How does international law work? Who is holding countries accountable and what real punishments can be enforced on a nation’s government/people?
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Each country is considered sovereign within its borders. International courts bring up people on charges of crimes against humanity. But on topics of how a country governs itself, there is no international law.
Several leaders have been convicted and sentenced to jail for life
There isn’t any enforcing body in international law, it’s just all the countries keeping each other responsible for aggrements. If a country don’t want to follow on their treaties and what is view as international law, other countries might put sanction or refuse to deal with them in the future. In the global economy of today, not carring about international law might cripple the economy of your country, isolate you diplomatically, anger your own population, prevent you acces to important ressources, etc Basically it like the kid that don’t play by the rule and end up playing by himself.
In worst case scenario the international community or a powerful group of countries could make war to you to enforce international law.
International laws fall into two rough categories: Self-imposed and foreign-imposed. Self-imposed international laws cover things like the EU, where several countries got together and agreed to share certain laws and a semi-governing body. In this case, the law is enforced by countries on themselves, and if a major problem arises then other countries in the agreement may step in. The Geneva Convention falls into this category, for the most part. Foreign-imposed laws are generally rules that big countries force onto smaller countries. Things like war crimes might be a violation of such laws. Enforcing of the Geneva convention on countries that have not signed it would count as this. Depending on how you want to look at it, *most* foreign economic and military interventions could be put in this category.
Generally, states have to consent to being subject to a binding decision. Sounds paradoxical, but they are often insentivised to do so to gain certain advantages. For example, to gain access to favourable tariffs under the WTO regime, states have to agree to be binded by decisions of WTO tribunal. The consent is usually given by signing a treaty or becoming a part of international organization, like EU or other trade blocks.
In some cases states can even consent to being “sued” by individuals. For example, European Convention on Human Rights allows individuals to petition European Court of Justice to review their case.
As for actually enforcement… Well, there isn’t any, as other comments said. At least not centralized one. States can respond with acts of their own, such as sanctions (which are sometimes argued to be illegal outside the scope of UN Security Council) or refuse to perform their own obligations towards offending state.
There are two principal ways. The first is to have a treaty with another country. This is the most common way, if you are in violation of that treaty you have broken an international law. International just means between two or more countries. Examples of treaties include agreements to house US bases in foreign countries, NATO, etc.
The second way is to be part of a trade and or governance pact. This is like a treaty but more involved. The EU and the voting members of the UN security council are examples of this. You don’t need a new treaty for every one thing that needs to go back to your respective governments for approval.
International law isn’t really law, and should probably be called “international commonly agreed standards of behaviour”, although that’s a bit of a mouthful.
Only states can authorise jurisdiction and so only states can hold countries to account. So if you break international law other states may take action against you, or may simply think less of you for it. But there is no international police or international court who will send you to jail.
There are some international judicial bodies though:
– when you sign a treaty you make that treaty into a binding part of your own domestic law, and so if you then break the treaty your own courts can prosecute you for doing it. But if you live in a country that doesn’t have an independent judiciary then they probably won’t, but there might be penalty clauses in the treaty itself, and so the other parties to the treaty might take actions against you on that basis, and of course you lose the benefits of having signed the treaty. Some treaties have “treaty bodies” attached, like the OPCW attached to the Chemical Weapons Treaty, who monitor compliance and blow the whistle when the treaty is being violated.
– the international court of justice, ICJ, is a court set up to resolve disputes between states through legal proceedings. States who have a dispute and want to resolve it legally can bring their dispute to the ICJ and both agree to an undertaking to be bound by its outcome. There’s no enforcement for that undertaking but since going to the ICJ is voluntary to begin with and there’s no real point in going to the ICJ at all unless you’re willing to respect it, if you go to the ICJ at all then you tend to respect its outcome. The ICJ can also issue advisory opinions even when it doesn’t have these undertakings, although these are not then binding – they’re just a respected legal opinion into what the law is
– the international criminal court, ICC, is a treaty body (the treaty is called the Rome Statute) specifically designed to prosecute atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and war crimes) and the crime of waging aggressive war. Countries that agree to be bound by the Rome Statute agree that that means the ICC can prosecute them if they commit those crimes. But they have no police or army, so it is up to the states, or to other states who are part of the system, to hand perpetrators over. The ICC can also act without permission if the UN Security Council tells them to (more on that next)
– the UN Security Council is a body of France, Russia, China, the USA and the UK and ten elected countries on rotating two year terms. It is not a legal body, it is a purely political body that makes political decisions. However it is allowed to order “coercive measures” against other states (sanctions, taking military action against them, or ordering the ICC to prosecute them) and one of the reasons it might order coercive measures against a state was because they broke international law. But they might not, particularly as all five of those first five countries have to agree on a course of action before it can happen, and so they protect themselves and their friends. Even if they do order coercive measures, they have no means themselves of making sure those coercive measures are carried out, that’s up to states to go and do it for them (although the idea by having those 5 states have to agree to everything is that those five at least should be committed to the action and between the 5 of them they should be able to hold most people to account).
– there are various bodies like the WTO and PCA which basically offer different kinds of mediation and arbitration processes between states.
A key concept in international law and relations is that nation-states are *sovereign*. That means they’re completely independent and you can’t really force a nation-state to do something it doesn’t want to do. Therefore, one of a nation-state’s primary goals is maintaining its *sovereignty*.
That said, there’s still an agreement that there should be norms and standards for conduct even among nation-states. That’s where you get international law. But it differs from the laws you and I are bound to follow in that following international law requires consensus. You and I are bound by the laws of where we are even if we don’t agree with the laws.
With nation-states who can ignore the laws at any time its important to figure out something to agree on first. Even then it doesn’t work all that often.
Then you have what’s left. You can’t put a whole country in jail. But you can try other things to try a nation-state to get back to normal. That might include sanctions on the nation as a whole, or sanctions on individuals in the government who can make the changes. At the extreme end you can use international courts to put people on trial in a venue that has jurisdiction (i.e. the right to hear cases) over people who committed ‘international’ crimes.
That’s what happened with someone like Slobodan Milosevic. The issue was the extent he was personally responsible for the acts of genocice performed by serbian forces during the Yugoslav wars in the 90s. Though he was being tried by a court specifically set up by the UN focused on former Yugoslavia.
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