e.g. unilateral invasion)
Then later another invades a neighbour and ignores any disagreement.
Then another extends its ocean border illegally.
And so it goes.
Until there is another war...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Sunday October 23 2016, @12:48AM
"Until there is another war..."
The only real law is the law of force. Who is willing (and able) to use the most force wins. I.e. "might makes right".
Everything else is just sugar coating. Fat good it is having a UN resolution saying you are in the right, when the powerful just ignore it and carry on anyway.
A country is only as sovereign as it is powerful enough to protect its borders and repel invasion/annexation, nothing else matters.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 23 2016, @03:20AM
That thin veneer of civilization.
Given a big enough catastrophe, damned near all of our grandchildren would become savages. The human race was savage far longer than it has been civilized, savagery is ingrained into us.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday October 23 2016, @04:42AM
More to the point, if there's a big war and we blow ourselves back to the Iron Age, I'm not sure we have the resource base for another Industrial Revolution. In other words, if we fuck up, that's it; we'll live out the remainder of our lifetime as a species as savages.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Sunday October 23 2016, @05:31AM
We're like an oasis in the middle of a desert, with some stored oasis resources (that we are depleting, e.g. stored up solar energy aka fossil fuels). If we finish or destroy those resources it would take longer before for we can accumulate enough resources for a trek across the desert to a different oasis. But barring some planetary level cataclysm it will be a while yet before the Earth becomes permanently uninhabitable (I doubt even nuclear war would be enough).
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday October 23 2016, @04:24PM
The industrial revolution, economy of scale, and mass pollution, and demographic/political imbalance? why should we go through it again automatically?
If we nailed something like LENR, which I suspect is feasible given the disproportionate amount of disinformation in free energy topics (too much effort for pranksters), we would end up in a world that looks more like atlantis than star trek.
Fact is, science fiction has boxed up our imagination instead of expanding it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 23 2016, @03:17AM
Simple solution. Declare war on the bullies, beat them down, and tell them how things are going to be. Stop whining.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Sunday October 23 2016, @01:39AM
When they didn't even try to prosecute anybody in the Bush administration for crimes against humanity, they lost a lot of credibility. The fact that they still haven't tried any of the Israelis or a long list of Palestinians is deeply problematic. It undermines the whole point of the Hague if they're ignoring such egregious examples.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Sunday October 23 2016, @05:12PM
Well, they couldn't try to prosecute them. George Bush signed a law that any American held in the Hague would be liberated by force.
Here, read this: The Hague Invasion Act [wikipedia.org].
But it's not just the US; there are several powerful countries that gave a big "FUCK YOU" to the ICC.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday October 23 2016, @07:14PM
They could have tried anyways. I doubt they would have gotten the extradition, but failing to even try to do something about it isn't a good message to send.
Just preventing those folks from traveling abroad would have been somewhat better than the situation where nothing at all was done.