Universal Jurisdiction

Economics Political Theory
1

I’m sure that many of us would agree that most politicians are criminals and deserve to be arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. Unfortunately, politicians control the courts and prisons would don’t seem very eager to incarcerate themselves.

Universal jurisdiction to the rescue.

Universal jurisdiction is the newfangled legal doctrine that says that any government has a right and duty to punish alleged crimes against humanity; for example, British officials arresting Israeli officials for war crimes against Palestinians.

Read this article, particularly the last few sentences. An Israeli bureaucrat tersely stated that “British officials could find themselves in a similar situation due to airstrikes by British crews on population centres in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

I like that. In an ideal world, Israeli politicians would be jailed by the British; British politicians would be jailed by Iranians; Iranian politicians would be jailed by the French; etc. We would have anarchy by default, because all of the politicians would be in jail.

2

Except that criminals will find it to their advantage to cooperate, that is, to avoid jailing each other.

3

Yeah, that seems to be the problem.

Back to the drawing board.

4

What are you smoking? The Western powers already use this doctrine to imprison individuals (politicians and otherwise) of countries that don’t toe the social democrat/multi-culti/globalist line.

International law only concerns relations between nations. Any extension of this to jurisdiction over individuals is one-world government, with no hope of secession, nowhere to hide, etc.