War And Justice

Bluesky

Try to imagine, for a moment, a world without war. It’s not easy to do. Most of us find ourselves pulling back instinctively, ready to dismiss the idea without discussion, because it sounds hopelessly naïve. But might our ancestors, four thousand years ago, have reacted the same way to the notion of a society without interpersonal violence? Did they laugh when, in 1755 BCE, Hammurabi formally introduced the idea of solving conflicts through recourse to law instead? Although fights still happen, they’re not a day to day occurrence for most of us, and many people go their whole lives without ever getting into one. Could we, with enough effort, bring about a similar change in the way we manage conflict between nations?

“There has never been a war without atrocities on all sides,” says Ben Ferencz, the youngest of the prosecutors who took on Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. He appears here in one of his last interviews, filmed shortly before his death in 2023, and the film is dedicated to his memory. Despite all the horrors that he has dealt with, he says, he still holds that the greatest crime is starting wars, in itself.

This isn’t the morally simple statement it might seem to be. Rightly or wrongly, sometimes wars are started with the intention of saving lives, or of ending other evils such as slavery. Although the film doesn’t dig down into these complexities, other participants stress that the kind of warmongering they condemn is war or aggression. Then again, they highlight the ease with which an aggressive situation can be presented to ordinary citizens as a defensive one – all that people need is to be persuaded that they’re under threat. An extreme example of this, and the damage done by paranoia, is provided by a piece of Nazi testimony.

There is a description of the present era as one defined by constant war – and all of it complicated by the danger of global escalation and nuclear exchanges. The film makes specific reference to the ‘complicated’ situation in Ukraine; Libya’s ‘Arab Spring’ and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi; and Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the first person the International Criminal Court ever convicted – as well as George Bush and Tony Blair launching war of Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the pictures of torture which emerged from Abu Ghraib. There’s also a lengthy discussion of the difficulties presented by Palestine, before and after the UN considered recognising it as a state.

Would war be necessary in a world where there were alternative means of achieving justice at the state level? This is a problem that the ICC was created to solve, and the film sets out to tell its story: origins, ambitions, political struggles and more. It’s a necessarily simple account – the running time is only just over 90 minutes – but it benefits from the participation of the organisation’s first ever chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, as he returns to the Hague for the first time in 15 years. His conversations with a driver as he travels round the city, remembering old haunts, add a human dimension to the story; and present chief prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan steps in to bring us up to date.

There are a few asides to bring in celebrities who have their own connections with the court. One can understand the desire to leverage Angelina Jolie for marketing purposes, though it would have been nice to hear a little about her important work on bringing war rapists to justice. The inclusion of Julian Assange is a little more dubious. He doesn’t contribute anything that couldn’t have been summed up in an intertitle, and some viewers will feel uncomfortable about him being associated with an argument for the rule of law.

In the end, that’s the focus of the film. Due attention is paid to the court’s more obvious limitations, and the fact that, as a consequence, it has only successfully taken action against smaller, less powerful countries. Moreno points out that at least it has succeeded in protecting some people. The case is made that whilst it could be more outspoken in some cases – especially around the abusive behaviour of the US, Russia and Israel – it cannot afford to overreach itself not just because this would likely be ineffective, but because to do so would defeat the idea of using agreed rules rather than force, of using law itself.

Culturally speaking, the project is still at an early stage, and with powerful economic interests supporting the continued instigation of wars, progress will take time. This makes it a difficult subject for this sort of documentary. The format is somewhat meandering and at times it feels as if stories or images of horror are being used primarily for the purpose of keeping it energised. That said, it’s an important subject, and a fair amount of information about it is communicated in an accessible way. Prospective viewers need not fear that it will be too dry or jargon-dense and incomprehensible. They will go away with a good basic understanding of what the court is, what it does, and why it is worth holding out hope for a less violent world.