Sovereignty on Trial

It is high time to stop the silliness. First in the cases of Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic, who mercifully died this month, and now in the cases of Saddam Hussein and Charles Taylor, the Western establishment is attempting to bring dictators to justice. This is an exercise in vanity that can only hurt the image and substance of judiciousness built up by the establishment since 1945.

The model for trying members of violent regimes is the Nuremburg trials. Hitler, of course, was not tried; he had committed suicide. And the trials were not for show: they handed down acquittals when they were convinced that someone was not in fact a mover in the Nazi regime. The basic questions asked at each trial there and in the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia are (1) did this person commit war crimes or crimes against humanity and (2) does the "just following orders" defense hold here?

This is a good and valid system for members of violent regimes - not for heads of them. It is axiomatic that the head of a regime was not "just following orders", so the second question can be disposed of. As far as the first question, since almost all actions of subordinates can be linked to the leader, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which a court does not find a dictator guilty. In general, these trials violate the rule that there should be some doubt as to the outcome.

That said, I don't have a better solution short of executing the ex-sovereigns upon apprehension.