Taking South Africa out of the International Criminal Court is a huge step backwards for democracy here and in the rest of Africa. Finding bias in the ICC’s pursuit of African dictators is an exercise in cringeworthy bad faith. But what cannot be denied is that the current world human rights regime is not only letting dodgy leaders such as Tony Blair off the hook, but even allowing them to prance around as elder statesmen. Nothing very discomfiting has happened to the former British prime minister since the release of the Chilcot Commission into the UK’s part in the 2003 Allied invasion of Iraq, despite its damnation of Blair’s duplicity. And the reason is not hard to spot; the commission itself, not being a court of law, was set up to be ineffectual, avoiding through its terms of reference the key question of the legal underpinnings of the war. In so doing, it disabled itself from fully describing the revolution in contemporary warfare, which peaked with the invasion in Iraq, and w...
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