International Justice?

The extradition in July of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague was a subtle shift in the march toward global "law." It was the first time a former head of state had been successfully extradited for trial as a war criminal. However, while some might consider the trial of a "war criminal" a positive event, it should be considered negative because the precedent it is setting in global law is dubious.

The Emerging Global Governance

In its push toward global governance, the UN has been striving for three key elements:

1. An independent, standing UN army to make it a power in its own right;
2. A global system of taxation collected independently of other nations, making it free from dependence on member nations' dues; and,
3. A global system of law complete with courts and enforcement. Thus we are hearing more and more the term "international law," even though what that is and who makes it is currently vague. Nevertheless, that hasn't prevented the globalists from making it up as they go along-with or without the approval of the world.

Crime Goes International

The 20th century saw some of the worst "crimes against humanity" in the history of the world. As movie newsreels portrayed the horrors of Nazi death camps, the natural concern was to bring them to justice. However, the question was, what justice?, since justice usually operates within a legal system of jurisdiction, such as a country. The problem that confronted the Allied prosecutors was that the Holocaust was a technically legal event, having been perpetrated and sanctioned by legitimate laws of a sovereign state. So how could the men and women who had perpetrated it and followed legitimate orders and the laws of Germany then be prosecuted when, technically, no law had been broken? Indeed, the defendants at Nuremberg made just such an argument in their defense. To circumvent this problem, the Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg created a new category of law out of thin air, called "crimes against humanity." They then proceeded to prosecute the Nazis ex post facto, on the basis of a crime which hadn't even existed when it was committed. Appeal was made to the philosophical ideal that all humans have rights and that these rights transcend borders.

While the Nazis did commit moral outrages that deserved punishment, the Nuremberg trials introduced legal leger de main, which will most likely prove to have opened the door to tremendous evil before it is done. This legal magic is blossoming in our day. It is wise to remember that evil frequently rides in on the back of a white horse - a solution to an evil problem, which becomes far more evil than the original problem.

A Dangerous Precedent

The most recent thrust to implement international justice is the International Criminal Court. Although it has yet to be ratified by the required 60 countries, the globalists have already begun legal proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic, a former head of state, who was successfully extradited from his home country to stand before an international tribunal.¹

Here's the catch. This precedent-setting action did not come as the result of a duly ratified treaty or by following some established international law, but by rather dubious international manipulation. First, the International Criminal Court does not technically exist yet, because the treaty creating it has not been ratified by the required 60 member states. So, to circumvent that problem, the tribunal charged with hearing Milosevic's case was convened at the request of the United Nations Security Council, consisting of 15 nations, rather than by the vote of the entire UN membership in the General Assembly.²

The charges against Milosevic - responsibility for the murder of more than 600 people and the displacement of 740,000 Albanians in Kosovo in 1999 ³ - were originally initiated at the time of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Since that time, Milosevic has been replaced by the legitimate election of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. The new prime minister was eventually forced to extradite his predecessor when the extradition was made a condition for a desperately needed $1.3 billion aid package.⁴ Milosevic questioned the legitimacy of the tribunal when he was brought before the UN war crimes court at The Hague. He told the judge, "I consider this tribunal a false tribunal and the indictment a false indictment."⁵ Milosevic refused to appoint a lawyer for his defense and also refused to hear the indictment or enter a plea, because of his contention of the court's illegitimacy. Milosevic may be correct in his complaint, but without a formal court system, to whom will he appeal?

International Criminal Court

The International Court of Justice at The Hague was established to handle disputes between nations. It has no jurisdiction to indict individuals. It was with this in mind that the International Criminal Court (ICC) was conceived, to prosecute individuals accused of "crimes against humanity." If the ICC is eventually ratified by a minimum of 60 countries, it will come into existence and already claims jurisdiction even over those countries which don't ratify the treaty, which opens another legal can of worms. The ICC will not have the guarantees that English-speaking countries have come to take for granted. For example, there are no trials by jury, no presumption of innocence, no right to freedom from self incrimination, no right to a speedy trial, no protection against cruel or unusual punishments, and appeals will be handled internally by the court's appellate judges.⁶

Israel the Next Target

While Milosevic may have been a malevolent dictator, the precedent his case sets may be far worse than is immediately evident. There is no uniform standard for what constitutes an international criminal or what crimes are deemed serious enough to be addressed in the arena of international justice. For example, far worse crimes involving millions of innocent victims in Sudan, Indonesia, Iraq, and Cuba have seemingly gone unnoticed. The UN also has a well-established track record of showing partiality to socialist rulers and hostility toward capitalist ones, and its favorite whipping boy of late is Israel. The next candidate for indictment may be Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who is accused of allowing the massacre of 800 Palestinians by Lebanese "Phalangist" forces. While Sharon denied any part in the incident, his detractors labeled him the "butcher of Lebanon." Since that time, new revelations have surfaced suggesting that the killings were masterminded by another man, Elias Hobeika, who though operating at top levels of Lebanese intelligence was actually loyal to the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. Some analysts now believe that Hobeika actually staged the massacre to further Syrian interests.⁷

Global Governance on the March

The ICC is only one part of the push to establish global governance. This trend toward globalism has tremendous significance for Christians for several reasons. First, we are witnessing the formation of what, it would seem, the Bible predicted 2,000 years ago: a (somewhat) unified, universal, political, financial and religious system.

Second, Christians have failed to note that the new global paradigm being implemented has moral, religious and political components that will not tolerate opposition or dissent by religious factions that do not agree with it. These paradigms are operating within the new definitions of "consensus," which itself is a dialectical, changing process of truths and rights and wrongs. Even the UN's definitions of "mental health" for its global programs see firm adherence to one's faith-to the exclusion of other faiths or the UN's global values-as a mental illness. This sounds hauntingly like the abuse of mental health in the former Soviet Union to persecute dissidents.

Ultimately, the new globalism will not leave the Christian Church alone, or any other religious groups that don't go along with it. It will use legal, economic and social pressures to co-opt, coerce, or eliminate religious groups - either force them into conformity to the new ideals or "out of business." No clearer warning can be sounded as to the dangers to faith on the road ahead.