Deeply hindered by the lack of enforcement mechanisms, international law can too easily be evaded or violated outright by government officials of countries who easily sense the ability to act so with impunity. Was the president of Mongolia such an official, and thus to be considered as blameworthy, when he did not have Russia’s President Putin arrested as soon as he touched down on Mongolian soil and sent to the International Criminal Court in 2024 for war crimes committed in Ukraine, including forcibly taking Ukrainian children to Russia? Is Mongolia’s acquiescence just another case of the implacable impotence of international law?
On September 2, 2024, Russia’s President Putin arrived in Mongolia. Despite “calls by the EU, the ICC, and Ukraine for him to be arrested, Putin was instead warmly welcomed.”[1] The International Criminal Court (the ICC) had issued an arrest warrant for Putin 18 months earlier, and, because Mongolia had signed the ICC Rome Statute, the country had “the obligation to cooperate with the court.”[2] In fact, the court relied on country signatories to execute the court’s decisions, “including in relation to arrest warrants,” according to ICC spokesman Fadi El Abdallah.[3] The E.U. position was that “Mongolia is a state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC since 2002 with the legal obligations that it entails.”[4] This would seem to put the government of Mongolia in a bind, but I contend that the government acted correctly from the standpoint of international law.
The argument that the government of Mongolia was in a bind runs as follows. According to the ICC spokesman, “In case of non-cooperation, ICC judges may make a finding to that effect and inform the Assembly of States Parties of it. It is then for the Assembly to take any measure it deems appropriate.”[5] In short, the Assembly could take punitive action against Mongolia for refusing to hand Putin over to the ICC. Even so, government officials were naturally hesitant to arrest the Russian president because Mongolia was “heavily dependent on [Russia] for fuel and electricity.”[6] Also, any measure adopted by the ICC Assembly would not come with an enforcement mechanism, since the ICC relies on the countries that have signed the Rome Statute for voluntary enforcement.
The tension between Mongolia’s economic reliance on Russia and the legal obligation under the Rome Statute to arrest Putin can be dissipated on a more fundamental level by realizing that Russia was not a signatory of the Rome Statute, and thus Putin’s arrest warrant was null and void. Mongolia’s obligation was to arrest anyone from a country whose government had signed the Rome Statute and was thus under the jurisdiction of the ICC. In such a case, the ICC’s deeply flawed enforcement of punitive measures enacted by the court’s Assembly would be the major issue.
At a basic level, the ICC is binding only on the countries whose governments signed the Rome Statute. Government officials of other countries are as though in a Hobbesian state of nature with respect to the court’s jurisdiction. So government officials like Putin and Netanyahu could legally dismiss the ICC and even that court’s signatory countries; it is not a question of the latter’s non-cooperation with the court, but, rather, the court’s own jurisdiction. To hold government officials like Putin and Netanyahu accountable, the world had, at least as of 2024, to rely on the voluntary economic, political, and even militaristic efforts of countries, signatories or not, to protect human rights from war crimes and crimes against humanity. How much humanity there is in leaving such important constraints to the varying and shifting political and economic interests of countries around the world is a question whose answer, at least as of 2024, did not yet reflect well on our species. Even the UN’s court, the International Court of Justice, lacked an enforcement mechanism for its verdicts. Russia and Israel were countries in the UN, but not even a global international organization could constrain Russia and Israel as they allegedly committed war crimes in 2024.
1. “Putin
Arrives in ICC Member State Mongolia without Being Arrested,” Euronews,
September 2, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
