The concepts of both civil and criminal justice assume national identity within a society, such as the United States. How are these ideals applied to people outside of that society? What are the obligations of distribution and retribution of nations toward other nations, or toward individuals outside of U.S. society? As commerce and technology have drastically reduced the time and isolation between nations and peoples, the possibility of interdependent global responsibility has developed in response to these questions. International bodies such as the United Nations, as well as many economists and philosophers, claim that a nation is obligated to protect fundamental tenets of justice internationally and that such protection extends to both civil and criminal justice.

Justice requires that states take responsibility to avert harm that can reasonably be anticipated, for example, by stabilizing regions such as the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda that, left alone, would devolve into chaos. At the same time, international justice demands that laws and practices determining conditions in other nations protect fundamental structures of humane existence rather than exploit weak justice systems in those countries for the sake of profit alone. Thus, trade agreements, international labor practices, and environmental phenomena impacting multiple nations can be viewed as matters of international justice, demanding that both the active parties (the beneficiaries) and the passive parties (the recipients) be afforded fair minimum resources. Clearly, these views of international justice reject the position that justice posits the right to fair accumulation. Even that conceptualization of justice, however, may acknowledge that the nation-state provides a link between social norms within a nation and how that nation behaves internationally, in other words, the connection between domestic and international authority. Whether the nation is obligated to act according to domestic norms depends on whether one views justice as a function of universal morality or finite within the cultural and geographic borders of the state.

International criminal prosecution addresses those violations of human conduct so egregious that domestic prosecution is insufficient. These are cases in which large numbers of people are killed, especially people targeted because of their ethnicity, race, or other defining and unalterable characteristic. Motivation to create an international tribunal developed as nations grew into increasing interaction with each other, following advances in transportation and the corresponding impact of commerce and war. Following World War II, the Nuremburg and Tokyo Courts were established and administered by the winning allies to address war crimes committed by the losing nations. At the end of the cold war, the Rome Statute established the International Criminal Court. In meetings that began in 1998, the court's jurisdiction and administration evolved to try crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. In 2002 the statute was signed and ratified by enough nations (60) to make the treaty binding and effectively establish the court. The statute has been ratified by 104 nations and signed by an additional 35. The United States opposes the treaty, based on concern that U.S. citizens could be tried in the court. Considerable debate exists about the exclusion of other crimes, notably drug trafficking, terrorism, and use of weapons of mass destruction, none of which has unanimous international agreement as to definition.

These two issues, ratification and definition of crimes, speak to the principle challenges of defining the terms of international justice as well as creating effective structures to administer justice internationally. Crimes committed by states or by individuals protected from one state's justice processes by another state are difficult to define without asserting international priority over national sovereignty. Nations, particularly those that are internationally dominant such as the United States, have little practical reason to defer to an international determinant of right and wrong, preferring to define and address violation of law (and not the broader universal ethics) through national systems, including military courts, and thereby avoid seeing harsh punishment meted out in the international arena to citizens who would be absolved or benignly punished for crimes domestically. Indeed, the United States successfully sought assurance from the UN Security Council that no U.S. troop would be surrendered to the court, though the United Nations agreed to the provision only for UN-related activity. This protection, however, was revoked following evidence of abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by U.S. military personnel. Indeed, the War on Terror demonstrates several challenges to executing international justice, including recognition of legitimacy, access to offenders, agreement on how violations are defined, and agreement on purpose and nature of punishment.

References:

1) Dworkin, Ronald. 1985. A Matter of Principle. New York: Oxford University Press.

2) Follesdal, Andreas and Thomas Pogge. 2005. "What Is Global Justice?" Pp. 1-20 in Real World Justice, edited by A. Follesdal and T. Pogge. Berlin: Springer.

3) Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

4) Sen, Amartya. 2001. Development as Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.

5) United Nations. 1999-2002. Rome Statute of International Criminal Court. UN Doc. A/CONF.183/9.

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