On 14 November 2019, the President the International Criminal Court (ICC) Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji, delivered the third annual Lantos Rule of Law Lecture at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C., United States.
During his lecture, titled “The US and the ICC”, the President recalled the message of the USA Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg proceedings after the World War II, Robert H Jackson, who underscored the “indispensability” of international law “to a world that plans to live in peace.”
President Chile Eboe Osuji stressed that “when international law operates to make our world a little better for common humanity in the long run, it would have worked to our national advantage, though it may not seem like it in the short run”.
“Justice plays its important part in helping to deter those conducts and events that drive mass migration or refugee flows. It does so by exerting the needed pressure against those conducts. And that is one more reason that compels sustaining and supporting the ICC – and not subverting it,” the President stated.
In his remarks, the ICC President expressed his disappointment at the threats made against the Court by the United States Government in the context of the situation in Afghanistan. “It truly confounds the mind to think that such a development would be something that could, in the strangest of happenings, be associated with the Government of the United States – a country that the world has grown used to seeing as the most prominent lighthouse of the rule of law and respect for judicial independence”, he said.
The President however welcomed the fact that influential groups and individuals within the U.S. had condemned the threats against the ICC and called upon their government to cooperate with the Court. The President ended his lecture with a call upon the United States to join the Rome Statute of the ICC.
“The US and the ICC”: Annual Lantos Rule of Law Lecture by ICC President Chile Eboe-Osuji
