International Criminal Court: The World Will Judge

An international group of judges has been elected to the International Criminal Court and a prosecutor is likely to follow this month. Soon there will be a building and investigations should begin within the year. Despite residual opposition, most notably from Washington, the world is about to get a new body to deal with the horrors all too frequently visited on humanity.

The World Today
5 minute READ

Mass atrocities have continued to plague our world throughout the last century. Between 1915 and 1918, an estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed and an entire culture destroyed. In the early 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin created a famine in the Ukraine by exporting all local crops and denying outside humanitarian aid.

Over seven million died. A few years later, the infamous rape of Nanking occurred, as half of its six hundred thousand residents were murdered and countless others raped and tortured by the invading Japanese army. This heinous event was historically overshadowed by the Holocaust. The next major genocide occurred under Pol Pot as he implemented his vision of a communist agrarian society in Cambodia in the late seventies – some two million lost their lives. So far, despite the massive scale of these tragedies, all those responsible, save for the Nazis tried at Nuremberg, have gone unrecognised and unpunished.

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