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Saving U.S. Soldiers from Runaway Prosecutors
(Wall Street Journal) Eugene Kontorovich - The Trump foreign policy team scored a big victory in The Hague that will protect American soldiers from illegitimate and unaccountable foreign prosecutions. The International Criminal Court dropped a more than decade-long inquiry into alleged crimes by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the U.S. would deny a visa to the court's prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. If the ICC were to indict U.S. servicemen, no American president would turn them over, but it would have a real effect on their lives. They would face peril in traveling to countries that have joined the ICC, including all of Western Europe. They would be international fugitives. The court's officials are unaccountable to nationals of non-member states like the U.S. Yet they might sit in judgment of decisions made by U.S. personnel in life-or-death situations, and second-guess the judgments of professional prosecutors in democratic countries that have chosen not to join the court. The court is currently considering whether to open an investigation into whether Israel is committing war crimes by allowing Jews to live in the West Bank. Thus the ICC would be investigating a non-member state at the behest of a non-state member, for a supposed crime that no one in the history of international criminal law has been charged with. The writer is a professor at George Mason University Law School.