The fate of one French judge is a case study in the west’s long unravelling. Nicolas Guillou cannot shop online. When he used Expedia to book a hotel in his own country, the reservation was cancelled within hours. He is “blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system”, unable to use most bank cards.
Guillou, you see, has been sanctioned by the United States, putting him on a 15,000-strong list alongside al-Qaida terrorists, drug cartels and Vladimir Putin. Why? Because alongside two other judges of the international criminal court pre-trial chamber I, he approved arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and Mohammed Deif, the former commander of Hamas’s military wing. Guillou and his colleagues had “actively engaged in the ICC’s illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally, Israel”, the US claimed when imposing the sanctions in June. All are now barred from entering the US – but that is the least of the consequences.
The rationale is brutally clear. The rule of law does not apply to the world’s hegemon or its closest allies. This was bluntly spelled out by Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who told the ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan – himself sanctioned – that the ICC was “made for Africa and thugs like Putin, not democracies like Israel”. The US refused to sign up to the court, clearly fearing that its propensity to commit war crimes in foreign lands would lead to prosecutions. That put Washington in the same bracket as human rights abusers like China, Russia and indeed Israel. Only because Palestine acceded to the court a decade ago does the ICC now have jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory or by its citizens.
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