{"id":672845,"date":"2010-02-23T01:29:43","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T06:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opiniojuris.org\/?p=11427"},"modified":"2026-10-04T10:52:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T14:52:12","slug":"at-least-one-british-prime-minister-faces-icc-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/672845","title":{"rendered":"At Least One British Prime Minister Faces ICC Charges\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>by Kevin Jon Heller <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Sure, it&#8217;s in Roman Polanski&#8217;s new film, <a  href=\"http:\/\/theghost-romanpolanski.com\/site.html\">The Ghost Writer<\/a>.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s still cool &#8212; especially when the Prime Minister, played by an excellent Pierce Brosnan, is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for aiding and abetting torture by the United States!<\/p>\n<p>I have to admit, I never thought I&#8217;d live to see Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute &#8212; the aiding and abetting provision &#8212; read word-for-word in a film.\u00a0 And that&#8217;s not all: not only does the film properly invokes Article 7 and Article 8 as covering crimes against humanity and war crimes respectively, the scenario it depicts could actually result in an ICC prosecution.<\/p>\n<p>That said, the film does make two errors &#8212; one blatant, one subtle.\u00a0 The blatant error is that it refers to the &#8220;Special Prosecutor&#8221; of the ICC.\u00a0 The subtle error (minor spoiler alert!) is that it implies that an unwilling witness could be required to testify, when the ICC lacks subpoena power.<\/p>\n<p>On the bright side, the &#8220;Special Prosecutor&#8221; in the film is a woman.\u00a0 We all know that would be an improvement over the current one&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/opiniojurisfeed\/~4\/HOboTjI8Wiw\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Kevin Jon Heller Sure, it&#8217;s in Roman Polanski&#8217;s new film, The Ghost Writer.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s still cool &#8212; especially when the Prime Minister, played by an excellent Pierce Brosnan, is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for aiding and abetting torture by the United States! I have to admit, I never thought [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2692,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-672845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2P2l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2692"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773982,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672845\/revisions\/773982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}