The problem should be obvious. International legal relationships and jurisdictional claims are already complex enough in an increasingly interdependent world. Using domestic criminal justice systems as a means of achieving foreign policy ends or, even worse, allowing individual magistrates to use their courts on a freelance basis makes global dispute resolution difficult — if not impossible — even when countless innocent lives are very much at stake, as in Darfur.
And, of course, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
African leaders, evidently unimpressed with Europe’s claims of moral authority, have condemned the indictments, and Rwandan President Paul Kagame (himself a potential target of a future legal action) has suggested that his own country might proceed against Europeans — specifically against French military officers who advised the previous, genocidal Rwandan government — in response to the Spanish and French indictments.
What we are seeing is not the birth of a global rule of law but a type of worldwide judicial anarchy. Spain’s judges should not be driving foreign policy at the United Nations — but they are.