African Lessons for the International Criminal Court: ‘Give us food. You are our king, but if you do not feed us properly we will get rid of you.‘
By Mehmet Ratip
Volume 11, Issue 1, pages 143-148
He showed his mother a picture of a gleaming flank of roast pork garnished with cherries and pineapple rings and set off with a bowl of raspberries and cream and a gooseberry tart. ‘People don’t eat like that any more,’ his mother said. He disagreed. ‘The pigs don’t know there is a war on,’ he said. ‘The pineapples don’t know there is a war on. Food keeps growing. Someone has to eat it.’
(Coetzee 1985 [1983]:16)
This quote from J. M. Coetzee’s celebrated novel Life and Times of Michael K hopes to serve as a powerful literary reminder of how food, its conditions of production, the root causes of its unequal distribution (and hence its absence in some contexts) dramatically determine whether one perceives the world as just or unjust. In this essay, I discuss the potential role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in contributing to such food‐related perceptions of justice and injustice. I problematise the possibility of whether the ICC can assign not only individual, but also institutional responsibility for the violations of basic subsistence rights in light of some of the notorious cases of undernourishment, environmental degradation, and political turmoil in Africa. The main argument is that, in order to become a reliable international defender of justice, the ICC should focus more systematically on how massive violations of economic and environmental rights, especially the right to food, directly contribute to the perpetration of those serious crimes which are already within its jurisdiction, namely genocides, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. What I will try to emphasise is that this possible restructuring of the goals and modus operandi of the ICC would mean that the future Court should be more engaged in the field of gross violations of social and economic rights. This, I will argue, is a major requirement so that the ICC can acquire a legitimate authority in the eyes of its distant observers and interlocutors.
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