The ICC Issues Arrest Warrants. Then the Accused Address Parliaments.

There is a photograph from March 13, 2023, that tells you everything you need to know about international justice. Vladimir Putin stands at a podium in Moscow, announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions. Seventy-two hours earlier, the International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for his detention on charges of war crimes—specifically, the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. The warrant was public. The charges were specific. Putin was undeterred.

What happened next was more revealing than the warrant itself. Putin traveled to Mongolia in September 2024. Mongolia is a signatory to the Rome Statute—the treaty that created the ICC and obligates member states to execute its warrants. Mongolia did not arrest him. It hosted him. The Mongolian government issued a statement about "balancing international obligations with national interests." The ICC issued a statement expressing "deep concern." Putin returned to Moscow.

I am not sure what we expected, but it was not this. Or perhaps it was exactly this, and we simply refused to see it.

The Architecture

The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute in 2002 with a mandate to prosecute genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. It has 124 member states. It has issued arrest warrants for 59 individuals. Thirty-one of those individuals have never been arrested. They include sitting heads of state, former presidents, military commanders, and militia leaders. Some live openly in capital cities. Some travel internationally. Some address their national parliaments.

The court has no police force. It has no army. It cannot compel sovereign states to act. Its authority rests entirely on the willingness of member states to enforce its warrants—and that willingness, it turns out, is selective.

Omar al-Bashir, indicted in 2009 for genocide in Darfur, traveled to at least nine ICC member states between 2009 and 2019 without arrest. He attended an African Union summit in South Africa in 2015. South Africa obtained a court injunction to prevent his departure, then allowed him to leave anyway. The South African government later apologized to the ICC. Al-Bashir remained president of Sudan until a military coup removed him in 2019—not because of the ICC charges, but because the Sudanese people demanded his removal.

He is currently in a Sudanese prison on corruption charges. The ICC warrant remains active. Sudan has refused to transfer him.

What the Precedents Tell Us

There is a history here, and it is not encouraging. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, established in 1993, took seven years to arrest Slobodan Milošević—and only after he had already lost power. Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general indicted for the Srebrenica genocide, evaded arrest for sixteen years. He was finally detained in 2011, living openly in Serbia under an assumed name.

Radovan Karadžić, indicted alongside Mladić, lived in Belgrade for years as a practitioner of alternative medicine, giving public lectures on spirituality. He grew a beard. He changed his name to Dragan Dabić. He was arrested in 2008—thirteen years after his indictment—on a city bus.

The pattern is this: international tribunals issue warrants, states ignore them, the accused live openly, and arrests happen only when domestic politics shift—or when the United States decides enforcement serves its interests. Milošević was arrested after NATO pressured Serbia with the promise of reconstruction funds. Mladić and Karadžić were arrested after the European Union made their detention a precondition for Serbian membership negotiations.

Who Benefits

The question is not why the system fails. The question is who benefits from its failure. The answer is: powerful states that want the appearance of accountability without the inconvenience of enforcement.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. Neither is Russia, China, India, or Israel. The court can prosecute crimes committed on the territory of member states or by nationals of member states, but it cannot compel non-members to cooperate. This means the ICC prosecutes almost exclusively African defendants—32 of its 59 arrest warrants have targeted individuals from African countries—while the architects of the Iraq War, the architects of the war in Yemen, and the architects of China's Xinjiang camps remain beyond its reach.

The African Union has repeatedly accused the ICC of neocolonial bias. In 2017, Burundi, South Africa, and The Gambia announced their intention to withdraw from the Rome Statute. Burundi completed its withdrawal. South Africa and The Gambia reversed course after domestic political changes. The criticism, however, is not without merit. When the ICC indicted Uhuru Kenyatta, then deputy prime minister of Kenya, for crimes against humanity related to post-election violence in 2007–2008, Kenyatta ran for president on a platform of defiance. He won. The African Union passed a resolution urging member states not to cooperate with the ICC. The charges against Kenyatta were eventually dropped due to "insufficient evidence"—evidence that witnesses said had been suppressed through intimidation.

The Illusion of Progress

There is a way in which international humanitarian law has become a performance. States sign treaties. Diplomats give speeches. The ICC issues warrants. And nothing happens. The warrants are filed. The speeches are archived. The accused remain free.

I think of the survivors. I think of the Yazidi women enslaved by ISIS who testified before the ICC's investigation into crimes in Iraq. I think of the mothers in Darfur who identified their children's bodies in mass graves. I think of the Ukrainian families whose children were taken to Russia and renamed, re-registered, adopted by Russian families under a systematic program documented by the ICC prosecutor.

They were promised justice. What they received was paperwork.

What Enforcement Could Look Like

The question we refuse to ask is whether a system of international justice without enforcement is justice at all. The answer depends on what we think justice is for. If it is symbolic—a statement of norms, a marker of civilization—then the ICC is succeeding. It produces documents. It establishes precedents. It creates a vocabulary of accountability.

But if justice is meant to stop atrocities, to deter future crimes, to provide redress to victims—then the ICC is failing. And it is failing because it was designed to fail.

Enforcement would require mechanisms the international community has refused to create. It would require an ICC police force with the authority to operate across borders. It would require automatic sanctions against states that refuse to execute warrants—suspension from the United Nations, exclusion from trade agreements, freezing of assets. It would require the UN Security Council to treat non-cooperation as a threat to international peace and security, triggering Chapter VII enforcement measures.

None of this will happen. The permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—have veto power over any such measures. Three of those states are not parties to the Rome Statute. The other two are selective in their enforcement.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The story we tell about international justice is that it is inevitable, that the arc of history bends toward accountability, that war criminals may evade justice temporarily but will ultimately face consequences. The evidence suggests otherwise.

The truth is this: international law is enforced only when powerful states find it convenient. The ICC prosecutes weak states and non-state actors. It issues warrants against the powerful that serve as diplomatic gestures—meaningful in the abstract, irrelevant in practice. The court has a budget of €167 million, 900 staff members, and no capacity to compel a single arrest.

I return to that photograph of Putin at the podium, indicted and undeterred. It is not a photograph of impunity. It is a photograph of a system functioning exactly as it was designed to function—a court with authority in theory and no power in fact, a monument to the principle that justice matters, except when it does not.

The Reckoning

What would enforcement actually require? It would require us to admit that sovereignty is not absolute, that borders do not grant immunity, that states harboring war criminals forfeit the protections of statehood. It would require a willingness to use force—not symbolic force, not diplomatic force, but military and economic force—to compel compliance.

This is not an argument for war. It is an argument for coherence. If we believe that genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes are so grave that they warrant a permanent international court, then we must believe they are grave enough to enforce that court's judgments. If we do not believe that—if we believe enforcement is too costly, too risky, too disruptive to the international order—then we should stop pretending the court has meaning.

The current arrangement is the worst of both worlds. We have created a system that angers the powerful without deterring them, that promises justice to victims without delivering it, that enshrines norms without enforcing them. We have built an accountability machine that runs on hope instead of power.

The photograph from March 13, 2023, remains. Putin at the podium. The warrant in The Hague. The gap between law and reality so wide it has become a governing principle of the international order.

I am not sure what we expected. But I know what we got: a court without consequences, justice without enforcement, a monument to the idea that some things are unforgivable—and that the unforgivable will not be punished.