Even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked. — Neil Gaiman
It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense. — E.A. Bucchianeri
In my previous post I discussed how the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) has squandered not just time and money, but also the good will of its funders who bought into the idea of establishing an international(ized) ad hoc tribunal to effectively prosecute domestic crimes, and in so doing, benefit International Criminal Law (ICL) by adding to its list of crimes under Customary International Law (CIL), the crime of terrorism.
I may be oversimplifying things. But when you cut through the fog of how and why the STL was established (aside from expected knee-jerk reactions at the domestic level by interested/subjective parties such as the victims’ family, friends, and political allies) it is what it is. Less charitably, it would appear to have been a vanity/ego project of the late professor, turned judge, Antonio Cassese, who aside from trying to solidify into ICL his concoction of Joint Criminal Enterprise (JCE) – now discredited, in part, due to his (and his colleagues’ who went along) reliance on bogus supporting jurisprudence – wished to further place his mark in ICL history by heralding a new crime in CIL, to wit: terrorism. I’m calling it bluntly as I see it. Continue reading “THE STL BILLION DOLLAR RULE 61 PROCEEDING: a charade of consequence to ICL “