A Court’s Collapse (National Review Online)
September 15, 2014
By Eugene Kontorovich
The International Criminal Court earlier this month suffered its biggest setback since its establishment at the turn of the century amid hopes that soft power and legalism could deter atrocities. The court’s chief prosecutor announced that she was shelving the prosecution of Uhuru Kenyatta, accused of abetting thousands of murders and rapes in Kenya’s 2007 interethnic election violence.
The prosecutor said the three-year-old case could not go on because Kenya’s government would not cooperate with requests for evidence. As it happens, Kenyatta is the country’s president (and son of post-colonial founder Jomo Kenayatta); his co-defendant, William Ruto, is the deputy president. They were democratically elected last year, having run for office while under the ICC indictment, cracking jokes about The Hague on the stump.