Did Tony Blinken Just Kill International Law?
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States appeared to have no remaining rivals, many liberals thought their ambitions for international law were finally within reach. American lawyers flocked to the United Nations and filled the international legal industry, which grew tremendously as a series of treaties outlawed chemical weapons, established the ICC, and made symbolic agreements about global warming, among other things.American ICJ Judge Who Voted Against Israel Was Nominated by Biden for Top State Department Role
Not all Americans shared this enthusiasm. Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge torpedoed the League of Nations treaty because they did not want to cede American sovereignty to any international body. Others dismissed the idea of international law altogether: When he taught a survey of international politics at Harvard, Henry Kissinger brought in a guest speaker for the sessions on international law, explaining, "I do not wish to give a lecture about something that doesn’t exist." Many Americans have feared the intrusion of international busybodies into American affairs, and the Senate has not ratified most of these new treaties.
Few of these institutions have had much effect on the real world, but liberals held out hope that they could at least browbeat small countries into compliance while they waited for the Democrats to ratify these treaties. The ones that have created the most benefit tend to focus on mundane issues, like setting technological standards. The major exception was the World Trade Organization, which reduced global trade barriers and helped lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015. This system of relatively free global trade saved hundreds of millions of people from horrid conditions and was one of the glories of the old Pax Americana.
As America’s enemies gained strength, they exposed the weakness of the international legal regime. During the 1990s, international legal beagles mostly fretted about "rogue states" like North Korea and Iran violating international treaties about nuclear weapons. America’s stronger adversaries have recently gotten into the game too: China joined the WTO and systematically cheated on its trade commitments, driving many American manufacturers out of business. Russia protected Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad when Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, then used its own chemical weapons against dissidents in Europe and Ukrainians. Neither Beijing nor Moscow respects older conventions, such as territorial sovereignty. Beijing ignored a 2016 arbitration ruling that its territorial claims in the South China Sea were meritless, and Russia is subjugating as much of Ukraine as it can.
America’s adversaries make a mockery of international law, but they still think it has some value. China seeks to dominate international bodies that set technological standards, such as the International Telecommunication Union, even while Beijing and Moscow stymie Western initiatives in the Security Council.
Conservatives usually view international legal organizations with suspicion or boredom. When the ICC attempted to investigate American forces in Afghanistan even though the United States hadn’t ratified the treaty, the Trump administration sanctioned the officials involved in the attempted power grab.
But Blinken showed this week that even American liberals are souring on the international legal community. The Americans and Europeans who dominate many international bodies are likely to carry on their work. But without the backing of the liberals, who have long been their main supporters, it is not clear if anyone will notice.
In an interview with Columbia Law School, Cleveland shared that her successful election could be attributed in part to her willingness to vote against American interests.WSJ: Here’s the real problem with the U.N.’s revised Gaza death toll
“Fundamentally, what the rest of the world wanted to see was that the US candidate to the court was independent from the US government, was interested in their individual countries, and understood their perspective,” Cleveland said. “They did not want a judge from a permanent member of the Security Council who would predictably vote for her own country’s interests.”
To win support from countries in the United Nations, Cleveland touted her history of standing against the US government’s positions on controversial issues.
“I have a long record of independence from the US government, since my very first case — as a student in a human rights clinic at Yale Law School — which was a lawsuit against the US government on behalf of Haitian refugees detained at Guantanamo,” she said.
On Friday, the ICJ issued a ruling demanding that Israel halt its military operations against the Hamas terrorist group in Rafah and allow for significantly more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. Critics of the court have accused the ICJ, along with other major international organizations, of harboring substantial and unfair bias against Israel.
The order was adopted by the panel of 15 judges from around the world in a 13-2 vote, opposed by judges from Uganda and Israel itself.
If carried out, the ICJ ruling would effectively end Israel’s campaign to dismantle Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza by invading southern Israel on Oct. 7, murdering 1,200 people, and kidnapping over 250 others as hostages.
However, Israeli officials have indicated the Jewish state will not comply with the ruling of the court, which has no enforcement powers.
Yet this new framing obscures reality. The “identified” data has become increasingly incomplete over time, and 17.1 percent of the “identified” entries in the Health Ministry’s early-May release have missing or invalid IDs, ages, names or sex. Meanwhile, the “unidentified” entries are actually a rebranding of the data from the media reports methodology, a change made in April as outside scrutiny grew.
It is unusual for the United Nations, which normally uses a strict casualty verification standard, to report unverified casualty figures from involved parties. The United Nations stopped reporting the death toll in Syria between 2014 and 2021 amid verification difficulties, and it has not even attempted comprehensive casualty reporting in the Ethiopian civil war. In Sudan, the verified U.N. death toll is nearly exceeded by estimated fatalities from a single city.
A better approach for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs would be to stop citing statistics from Hamas’s government media office, which lacks the capacity or authority to count casualties, and to distinguish between the three Health Ministry methodologies, while applying basic scrutiny to claims by all parties.
What can a partial and contested picture of the death toll, patched together through three methodologies of varying reliability, tell us? It cannot yield a civilian-combatant ratio, given the Health Ministry’s refusal to distinguish between the two and the likely undercounting of militants killed on the battlefield. It also cannot help assess the legality of individual Israeli strikes or operations. Nor is the claimed death toll a clear undercount: 40 percent of reported deaths derive from methodologies that do not involve physical identification of a body, creating likely overlap with those reported missing or under the rubble. The approach also cannot convey the enormous loss of life experienced by Gazans.
The data can give only broad indications: namely, that fighting-age men are overrepresented among the dead and that there has been a steady decline in the daily death toll, from an average of 341 in October to 56 in April.
A core criticism of Israeli conduct is that it has inflicted a high civilian death toll — the numbers have featured prominently in the news media, in remarks by international leaders, in arguments before the International Court of Justice and in criticism from the U.S. government. Yet the methodologies employed by the Hamas-run organizations compiling the information have been subjected to remarkably little scrutiny.
Exercising caution is essential when dealing with claims made about death tolls in any conflict, particularly claims made by warring parties. That means being transparent in acknowledging flaws in the available data and methodologies; failure to do so inevitably leads to suspicion that the data is being employed with a political goal in mind. The United Nations, government officials, media outlets and policy analysts have an obligation to employ the same professionalism and diligence regarding the war in Gaza that they have applied in other conflicts.