On a sunny day, the view from the Penthouse restaurant on the 42nd floor of The Hague Tower stretches to the North Sea. But this is late February in the Low Countries. The tower stands enveloped in mist, a fitting metaphor for the International Criminal Court, whose South Korean president, Sang-Hyun Song, is joining me for lunch.
Established in 2002, after the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, the ICC has lofty ambitions: to end impunity by holding countries and their leaders accountable under international law for heinous crimes. The reality is more prosaic: the court is a young, fragile institution in a Hobbesian world where might usually trumps right.
There are many questions I wish to explore with Song. How can illiterate, traumatised child soldiers from Africa be expected to testify against their former commanders in a foreign court thousands of miles from home? Should we take the ICC seriously when China, Russia and the US refuse to sign up? And how about the ICC’s record over the past 13 years, which shows the people put on trial (and the two convictions) have all been black men?