The devastation and massive human losses after the Second World War left lessons that the world knew how to convert into institutions to stabilize geopolitical relations.
This is how the Tehran Agreements of 1943 were born; from Moscow, in 1944; from Yalta, in February 1945 - three months before the German capitulation -, and from Potsdam, in August of the same year. These political agreements were followed by
the creation of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals
, and the formation of the United Nations (UN).
On November 21, 1945, in front of the brand-new Nuremberg Military Tribunal, United States Attorney Robert Jackson delivered his memorable opening statement. In one of his fragments he said: “
This Court, although novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculation nor was it created to vindicate legalistic theories. [...] The common sense of humanity demands that the law [...] must also reach men who possess great power and use it in a deliberate and concerted manner to set in motion evils that leave no home untouched. in the world".
Jackson was a very active architect in the formation of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the creation of international law standards for trials, and argued that what was at stake was civilization.
The Cold War preserved the warlike distance between the two great ideological blocs that emerged in the postwar period. Both the Soviet bloc and the West influenced the territories under their rule.
That was
a stable and tense world but one of calculated risks
, with peripheral conflicts such as Korea, Cuba or Vietnam, or the struggle between dictatorships and revolutions in Latin America, which managed to remain relatively balanced.
In the mid-1980s, the Soviet bloc began to dissolve following Mikhail Gorbachev's "glasnost" and "perestroika", the
highest point of which was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
. That historic event changed the world geopolitical map and dismantled the alliance within the Security Council. For this reason, the International Criminal Court is no longer promoted by all its permanent members, but only by the United Kingdom and France.
The transitions of the former Soviet bloc countries towards democracy were very diverse. While the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) disappeared peacefully and was reunified with the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany),
the bloodiest transition took place in the Balkans
, when Yugoslavia was dismembered through war.
Although the efforts of a notable number of specialists have borne fruit in the creation of institutions whose objective has been to try to recover balance in global social coexistence,
today these have ceased to be efficient in the face of current atrocities.
Still, the armed conflicts of the late 20th century, such as the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, did not find a response in the United Nations Security Council, which created ad hoc Criminal Courts to judge the crimes committed there. Both organizations were made up of judges from the five permanent members: the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France. On September 11, 2001, the terrorist attacks against the Twin Towers shook us deeply. Inside and outside the United States we all feel it as an attack on our culture, our values and the West.
The world is going through a period of increasing geopolitical instability
. The United Nations, beyond the exhortations of its Secretary General, is failing to restore stability in Ukraine and the Middle East. And as the writer Don DeLillo says in his book
In the Ruins of the Future
,
“the response of terror is a story that has been written over the years, but that now becomes inexorable”
and the territories occupied today
“are our lives and our minds.”
Hannah Arendt says in her book
Men in Dark Times
, and it is fully valid today, that
“history knows several periods of darkness, where the world became so doubtful that people stopped asking politics for anything other than to demonstrate a true regard for their vital interests and personal freedom.”
The most significant advance achieved in the international courts, created to judge war crimes and genocides, has been to
provide victims with a space in justice
so that the narration of these events is recorded, so that there is a narrative for History, and that the silenced voices have a sounding board.
Today the International Criminal Court
does not have the support of three of the powerful
permanent members of the Security Council. In its early years, it was questioned as a European court focused on Africa and as a neocolonial instrument. More recently it has been criticized for being a tool of the West against Russia.
The most notable defect of the international community, as a community of values, is that it
lacks a sovereign who guarantees the application of international criminal law
. During the 20th century that sovereign was the UN Security Council.
If wars drive the evolution of international criminal law, only in periods of peace can the world community seek the essential consensus to undertake a restructuring of the international justice system. Today, the future depends on the new rules of coexistence that this community of values to which we belong establishes to guarantee peaceful progress.