The European Council on Foreign Relations

Black Coffee Morning: Louise Arbour

Date: 3rd December 2010  |  Author: Anthony Dworkin,

Categories: Rule of law, democracy and human rights,
Tags: human rights, international law, sri lanka, louise arbour, gaza

Supporters of international justice sometimes take a rather absolutist approach to the place of courts in the international system, as if any compromise with politics would undermine the credibility of the whole enterprise.  But Louise Arbour, the former war crimes prosecutor and High Commissioner for Human Rights, painted a more complex picture when she spoke at ECFR's latest Black Coffee Morning in London this morning.  She said that the absence of a universal system of international justice meant that decisions about prosecuting war crimes inevitably had an intense political streak. 

Why did the Human Rights Council set up a commission to investigate war crimes in the Gaza war but only congratulate the government of Sri Lanka for its victory over the Tamil Tigers, despite the fact that civilian deaths in the latter conflict may have been twenty times as great?  And how should Europe react to calls to defer prosecutions in cases like Sudan and Lebanon because of the explosive political impact they could have? 

The only sensible way to handle these political minefields, Arbour argued persuasively, was based on a sober contextual analysis of each case.  The EU needed a better approach to the complex cross-currents thrown up by Gaza and Sri Lanka, where it had looked ambivalent or impotent.  There might be a case for deferring the prosecution of Sudan’s president Bashir, given the widespread support for the move among African leaders – but it should certainly not happen before the referendum on the possible independence of South Sudan next January.  Perhaps influenced by the remit of her current job (she now heads the International Crisis Group) Arbour seemed very alert to the need to balance legal idealism with political realism.

Arbour seemed almost nostalgic when she looked back to her time as a war crimes prosecutor – in those days the issues were much less politicised, she said.  But even then, all defendants used to ask her, “Why are you picking on us when war crimes have been ignored in so many other conflicts around the world?”  The best answer she could come up with was along the lines of, “It doesn’t make you less guilty, if other criminals in other places have gone unpunished.”  But Arbour said that only a big increase in the universality of international justice would remove these problems from the system – an irrefutable argument, but one that may take quite some time to be satisfied.

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