April 17, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   On April 5, the United States revoked the visa of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, for her attempts to open an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. in Afghanistan. A week later, judges at the ICC rejected Bensouda’s request to open a probe into U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

While rights advocates condemned this move as amounting to U.S. interference in the workings of the ICC, it’s more alarming than mere obstruction — and is rooted in the pre-existing hierarchy and embedded colonial structures in international legal order.

Bensouda’s visa revocation underscores the existing systematic inequality in international legal order. This is rooted in the presumed hierarchy by a group of elite nations that have dominated international order from a position of assumed racial, cultural, political, historical, material, economic and legal superiority.

These developments come in light of comments made by the Trump administration’s national security advisor, John Bolton, who delegitimized the role of the ICC in a speech he delivered in September 2018. He said that “the U.S. will take any means necessary” to overcome “unjust prosecution by this illegitimate Court.”

Countries like the U.S. have always enjoyed dominance through this presumed superiority, enabling them to suggest other nations are like-minded when it comes to the international legal order.

The U.S. and other powerful nations have not only been successful in maintaining the status quo of imbalance inherent in international law, but have also been instrumental in establishing the rules governing that legal order.

With tectonic political shifts across the world, the ICC’s representatives — and jurists like Bensouda — represent some of the last vestiges of resisting the dominant global legal order by attempting to hold the West accountable for their transgressions in the global South.