Tea at Trianon: Covid Crimes and Amnesty, Accountability and Justice

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, December 11, 2022

Covid Crimes and Amnesty, Accountability and Justice

From Brownstone Institute:

The victims of casual cruelty, capricious public health diktats and enforcement brutality are owed justice. But what type of justice? It might be helpful to look at examples from the theory and practice of international criminal justice. The sense of justice, fairness and equity is deeply ingrained in human beings. Correct that. It’s also deeply ingrained in some animal species. In the famous fairness experiments by primatologist Frans de Waal, capuchin monkeys were trained to trade pebbles for cucumber slices. When the monkey in the adjacent cage was given the more valued prize of a grape, the first threw its cucumber ‘reward’ out of the cage in anger. Subsequently, even the second monkey refused to accept a grape until its companion was also given the same reward. This segment of the full TED talk by de Waal in 2011 has been viewed 22 million times, has been liked by 243,000 and commented on by more than 15,000. The full talk has nearly 5.5 million views.

The justice sentiment is expressed in collective norms and, in a general sense, in laws. If the dominant perception is that law mostly conforms to notions of fairness and justice, the odd anomaly will not pose a threat to the system of law. But if the opposite perception takes hold, and law is seen to have marched off on a tangent from justice, then the system of law—and the principle of a community based on the rule of law—will be brought into disrepute and collapse under the weight of illegitimacy.

That’s the risk we run. The “deplorables” were arrested, cuffed, fined, tackled roughly to the ground, and had rubber bullets fired at them and assets frozen. If those responsible for these acts of criminality face no legal consequences, will faith in the rule of law and justice system survive undamaged?

Justice done and seen to be done

It’s worth making three arguments about the relationship between justice being done (the domain of law), and being seen to be done (the realm of politics):

Justice may be done, but not be seen to have been done;
Conversely, justice may be seen to have been done, but not actually be done.
Finally, justice may be seen not to have been done.

Calls for amnesty without accountability risk the third outcome, which is why Oster’s call provoked such passionate pushback from many quarters.

The landscape of international criminal justice has changed dramatically over the last three decades. In 1992, tyrants would have been reasonably confident of the guarantee of sovereign impunity for atrocities committed against their own people inside their borders. Today, there is no guarantee of prosecution and accountability. But not a single brutish ruler can be confident of escaping international justice forever: the certainty of impunity is gone.

The international criminal tribunals of the 1990s in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, set up to try limited numbers of individuals for specific activities and regions, helped to bring hope and justice to some victims, to combat the impunity of some perpetrators and to enrich the jurisprudence of international humanitarian law (IHL). But they were expensive and time-consuming and contributed little to sustainable capacities for justice administration. (Read more.)