Ruth Wedgwood is Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy; and Director of the International Law and Organizations Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University, Washington DC. She is also a  visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the UN Human Rights Committee.

If you’re a betting person, here’s a safe bet: On August 9, the balloting in the east African state of Rwanda will give world-famous military leader Paul Kagame yet another seven-year term as president. The astonishing margin of victory will impress even the modern grand viziers of Central Asia. The outcome is quite easy to predict, when no other candidates are allowed to campaign.

Given this and much else besides, it’s time Washington began to create some distance from a man who has earned his reputation as a de facto despot who terrorizes critics and does not shrink from political violence.

Kagame revels in his fame as the strategist who led a Tutsi invasion force from Uganda in 1994, pushing back the Hutu army and Hutu militia, though not before they perpetrated a shocking genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of the country’s Tutsi minority, as well as moderate Hutu. Washington, reeling from Somalia and fearing another Black Hawk Down, refused to intervene. Madeline Albright was directed to inform the U.N. Security Council that, no, we would not reconstitute the U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda, and, further, the United States would veto any resolution that authorized other countries to do so. It was the season of peacekeeping misadventures, and the Clinton White House decided, as one former National Security Council official recalls, that it could not afford to intervene both in Haiti and Rwanda. Presidential Decision Directive 25, drafted by Richard Clarke as a white paper for peacekeeping, morphed into an excuse to “just say no.”

For the last 15 years, Kagame has at every turn invoked these memories to shoehorn the West into a nearly reflexive support for his government. Even Bill Clinton came back to apologize. Kagame has become a fixture at the United Nations in New York, regaling delegations in the Indonesian Lounge, extolling his vision of benevolent autocracy, claiming to admire Singapore as his model for economic growth and insisting that he and only he can keep Rwanda’s torn society knitted together.

In truth, the Rwandan leader presides over nothing more than hollow democracy. He has attacked and exiled any and all viable political opponents. The local press, as well as international journalists, have been bludgeoned and harassed. The regime uses the Stalinist crime of “divisionism” as a pretext to silence and prosecute any critic who dares question its policies or the state sanctioned version of the 1994 conflict. (more…)

Ruth Wedgwood is Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy; and Director of the International Law and Organizations Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University, Washington DC. She is also a  visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Previously, she served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, and designed the redaction procedures that became the Classified Information Procedures Act

A striking consensus is emerging in Washington for a closer relationship with the International Criminal Court. Even some staunch conservatives have backed the idea of lending logistical, political, and diplomatic assistance to the ICC on a case-by-case basis – to act against the most shocking outrages of genocide, crimes against humanity, and systematic war crimes.

Yet, with notoriously bad timing, the path to this cooperation may be washed away, due to a troublesome and unnecessary fight brewing at a sister criminal tribunal in The Hague.

The fracas has arisen at the ad hoc United Nations war crimes court tasked since 1993 to try cases from the bloody ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia. This is a high-performing tribunal that has enjoyed strong leadership from its American judges and other admired jurists. The court is currently focused on the prosecution of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and has an indictment and arrest warrant waiting for fugitive Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic.

But this exemplary war crimes court also has a mess on its hands, partly of its own creation. The outcome will hold an important lesson for the transparency that any international criminal court should maintain, even amidst the difficulties of dealing with sovereign states. To be acceptable to democratic states and publics, an international court should make available the logic and effect of its rulings. There can be no secret jurisprudence, unavailable to debate and critique by an audience of lawyers, political leaders, and citizens.

Yet, in a summary proceeding now underway at the tribunal, three judges hailing from China, Turkey, and South Africa are threatening to send a French journalist to jail on a charge of criminal contempt for revealing the bare-bones logic of two appellate opinions. No witness has been endangered. No sealed arrest warrant was thwarted. And the criminal case to which the decisions pertained was ended by the fatal heart attack of former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic in his jail cell in The Hague in March 2005. (more…)