Geoffrey Bindman identifies the roadblocks to international justice
The arrest of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the now deceased Colonel, prompts the question: where should his trial take place? The arrest warrant was issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity but, assuming the crimes of which he is accused also violate the domestic law of Libya, he could be tried either in Libya or by the ICC in the Hague. By contrast, Gaddafi’s daughters’ plea that the ICC prosecute the killers of her father seems unlikely to be accepted.
Those choices of venue may be enough but suppose he had been able to flee to another country—to Britain, for example, where he had been a student at the London School of Economics—could he have been tried here? Could his father or Saddam Hussein have been tried here? Universal jurisdiction is necessary to ensure that there is no hiding place for the world’s most brutal criminals.
Amnesty International has defined universal jurisdiction as “the ability of the court of any state to try persons for crimes committed
