Kim Jong Il, you're under arrest

[pampango]

Source: Global Post

Setting fire to life-size cutouts of North Korea’s reclusive leader Kim Jong Il in the streets of Seoul is one of the more creative ways activists have protested against the hermit kingdom’s unpopular human rights record. But challenging a leader who has managed to completely isolate his country from the rest of the world is no easy task. After years of picketing and publishing booklets, groups in South Korea have set their sights higher: taking Kim Jong Il to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

More than 100 civic groups in South Korea recently launched a movement called the Anti-human Crime Investigation Committee and have declared their intention to take North Korea’s leader to the international court, which can prosecute individuals for their involvement in war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

The court, since it began operating in 2002, has taken A former rebel leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Thomas Lubanga, into custody for forcibly conscripting child soldiers, and unsealed an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. It has two additional ongoing investigations in Uganda and the Central African Republic.The ICC can only prosecute someone who is a citizen of, or has committed a crime in, a member state. — which North Korea is not. A state can voluntarily accept the court's jurisdiction, but as long as the Kim dynasty rules, the chances are almost nonexistent.

An exception is if the U.N. Security Council unanimously orders an investigation, as with President Bashir of Sudan. But with North Korea's ally China holding a Security Council veto, the odds of that happening to Kim Jong Il are slim.

Read more: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/south-korea/091203/korea-politics-defection

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Obviously not likely to ever happen, but interesting that there is an effort to use the ICC that way.

[smirkymonkey]

1. God, if they could only drag Kim Jong Il to court, imagine what

they could do in this country! We have a quite a few war criminals of our own living the lives of free men.

[aquart]

2. "They"?

We need other people to bring our criminals to justice? WHY?

[smirkymonkey]

3. Because apparently we can't.

Or won't.