Russian Bombs Usher Ukraine’s UN Address

Human nature itself must be attuned to walking out before a speech by political leaders who intentionally have enemy civilians killed and severely injured, and to being attracted to hear leaders who represent the victims. So, at the UN in September, 2026, many delegates at the UN’s General Assembly walked out before a speech by Israel’s Netanyahu, who was wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza (and arguably even in the West Bank), and Russia’s Putin did not even attend the opening session of speeches, whereas the address by Ukraine’s President Zelensky was to a full room. The contrast between Zelensky and the other two men could not be starker, and yet the UN was open to all three, serial violations of the UN Charter notwithstanding. The international organization can be said to have its legs wide open, and paradoxically to be impotent even with regard to enforcing its own charter. As a visiting research scholar at Harvard in 2025, I had the opportunity to speak personally with former UN officials, all of whom admitted that, given the vetoes in the Security Council, the UN itself could not even be reformed so the organization could even pass meaningful resolutions against a powerful member’s ally; something stronger at the global level would be needed if international law stood a chance of being enforced rather than merely given lip service. In 2026, even the notion of international law risked being relegated as an oxymoron, assuming that law itself—to be considered law rather than guideline or policy—requires a viable enforcement mechanism. To say that something is a law but is not enforced is to say that something really isn’t a law.

Flaunting the UN appearance of Ukraine’s president, Russia’s president unleased bombs in Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine as if to dare the UN to take action on Ukraine’s behalf. Not by accident, “Russia hammered Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with drones in daylight attacks . . . hours before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was due to address world leaders at the UN General Assembly. Two people were killed and 23 were wounded in Kyiv, and palls of black smoke floated above the city following the latest in what have been daily Russian attacks that torment Ukrainian civilians.”[1] Whereas Ukraine was targeting Russian oil facilities, Russia was going after civilians. The difference constitutes legitimate war from war crimes. For Russia to committing such crimes just hours before a highlighted address by Ukraine’s president at the UN is as if to dare the UN, and the world, to take military action to stop Russia from attacking Ukraine. That Russia had invaded Ukraine without the latter having provoked Russia militarily is itself a war crime, and in violation of the UN Charter. Indeed, at the time, Russia’s President Putin had an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, but as no means of automatic enforcement had any credibility, the ability of the ICC to issue warrants deservedly warrants ridicule. Hence Russia’s Putin felt free to dare the UN to take notice and even action.

In spite of representing a people serially victimized by a military aggressor, Zelenskyy could only hope to speak of half-measures at the UN. In his address, he said, “When someone gives Russia more money through trade, they give this war more time. And that is exactly why we insist on limiting trade with the aggressor, and why we are burning Russia’s revenues ourselves.”[2] This strategy differs significantly from that of killing and wounding Russia civilians so the Russian people might pressure Putin to remove his military forces from Ukraine; but going after trade is indirect at best at getting Russia out of Ukraine militarily. Even though insisted, the governments represented at the UN could trade with Russia nonetheless, and with complete impunity from the UN, as Russia held a veto in the Security Council and could thus exploit a conflict of interest by thwarting any resolution contrary to Russia’s geopolitical and economic interests. At the core of the UN’s impotence and thus lack of credibility can be said to be a structural conflict of interest, wherein even violators of the UN Charter (and their allies) could block any unfavorable resolutions.

So, Russia’s President Putin could taunt Ukraine and, in effect, make fun of the world, by serially bombing Ukraine just hours before Zelensky’s address at the UN without worrying in the slightest that the UN or a coalition, or bloc, of sovereign countries might ascend on Ukraine to rid it of Russian military equipment and troops, or even send anti-missile weapons to Ukraine. Thus it could be said that by 2026, the post-World-War-II world order had virtually collapsed even though its institutions were still standing and even moving, like the limbs of some insects that still kick just after death and thus such insects appear to still be alive.

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “Russian Pounds Kyiv with Drones, Killing Two and Wounding 23 Hours before Zelenskyy’s UN Address,” Euronews.com, 23 September 2026.
2. Edith Lederer and Jennifer Pelitz, “Zelenskyy, at UN, Urges Leaders to Keep Choking Russia’s Revenues and Impede Its War Efforts,” APNews.com, September 23, 2026.

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad: Guilty but Free

Because Syria’s government had not signed onto the Rome Statute, which renders governments and their respective officials subject to the International Criminal Court, including its arrest warrants and verdicts, Bashar al-Assad and his younger brother, Mahar, who were then in absentia under Putin’s protection in Russia, were not subject to the ICC when a Syrian court found the two brothers guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes on August 11, 2026. The two men could evade the death sentences issued by their own country’s judiciary as long as they could be protected by the Russian president in Russia. Although an Israeli court had tried and convicted the Nazi Eichmann of crimes against humanity, so a precedent existed for national courts adjudicating that crime, the fact that Israel had to illegally kidnap Eichmann in Argentina and the al-Assad brothers could evade being held accountable for their horrendous crimes in Syria suggests that the right, proper, and effective court to hear cases on crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes, is international, such as the ICC. That court’s weakness, however, as in Syria, Russia, and Israel not being subject to that court’s jurisdiction, points to a hole in jurisprudence on crimes against humanity, assuming that the proper and necessary jurisdiction is rightly international rather than national. With the U.S. having recently announced a full-on attack on the ICC (and its prosecutors) at the behest of the indicted suspect Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, it could be asked whether the ICC was in a position to “fill the hole” in the jurisprudence of crimes against humanity (and war crimes), or whether a coalition of the willing of national governments would have to start from scratch to construct a new international criminal court (and block diplomacy and trade with any country not willing to be bound by the new international jurisprudence). The judicial case against the al-Assad brothers (and their maternal cousin, who was in the courtroom and thus could be held accountable by the national court for having led the 2011 Daraa crackdown) demonstrates the value in shoring up international jurisprudence on crimes against humanity (and war crimes).

The Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus, Syria, found the country’s former dictator guilty of having ordered “the murder of civilians including children, as well as torture and unlawful detention.”[1] Although the senior director of the Soufan Center said at the time of the verdict and sentencing of death, “The ruling we saw today on the al-Assad brothers and their cousin, Atef Najib, marks a new chapter in Syria’s post-regime accountability landscape,” such accountability was severely limited because neither of the brothers were in Syria, and thus could not be touched by the ruling and sentence.[2] In fact, the ruling on and sentencing of the two brothers even as they were in absentia showcases the limitations of a global order in which accountability in regard to crimes against humanity is subject to national sovereignty rather than international jurisprudence. Caroline Rose, the director at Soufan, admitted, “Bashar and Maher remain in Russia and likely will not be handed over by Moscow.”[3] It is indeed tenuous at best for accountability for the guilty of crimes against humanity to hinge on the political discretion of Russia’s president Putin, who was then wanted by the ICC for having abducted Ukrainian children and having them send to Russia to indoctrinate them to be ethnic Russians rather than Ukrainians.

So even though Rose said of the Syrian court’s verdict and sentencing, “It is a decision that seeks to satisfy millions of Syrians who seek accountability and justice after war crimes committed by the regime, seeking closure,” the “result” was anything but closure.[4] This is significant because the “al-Assad regime’s documented atrocities over 14 years include the use of chemical weapons, most notably a sarin attack on the Ghouta suburb of Damascus in August 2013 that killed an estimated 1,400 people, according to US intelligence reports” and “confirmed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.”[5] Additionally, the Syrian Network for Human Rights reports that the “regime also dropped more than 80,000 barrel bombs on civilian areas,” and photographs smuggled out by a military police photographer confirm that 11,000 detainees died “from torture, starvation or execution in Syrian government facilities.”[6] 

The severity of such crimes in Syria can be said to transcend national sovereignty and the related reach of national judiciaries, and thus to properly belong to international jurisprudence in line with the Nuremberg Trials wherein several Nazi officials were tried between 1945 and 1949 by an international, albeit of the Allied powers, tribunal. It was there that “crimes against humanity” was coined and first tried, and with success. In fact, that not every defendant was found guilty added to the credibility of the Trials as being something more than the vengeance of the victors on a vanquished regime. Even the Israeli trial of Eichmann turned out to be credible, as the verdict hinged on Eichmann’s violation of Himmler’s order not to march Hungarian Jews to far-away death-camps; Eichmann could not say that he was just following orders, and thus he could be found guilty of having committed a crime against humanity. Even so, both the added credibility that an international court would have had and it not having to necessarily resort in illegal abduction argue in favor of having an international rather than a national court adjudicate on crimes against humanity (and war crimes), rather than leaving these crimes only to national tribunals, especially as military technology, including on chemical weapons, has magnified the possible scale of the crimes. 

As in the case of nuclear weapons and even carbon-emissions, the weapons that technology, or science, already made possible when the al-Assad brothers were killing and torturing Syrian civilians for 14 years, can justify a situs for justice at the global level—as jurisprudence in a global order, and thus not held back by absolutist interpretations of national sovereignty which had arguably already been antiquated when Nazi Germany enforced nationalism throughout Europe in the mid-20^th century. In other words, the limitations on the Syrian court being the enforcer of justice against two brothers found guilty of horrendous crimes against humanity could ween nationalists around the world from the addiction to national sovereignty as the exclusive default for any sort of global arrangement and international relations.

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1. Aleksandar Brezar, “Syria Sentences Bashar al-Assad to Death in Absentia for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity,” Euronews.com, 11 August, 2026.
2.Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Vendetta Violence: Israeli Settlers Sanctioned by the E.U.

What a difference even just a month can make. On 11 May, 2026, the E.U. enacted sanctions against “Israeli settlers over their violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, a move enabled by backing from Hungary’s incoming government.”[1] A month earlier, Viktor Orbán was the sitting prime minister of the E.U. state of Hungary. As a supporter of U.S. President Trump, who in turn supported Israel even in its decimation of Gaza razing entire cities into leveled ground for real estate “properties,” Orbán would have wielded Hungary’s veto in the European Council.

Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s foreign minister, marveled at the time, “We move from political deadlock that was there for a long time. Violence and extremism carry consequences.”[2] The long time is likely a reference to Orbán’s 16 years in power in the E.U. state of Hungary, and her point overall is that with that governor out of the European Council, the E.U. can inflict consequences on foreign actors who engage in violence under the aegis of some extremist ideology. In the case of the Israeli settlers, the ideology is Zionism, which in coming from a religious text has overreached into the political domain, even circumventing international law.

That the violence occurred in the occupied West Bank renders Israel itself especially culpable, for under international law, “all settlements are considered illegal, with the International Court of Justice describing the State of Israel’s ‘continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’ as ‘unlawful.’”[3] Both the unprovoked violence of the settlers and the Israeli government’s attempted holocaustic genocide of the population of Gaza are on top of the fact that Israel has no justified basis internationally to even be in Gaza and the West Bank. In other words, Israel is two degrees of separation from being a lawful state in terms of international law. That the Netanyahu government was able to ignore that law so easily suggests that there is no such thing as international law—that only guidelines were by then operating in the collapsed post-World War II global order. In a Hobbesian state of nature, no law exists because no international or global government exists. No world federation certainly, which Kant admitted in Perpetual Peace would only make world peace possible but not probable.

The recurrent violence and theft was being committed even in broad daylight by Israeli settlers against defenseless Palestinians—even walking into their houses and nonchalantly taking appliances and furniture!—because impunity must surely have been assured by means of the tacit approval of a government that, after all, had been determined by the UN to have committed a genocide in Gaza. The violations of human rights occurred on both the societal and interpersonal level. A counter-move international could therefore be expected beyond the E.U. sanctioning individual settlers and related organizations.

Given the harm that was being unleashed directly or indirectly by the Israeli government, Kallas’ claim that violence and extremism abroad would trigger negative consequences by the E.U. rings hollow because those consequences are so inadequate to meet the magnitude and depth of the suffering, both interpersonally and at the societal level (i.e., an entire people). So even though a month made a difference in the European Council, the global “community” was still holding back from enforcing international law. With no other enforcement mechanism, can such law even be called law?

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1. Maia de la Baume, “E.U. Approves Sanctions on Israeli Settlers after Hungarian Backing,” Euronews.com, 11 May, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

The Reader: Implications for International Governance

The film, The Reader (2008), captures a frame of mind that may be so frequently overlooked when it is observed because it is so bizarre in its impact on reasoning that it difficult to explain, let alone grasp for what it is. The phenomenon is not of artifice; rather, it is a natural vulnerability of the human mind, or brain, due to its susceptibility to ideology that is highly unethical in its content, including a circumscribed and even warped mental framework and very unethical prescriptions for conduct. The ideology at issue in the film is that of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1933 to 1945.  The truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely does not fully account for the cognitive warping that is evinced by Hanna Schmidt during her trial in the film.

The full essay is at "The Reader."

Russia Damages E.U. Diplomatic Offices: Implications for International Law

Even though the Vienna Convention of 1961 includes protections for diplomatic and consular properties in active war-zones, Russia’s attack of 629 missiles and drones on Kiev, Ukraine, came within 50 meters of the E.U.’s diplomatic offices there late on August 27, 2025, severely damaging them but killing nobody in the E.U.’s delegation. The two bombs that hit nearby were enough to give the Europeans the impression that President Putin of Russia did not consider himself bound by international law in war. To the extent that fighting between two sovereign countries, Russia and Ukraine, fits Hobbes’ infamous state of nature, international law is really not law at all, for jurisprudence, including mutually acknowledged rights, requires an overarching polity to enact and enforce laws. So the E.U. could not enjoy a right to be sparred death and destruction at its diplomatic offices in Kiev during the war there, but the Union could claim another right at Russia’s expense within the E.U.’s territory.

After the bombing, the E.U.’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said of it, “It shows that the Kremlin will stop at nothing to terrorize Ukraine, blindly killing civilians—men, women and children and even targeting the European Union.”[1] Even though it was not clear that two bombs going off in the vicinity necessarily means that Putin was targeting the E.U., António Costa, chairman of the European Council, which represents the state governments, stated, “The EU will not be intimidated. Russia’s aggression only strengthens our resolve to stand with Ukraine and its people.”[2] In return for the E.U. having just come in close contact with brazen Russian military might, E.U. President Von der Leyen “promised to tighten the screws on the Russian war machine with a 19^th package of EU sanctions.”[3] That so many so-called packages had already not worked gives little credibility to what a 19^th might do in terms of making a difference to Russia’s war calculus.

Fortunately, Von der Leyen said that the E.U. would work at the federal level “on new ways to further mobilize Russia’s frozen assets, worth about €210 billion, that are “on EU soil, to finance Ukraine’s defence capabilities and reconstruction.”[4] Even though international law put constraints on confiscation of the funds, and an E.U. spokesperson said the efforts would continue to pertain to “the windfall profits, rather than the money itself,” I contend that if it can be proved that Russia had violated international laws militarily in Ukraine, the E.U. should be released of any legal and moral obligation not to confiscate the frozen Russian assets.[5] It would be unfair to Ukraine, as well as the E.U., were international law to be applied to only one side while the other ignores the very existence of law internationally in line with how Hobbes describes the state of nature prior to any social contract.

It was obvious at the time that Ukraine could use any additional military support that could come from the E.U. confiscating the frozen Russian assets in the E.U., but perhaps even more significant would be the decision that could be taken on whether international law itself pertains to the war. In deciding that no law applies to both sides because of a lack of de jure and de facto recognition by both sides and enforcement, the question of even whether there is such a thing as international law—whether jurisprudence applies in a domain in which enforcement mechanisms are lacking, whether institutionally, as by a militarized international federation or a coalition of the willing.

The lack of any enforcement can be distinguished from a weakness in enforcement or even an abject failure of an extant enforcement effort. That no enforcement mechanism existed at least as of 2025 on international law arguably renders such “law” as merely wishes by some people or organizations. If Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu were able to treat international law as such, this is all that would be required to render international law as something less than law itself. For other people to continue to refer to international law would be an error predicated on a mere wish rather than being a statement of fact. A dictum could be presented to the world wherein international agreements cannot, or at least should not, be labeled as law unless credible enforcement mechanisms exist; by credible, I mean likely to be efficacious in constraining culprit governments. In short, federal officials of the E.U. should not feel constrained by international law on confiscating the frozen assets, just as Russia’s President Putin had been ignoring international “law” in having invaded a sovereign country. With so many obvious attacks on civilians and kidnapping of Ukrainian children, taking them inside Russia far from Ukraine, the very concept of international law goes out the window.

Applied to Russia and Israel in 2025, the invasions would have had to be stopped with the invaders pushed back for there to be such a thing as an international law against invasion (or targeting civilians). To claim that there is such a thing as international law while a genocide or even holocaust is underway unimpeded involves cognitive dissidence, if not an abject refusal to think at all. In Cameron’s film, Titanic, an employee of the ship tells third-class passengers that they cannot go through a passageway only to be knocked into the rising water by Dawson. Without enforcement, the employee can only be regarded as strongly expressing a desire. Similarly, a food-aide or medical-aide worker in Gaza could shout again and again at Israeli tanks, you can’t come into Gaza City, but if those tanks keep rolling in, it is not as though the worker would be supposing that a law is being broken, for there is no viable enforcement to force the Israelis out of Gaza; not even a coalition of the willing had emerged to do so in more than a year. Netanyahu could easily dismiss such shouting as pleas rather than even a demand, much less a law. Anyone watching the tanks continue onward would regard any onlooker making a demand as crazy. I submit that it is just as crazy to refer to international law in the context of the Russian and Israeli invasions in the mid-2020's.

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1. Jorge Liboreiro, “EU Delegation in Kyiv Severely Damaged by Shock Wave of Russian Strike,” Euronews.com, August 28, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Jorge Liboreiro, “EU Summons Russian Envoy after Strike Damaged the Bloc’s Delegation in Kyiv,” Euronews.com, August 28, 2025.

On the Case Against Israel: The ICC and ICJ as Seeds

At first glance, the impotence of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice once an order has been willfully ignored by a government may seem overwhelming. The continued atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine even amid court challenges fueled the argument that might makes right. Even so, the willful sense of impunity of the perpetrators and their enablers in other governments may trigger enough of a public adverse reaction that the courts and international law itself eventually come out stronger.

In 2024, the jurisprudence on genocide was still new and has few cases. In its case against Israel, South Africa urged the International Court of Justice to order provisional measures that Israel would be obliged to take because an imminent risk of irreparable harm that is genocidal in nature exists in Gaza. Allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza is one such measure. With famine already in Gaza, South Africa asked the ICJ to direct Israel to do more in cooperation with the United Nations. Expanding the number of crossings for UN aid to enter the territory, and making that aid available at various points throughout Gaza are two examples of how Israel could cooperate with the UN, of which Israel is a member. The court issued such concrete orders as these two, even as the court had to consider the risk that Israel would violate the court’s provisional orders. In fact, in January, 2024, the court ruled that given the future risk of genocide, additional provisional measures were justified. This means that the court had found enough evidence of a risk of genocide—not that the court found evidence that genocide was taking place. This is a key distinction.

Moreover, the court had to ask itself whether the group being harmed—residents of Gaza—are a protected group?  The court found that the Palestinians constitute a national group. The court also had to assess whether there was destructive intent, meaning that Israel’s actions in Gaza were geared to eliminating the group rather than just killing individuals in the territory. South Africa charged Israel with four out of five types of acts that are genocidal in nature. By mid-April, 2025, Israel had been blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza for over 6 weeks. Crucially, the underlying action was being deployed against the group as a whole, as distinct from killing individuals by gun or bomb. Displacement, starvation, and destruction of medical facilities are the other types of acts that South Africa cited as being indicative of the Israeli government having a genocidal intent.

Even though Israel has ignored the court’s provisional measures, and in fact has gone in the opposite direction, such as by blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, that Israel has engaged with the court by sending a high-level legal team to argue before the court is a good argument for Israel being obligated to comply with the provisional measures. Why would the Israeli government engage at all with the court if doing so would make it more difficult to sneak out of any obligations? Israeli officials continued to believe that it is too hard for genocide to be proved in a court of law for the charge to gain traction at the court.

The arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Israel’s sitting prime minister, Ben Netanyahu, and a former Israeli defense minister is not for having committed genocidal acts because proving genocidal intent is more difficult than is pursuing charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Proof of cause of death is required in the crime against humanity of extermination, and the prosecutor was looking only at starvation, so the arrest warrant is not for that crime. Of course, crimes against humanity and war crimes are not exhausted by extermination, and are serious nonetheless.

It is significant, therefore, that in April, 2025, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of the E.U. state of Hungary, ignored its treaty obligation to the ICC and even E.U. law as per the Rome Statute by refusing to arrest Netanyahu when he was visiting the state. The court dismissed Hungary’s excuse that the state’s legislature had not yet enacted a state law that would enforce the treaty obligation. Simply put, a treaty has the force of law, so domestic legislation is not needed for a government to act as obligated in line with the language of a treaty. As for the Rome Statute, it has the status of federal law because the E.U. itself has been delegated enumerated powers, or competencies, that the state governments are legally required to observe. Furthermore, that Hungary was planning to leave the jurisdiction of the international court does not mean that the treaty obligations could legitimately be ignored prior to pulling out of the court’s jurisdiction.

I contend that both Israel’s willful violations of the international court’s rulings and Hungary’s refusal to recognize the arrest warrant by hosting Netanyahu risked undercutting the legitimacy of international law and courts such as the ICJ and ICC because the disrespect could become an international norm.

There is not yet an international, multilateral treaty on crimes against humanity; there is a treaty against genocide. That the latter is being applied to powerful states may result in less progress in negotiating a treaty on crimes against humanity. On the other hand, South Africa taking Israel to court based on international law has strengthened such law; even the court’s provisional measures have made a dent in the public consciousness around the world. Even in just telling victims that their rights are being violated is significant. It may be that governments will recognize an obligation to thwart genocide in progress around the world.

Moreover, in addition to how easy it has been for governments, including Hungary, Russia and Israel, to ignore the orders of international courts, that Orban has repeatedly violated E.U. laws and various states, including Germany, have serially violated the state-budget deficit limits of the Growth and Stability Pact undermines federalism as a viable system of basic law. Even the checks and balances at a federal level, as in a judiciary being able to curb excesses by an executive branch, were under threat in the U.S. when a federal judge found sufficient evidence that the Trump Administration was guilty of criminal contempt by ignoring certain court orders. The inability of courts to enforce their respective rulings is a vulnerability that was being exploited by governments at various levels of jurisprudence and governance. The danger of such intentional breaches becoming a norm was nothing short of the rule of law itself becoming too easily expendable.

To be sure, there were signs of seeds sprouting that could someday result in national laws requiring governments to take action against a power-aggrandizing government reaching the level of extermination and genocide. The ICJ was hearing South Africa’s case, especially after South Africa had been guilty of refusing to enforce an ICC arrest warrant in Africa, and Nicaragua had brought Germany to the ICJ on the charge of supplying weapons to a genocidal government in Israel. Although the case law was still limited, public interest in the rulings of the ICC and ICJ was growing globally in the early 2020s. It could be that the governmental attacks on the international courts by refusing to respect their orders were the last gasps of opposition before a global step forward in holding otherwise absolutist-sovereignty in check. Just as climate change had entered public discourse around the world, the obligation of governments around the world to stop one government from exterminating a people could represent a progressive step in our species’ political development.  

Applying Justice to Nazi Jurists in the Context of the Cold War

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding. 

The full essay is at "Judgment at Nuremberg."

Israel Legalizes Illegal Settlements on Palestinian Land: On the Rule of Law

Israel’s legislature passed a law on February 6, 2017 retroactively legalizing Jewish settlements on privately owned Palestinian land. Incredibly, the state’s own attorney general said he would not defend the new law in court because he had determined the law to unconstitutional and in violation of international law. Anat Ben Nun of an anti-settlement group said the law was “deteriorating Israel’s democracy, making stealing an official policy.”[1] Specifically, the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including those offered financial compensation for the “long term use of their land” but without being able to reclaim their property under the new law, “are not Israeli citizens and cannot vote for candidates for Israel’s Parliament, or Kenesset.”[2] I submit nevertheless that the underlying casualty in this case is the rule of law itself.

Every government enjoys the power of eminent domain, which effectively means that the right of private property is limited in nature rather than absolute. This fact goes to the amount of power that a government potentially has. In the case of the Israeli pro-settlement law on the private property of Palestinians, the rule of law was undercut by the law’s retroactive aspect. To retroactively legalize something illegal weakens law itself in its capacity as prohibition because confidence in the illegality is lessened and thus weakened.

Such a weakening can be invisible when the retroactivity is in popular demand. In the early 1960s, Israel’s highest court declared a 1950 Israeli law to retroactively apply not only temporally, when the state of Israel did not even yet exist, but also as applicable in another sovereign country! Lest this decision seem sordid and utterly devoid of justifiable jurisprudence, even such a dark underbelly can be easily whitewashed or at least overlooked on learning that the decision was against Adolf Eichmann, whom Israel had illegally kidnapped and tried for his significant role in transporting gays, communists, and Jews to the concentration camps in the horrendous systemic atrocity known as the Holocaust. The desire for justice against him easily hid from view the toll on law itself from what probably boiled down to garden-variety vengeance—the notion of law being distorted in the process. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, but not when the sweet scent of revenge at the expense of law itself is too alluring. Perhaps the retroactive law in 2017 may also have been fueled by vengeance, given all the hatred between the Palestinians and the Israelis, though in this case the retroactive vengeance was against the oppressed rather than a former oppressor. In both cases, however, the same basic pattern can be observed with respect to the subtle and gradual corruption of the rule of law itself. The power within the reach of a government—any government—is indeed something to beware.

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[1] Ian Fisher, “Israel Passes Provocative Legislation to Retroactively Legalize Settlements,” The New York Times, February 7, 2017.

[2] Ibid.