Beneath Their PC Veneer

Brendan O'Neill writes:

Imagine if there were a criminal court in Britain which only ever tried black people, which ignored crimes committed by whites and Asians and only took an interest in crimes committed by blacks. We would consider that racist, right? And yet there is an International Criminal Court which only ever tries black people, African black people to be precise, and it is treated as perfectly normal. In fact the court is lauded by many radical activists as a good and decent institution, despite the fact that no non-black person has ever been brought before it to answer for his crimes. It is remarkable that in an era when liberal observers see racism everywhere, in every thoughtless aside or crude joke, they fail to see it in an institution which focuses exclusively on the criminal antics of dark-skinned people from the "Dark Continent".

Yesterday, the International Criminal Court delivered the first verdict in its 10-year history, finding Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga guilty of recruiting child soldiers. Lubanga is black, of course. Despite having pretty much global jurisdiction to investigate war crimes, and despite having received complaints about alleged crimes in 139 countries, the ICC has only opened investigations into seven countries, all of them in Africa: the Democratic Republic of Congo (where Lubanga committed his crimes), Uganda, the Central African Republic, Darfur/Sudan, Kenya, Libya and the Ivory Coast. (NB the Serbs stood trial in a special, separate court: the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.)

No doubt many crimes were committed in the conflicts that swept those seven African nations in recent years, and no doubt Lubanga is a nasty piece of work. But at a time when there is conflict in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, and when the armies of many Western nations are getting up to all sorts of bad things around the globe, to have a war crimes court which only investigates blacks really is as perverse as it would be to have a court in Britain that investigated black burglaries and ignored white ones.

But try saying that to any human-rights activist or concerned commentator, and watch them balk. They will accept no criticism of the ICC. The kind of people who hector Boris Johnson for making a silly comment about the Irish or lambast Prince Phillip for being un-PC about ethnic minorities will tell you, with a perfectly straight face, that the ICC is a good institution which is helping to right the wrongs of the world. Liberal sensitivity towards issues of racism completely evaporates when it comes to the ICC, which they will defend tooth and nail, despite the fact that it is quite clearly, by any objective measurement, racist, in the sense that it treats one race of people differently to all others.

In the words of Courtenay Griffiths, the British QC who has acted as defence lawyer for Africans charged with war crimes: "The ICC was set up to try those lesser breeds without the law – the Africans. This is the same civilising mission from the late nineteenth century and I find it, as a black man, totally objectionable." The fact that many white do-gooders in the West support such a missionary institution rather gives the lie to their claims to be concerned about equality and justice, and exposes the colonial snob lurking beneath their PC veneer.