Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Thursday that he intends to pull his nation out of the International Criminal Court (ICC); he announced his decision just hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Hungary for a state visit, despite facing an international arrest warrant.

Rather than placing Netanyahu under arrest upon his arrival in Budapest on Thursday morning, Hungary rolled out the red carpet and welcomed him with military honors. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who also has an arrest warrant on him by the ICC, received the same lavish welcome when he visited Mongolia, which is a member of the Court.

It is not my intent to dwell on the accusations of the aforementioned leaders, inasmuch as to stipulate the failure, if not the pretension, of global security of the United Nations.

The ICC, which was established in 2002 and is based in The Hague, is a criminal court that can bring cases against individuals for war crimes or crimes against humanity. According to the Relationship Agreement with the UN, which was approved by the General Assembly in its resolution 58/318 of 13 September 2004, if the Court requests the testimony of an official of the UN or one of its programs, funds, or offices, the latter must comply. Additionally, practical guidance for implementing this Agreement was issued on 26 September 2016. The Agreement defines the mechanisms of cooperation between the Security Council of the UN and the Court concerning a referral by the Council of a situation in which one or more crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court appear to have been committed.

‘The UN is juridically neutral, and it is coerced to wait for a threat to emerge before it can consider action’

The UN, unlike the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is a collective security system; the latter is an alliance, which deals with a specific and specified threat and has military forces to address these threats. The UN is juridically neutral, and it is coerced to wait for a threat to emerge before it can consider action. According to the late Henry Kissinger, the UN has not only failed to prevent major global threats, it ‘has never succeeded in imposing peace on reluctant parties or on a party backed by a permanent member of the Security Council.’^[1] And when individual nations have taken it upon themselves to resolve their own international crisis, as with the Camp David Accords of 1978 between Israel and Egypt, the UN has been quick to criticize and not acknowledge such treaties—it did so because the agreement was concluded without participation of the UN and the Palestinian Liberation Organization and did not comply with the Palestinian right of return, of self-determination, and of national independence and sovereignty.

The ultimate reason for the obsoleteness of the UN collective security is substantially due to the manner in which it is structured—it is exclusively dependent on the Security Council in such matters. Aside that an aggressor cannot be named in advance, if the assailant happens to be one of the permanent members of the Security Council—China, France, U.S., UK, and Russia—it has the right to veto the determination of who the guilty party is or the collective actions to be undertaken.

An example of this is the case heard by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—a branch of the UN—in Nicaragua v. United States (1986), which concerned the military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua by the U.S. government. Under the Reagan Administration, Washington had clandestinely funded the Contra rebels to overthrow the Sandinista regime.

The ICC found in its verdict that the U.S. was in breach of its obligations under international law not to use force against another nation-state, i.e., in violation of Nicaragua’s sovereignty and; in breach of its obligations under Article XIX of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the Parties signed at Managua on 21 January 1956. As a result, the Court ordered the U.S. government to pay millions of dollars in reparations.

The U.S. eventually blocked such enforcement by vetoing the Court’s sentence as a member of the Security Council, thereby keeping Nicaragua from receiving any sort of financial compensation. Another similar blockage of UN enforcement occurred when the former Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner (Flight 007) in 1983, which mistakenly flew into Soviet airspace. Eventually, the (former) Soviet Union vetoed a UN resolution that would have condemned the shooting of the airliner, in addition to possible penal sanctions.

‘While the UN did not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, it did nothing more than voice its opposition’

In rare cases, when the UN has succeeded in its peacekeeping effort, i.e., when all the parties have agreed, particularly when the issue has been the technical implementation of an agreement, the need for collective security has been minimal. And when the parties have been divided, it accordingly made such implementation impossible. ‘When every member of an international system has the same obligations, no country or group of countries has the special obligation which is the essence of an alliance [such as NATO].’^[2]

It is true that the U.S.-led invasion of Kuwait during the First Gulf War (1990–1991), which was backed by the UN Security Council, was successful in forcing Iraqi troops to withdraw from occupied Kuwait. Nevertheless, it failed to curtail Saddam Hussein from reorganizing his military might. And while the UN did not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, it did nothing more than voice its opposition, for it was powerless to do anything that would have been juridically effective.

It cannot be undermined, to the disappointment of many, that an unwillingness by member states of the ICC, the ICJ, or the UN to enforce the norms they vowed to do has contributed to the failure of collective security. In the end, it is because such organizations naively think they could be, what Prof. John Mearsheimer coined, the global ‘nightwatchman’, when in reality, they are far from it.

The views expressed by our guest authors are theirs and do not necessarily represent the views of Hungarian Conservative.

^[1] Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2001, 43.

^[2] Ibid, 44.

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