I stole this article from another forum, and (with the poster's permission) am stealing this response contained within the thread:
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I don't see why these laws are "naive" at all. If you espouse particular principles and, indeed, you encode it in your local law, you shouldn't sanction or grant immunity to the citizens of other nations, however powerful they are, if they have violated those principles in some way.
The problem is that governments are forced to operate within the framework where any decision they make with respect to a foreign citizen, especially the powerful, is always percieved as having broader meaning than simple principle. So when politicians do act according to principle, the simple moral statement is subsumed by the perception that some kind of opening shot is being fired in a political, social or economic battle between nations, rather than the simple fact of what it is, namely:
"We would jail our own citizens for what you've done, therefore we cannot condone the citizens of other nations, however powerful, doing it"
By making the law, rather than the commitment of a particular politician, be the agent of a principle or principles it makes it far harder to cloud the issue, which is that a society has aligned itself with a particular set of principles (in this case the Geneva convention) and will not condone violation of those principles, no matter what. At the same time, its harder for the powerful citizens of other nations to huff and puff and turn their personal indictment into an issue of national affront worthy of economic reprisals and so on.
Lastly, by removing the responsibility to do so from politicians - and indeed the ability to change the immediate outcome - the ability of powerful nations to bully other nations into accepting their transgressions is curtailed. Economic and other reprisals are less effective when the politicians can say "Sorry, what can we do? It's our law".
Sure, pressure can be applied to change such laws, but in the process the moral issues at stake are thrust into the spotlight. To vindicate bringing pressure to bear to change such laws the offending state must implicitly criticise the law and what it implies and be drawn into a debate about their motives and values.
If, for instance, the German war crime laws are based on the Geneva convention, debate would naturally focus around whether Rumsfeld is, in fact guilty of war crimes and the issue would receive the attention and learned discussion it merits, in the international public eye.
The US is a signatory to the Geneva convention and many other rights conventions it has consistently violated with impunity. The most damning evidence of its intransigence is its withdrawal from the ICJ (after first submitting to that body's authority then not liking the outcome of one case) and later refusal to ratify the treaty establishing the ICC. Lets not forget that these treaties are laws in every sense of the word. In order to ratify them, member nations must pass them into their own body of law. The Geneva convention, for instance, is actually encoded in US military law.
Politicians that break such laws are actually criminals in their own countries, but a lack of political and judicial will means that their own legal systems fail to prosecute them, leading to the perception that international law exists only in the void between nations, not within nations themselves. I've certainly encountered this misconception over and over again in discussions here.
Many will claim such efforts are futile because of a lack of power to enforce, but thats only because they've been trained to believe that brute force is the only effective weapon in an international war of ideals. Its not and anyone with a bit of worldly wisdom and a real understanding of realpolitik will realise its not.
In a rapidly globalising world economy, perception translates into money and co-operation on many fronts. A nation that is judged and found wanting in the eyes of the world again and again will rapidly decline, unless they're willing to invade the whole world. Even with the US' current strained military capacity, it isn't a patch on the British Empire's capacity for military domination at it's height - and they only managed to rule a quarter of the earth's population for a brief period of time.
So these laws are effective. If people trust their justice system enough to consider most convictions or acquitals a strong measure of their own citizen's guilt, they're equally likely to consider the conviction or acquital of foreign citizens, in absentia or not, strong evidence of guilt or innocence. Certainly they'll trust in the probable truth of learned judges in a legal setting, seriously contemplating the laws (and lets not forget that that's what these treaties are - very carefully worded international laws), far more than they would a newspaper pundit or a politician.
Those beliefs translate into deeds, such as what brands you buy and whether you stand by politicians who pander too much to foreigners you consider criminals.
So far from being naive, such laws are exceedingly enlightened and I hope more nations have the moral fortitude to enact similar laws in future.
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