Constraining lawless power: ideas matter

Perhaps dogged, seemingly naive, efforts emanating from the relatively weak can help bend that arc of history which we're enjoined to hope bends toward justice. A couple of years ago, I wrote about The Internationalists, a lucid argument which seeks to rehabilitate the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928 in which 63 nations declared they had outlawed war -- just a decade before World War II engulfed nearly all of them. And I found it did convince me. I came away believing that movements of citizens and battalions of lawyers could, slowly, step by halting step, build frameworks of rule of law and practice that reduced immediate physical violence in international relations. And further, I became convinced that, as Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro argue, in the tortuous process of a global society struggling to be born, "ideas matter and people with ideas matter."

Last week a couple of significant, if not immediately fruitful, developments in the arena of international rule of law floated by in the news firehose:

• A Dutch team of prosecutors charged four men, three Russians and a separatist Ukrainian, with having fired the Russian missile which shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 enroute from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in 2014.

  "These suspects are seen to have played an important role in the death of 298 innocent civilians", said Dutch chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke.
  
  "Although they did not push the button themselves, we suspect them of close co-operation to get the [missile launcher] where it was, with the aim to shoot down an aeroplane."
  
  Investigators, he added, had "evidence showing that Russia provided the missile launcher".

  BBC News

  Though there is little reason to expect Russia to hand over the accused men, a trial will start in November 2020 whether or not the defendants are in custody.

• Meanwhile, a United Nations human rights investigation has provided what the Washington Post calls "the clearest picture yet" of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi's kidnapping and dismemberment by Saudi agents inside the Kingdom's consulate in Istanbul.

  The months-long investigation by Agnes Callamard, a human rights expert at the United Nations, faulted the United States and other countries as not exerting enough pressure on Saudi Arabia despite “credible evidence” of the likelihood that [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed [bin Salman] was involved in Khashoggi’s killing.
  
  She called for sanctioning and freezing the prince’s assets until he is either cleared or definitively implicated.
  
  With access to audio recordings provided by Turkish intelligence, Callamard laid out in graphic detail how Saudi government agents prepared to kill and dismember Khashoggi.

  The U. N. has no police force, but it can hope to bring to bear continued international blaming and shaming. That may not seem like much, but in a moment when the Saudi kingdom's oil is becoming less essential to many states and its war in Yemen seems more barbarous than ever, such conclusions can hurt a surprising amount.

Step by step ...