A world without justice?

Lowdown interview with Steve Crawshaw

“Through tattered clothes small vices do appear.
Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.
Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.”

— Shakespeare, King Lear

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For most of human history, Lear was right. The powerful had impunity from great crimes while the powerless were punished for the smallest vices. Or as Thucydides had the Athenians tell the conquered Melians, justice is a polite fiction. In reality everyone knows that:

“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

In the late 20th century, liberalism advanced and a concerted and inspirational effort was made to establish a global system of justice that could bring to trial men accused of committing the worst crimes imaginable

The fate of that endeavour is as good a measure of our times as I can think of. Are we still progressing, or is authoritarianism triumphant?

Superficially, the march towards global justice appears as confident as ever. In 2023 Vladimir Putin was indicted for the multiple atrocities committed during the invasion of Ukraine. Putin is the leader of a major power, and Russia is one of five members of the UN security council. No matter. No one is immune today—or so it seems.

The International Criminal Court then issued indictments against the leaders of Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the fact that Israel is a democracy and the United States is its protector. Once again, it didn’t matter; the court showed it was willing to pursue alleged Western criminals too.

Rather marvellously Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor can recite Lear’s speech about robes and furred gowns hiding all. He gave it verbatim to Steve Crawshaw the author of the newly published Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crime and the Battle for Justice.

I have admired Steve for years. We were reporters together on the Independent. He covered the atrocities of the wars of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s before moving on to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

I wanted to talked to him because, if you raise your eyes from the Hague, the arc of history does not appear to be bending towards justice but heading at speed in the opposite direction.