‘Maybe Putin Should be Worried’
Thomas S. Warrick, writing for the Atlantic Council, says most heads of state charged internationally eventually faced justice, albeit it was sometimes “rough justice”:
Prior to the March 17 arrest warrant for Putin, some eighteen heads of state or heads of major military forces have been wanted by international justice—defined here, broadly, as serious multilateral efforts at accountability under customary international law or treaty law for genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes. This list includes officials wanted by international tribunals set up under the Chapter VII authority of the UN Security Council for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, by multilateral treaties such as the Rome Treaty that set up the International Criminal Court, by multilateral ad hoc courts set up for Sierra Leone and elsewhere, and by domestic courts set up with significant international support and assistance as in Cambodia and Iraq. Many of these courts also sought the arrest of subordinate officials, with mixed results, but heads of state and major political or military leaders wanted by international courts have faced justice far more often than not.
The preferred result of international justice advocates is a fair trial and a verdict under the rule of law. An accused who appears before an international court counts as a “win” even if the result is an acquittal. But practical realities sometimes intervene, dealing out “rough justice” where an accused reportedly commits suicide to avoid being handed over to a court, as happened with Pol Pot in 1998, or is killed out of vengeance by those who lost relatives and friends at the hands of a ruthless dictator, as happened with Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Working in the field of international justice in the early 1990s, my colleagues and I became accustomed to being told by diplomats and journalists that it was impossible that the former Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, or Ratko Mladić; or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein would ever face justice. In the end, they all did—and many others, as well. The atrocities get the headlines, while the work of activists, diplomats, investigators, prosecutors, and judges is slow, sometimes tedious, and always comes years later than it should. But the record of international justice in the modern era is one of history’s most striking if least-recognized successes.