In 2002 The International Criminal Court (ICC) was formerly established. As described on the ICC web site, the ICC is governed by the Rome Statute and is the first permanent, treaty based, international criminal court set up to help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community. Throughout its history the ICC has had to battle its critics over its effectiveness in achieving not only world order but also a balance between state sovereignty and world order. Nick Donavan of the Aegis Trust comments that a core challenge of the effectiveness of international law is that although the ‘architecture’ may well be in place, the ‘plumbing’ has been neglected. It is this argument that seems to have achieved the greatest voice in the debate.
In a recent article on the ICC, Justice and Politics, James Goldstein writes that when the ICC was first set up, Kofi Annan hailed the court’s birth as a “great victory for justice and world order? Yet in contrast Libys’s president and chair of the African Union called the arrest warrant for Bashir of Sudan an act of “first world terrorism”. Such is the debate.
World order refers to the balance of power among the nations, which attempts to consider the rights not only of the international community but all individual rights of nation states. The goal of world order is to balance the power in such a way that military conflict in minimised. The challenge however is that there is tension between state sovereignty, the self-interest of nations and international law, including ‘universal’ values such as human rights and security. The resolution of these differences can sometimes bring about a change in world order and this in fact is a key challenge faced by the ICC.
There are a number of ways in which the international community is working for world Order. An important aspect of achieving this is International Criminal Court (ICC) which was established in 2002.