This week’s WTF Friday goes to Somalia (again), for its continued ability to take a ridiculous situation and make it so much more ridiculous.

Somali journalists protest the imprisonment of their colleague. Photo credit: Badri Media

For those just tuning in now, a recap: members of the Somali security forces allegedly raped a woman last August. She told her story to a journalist, Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim. When she reported the rape last February, the Somali government arrested her and subjected her to a two-day coercive interrogation without a lawyer, during which they allegedly forced her to give up the names of any journalists she had spoken to about the rape. The police then arrested Ibrahim, and brought criminal charges against both him and the alleged victim. Then, for good measure, they also threw in charges against the woman’s husband, and two acquaintances of hers who were accused of introducing her to journalists. A lower court convicted both the woman and Ibrahim of “insulting a government body,” and sentenced each of them to one year in prison.

How could this situation get any more ridiculous, you ask? Were costumes perhaps involved, or a salad featuring both mayonnaise and jell-o as ingredients? Take it away, Human Rights Watch:

“On March 3, 2013, the court of appeals upheld a lower court’s conviction of journalist Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim, but reduced his sentence from one year to six months. The judge stated that Abdiaziz Abdinur had not respected the laws of the country and the ethics of journalism by not reporting his interview with the alleged rape victim. It is unclear what laws specifically he is found to have violated.”

That’s right – while he was first convicted of “insulting a government body,” even though he never actually published his story, his conviction was upheld on the basis that he failed to report the story!  Attention all journalists in Somalia: if you are either reporting or not reporting a story, you are probably committing a crime.

(There is a small silver lining here: the conviction against the alleged rape victim herself was vacated on appeal.  I am very pleased that she is now free, but in light of the above, I will not be awarding any Lucky Charms to the appeals court.)

Although we were not fans of the Kony 2012 video, Kate and I were both saddened by the news of Jason Russell’s very public breakdown. Mental illness is no joke, and we had nothing but sympathy for him and his family. We, like many of the other bloggers who were critical of the video’s substance, refrained from writing about Russell’s episode, because we consider the incident a private matter.

Invisible Children apparently disagrees, however: Russell plans to “break his silence” about that incident. In an interview with Oprah. On national TV. On October 7th. Which just happens to be the date on which Invisible Children will release its new video, “Move.”

Gross.

(H/T Jezebel.)

Last week, Human Rights Watch issued a new report, “Hate on the Streets: Xenophobic Violence in Greece.” From the press release:

“[The report] documents the failure of the police and the judiciary to prevent and punish rising attacks on migrants. Despite clear patterns to the violence and evidence that it is increasing, the police have failed to respond effectively to protect victims and hold perpetrators to account, Human Rights Watch found. Authorities have yet to develop a preventive policing strategy, while victims are discouraged from filing official complaints. No one has been convicted under Greece’s 2008 hate crime statute.”

We’re filing this under “terrible, but not terribly surprising.” (See, e.g., our previous coverage here and here).

Alan Boswell, writing in Foreign Policy, criticizes the SPLM’s powerful supporters in Washington for enabling bad behavior on the part of the world’s newest country:

The SPLM isn’t directly to blame for the dire conditions it inherited in South Sudan, but its dismal governance has stopped most progress before it even had a chance to begin. South Sudan has been run mostly autonomously — with its own budget revenue and standing military — since 2005, and the SPLM used that time to loot its way to personal riches, leaving development projects penniless. In May, South Sudan’s government acknowledged that South Sudanese officials had “stolen” $4 billion of missing funds that were supposed to go to developing the war-torn state — the equivalent of roughly two entire years of official revenue. Worse, this money was looted directly under the noses of the international community, which agreed to supervise the peace process and even provided consultants to do South Sudan’s own bookkeeping. [...]

Amid a sea of foreign-policy realism, Sudan has survived as a foreign-policy issue grounded not in national security interests, but moral idealism. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, Sudan became a rallying cry for religious activists and human rights proponents enraged by the Sudanese government’s atrocities. But the activists made a critical mistake: They seemed to think the SPLM rebels represented a virtuous mirror image of Khartoum’s evils. [...]

Two of President Bill Clinton’s Africa hands, John Prendergast and Gayle Smith, who co-founded the Enough Project at the Center for American Progress, have arguably been the most effective of the SPLM’s friends in Washington. By branding the organization as anti-genocide, the Enough Project often gets a free pass from the mainstream media, which frequently cites its version of events in Sudan as objective independent analysis. But the morally charged and culturally hip do-goodism helps disguise a clear political agenda: Even while it acknowledges South Sudan’s poor record on human rights and “transparency,” Enough’s policy papers are filled with calls for punitive measures toward Khartoum and greater engagement with Juba. Last year, Prendergast and Enough publicly advocated for arming South Sudan with air defense weapons. When Enough advertised for a job opening of “Sudan policy analyst” last year, they hired one of the SPLM’s legal advisors for the position.

For the rest, including a discussion of Clooney’s surveillance satellite system, and Gérard Prunier calling the GOSS “a government of idiots” that is “rotten to the core,” head on over to FP.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article by Lydia Polgreen, in which she claims that the uprisings of the Arab Spring, and the corresponding atrocities committed by the region’s autocrats as they clung to power, have revealed “crucial flaws” in the International Criminal Court’s setup: namely, that the ICC cannot try the leaders of Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and other non-member states, unless the U.N. Security Council first refers the matter to the court.

Before going further, I’d like to give credit where credit is due: Polgreen does correctly identify the mechanisms by which the court can obtain jurisdiction over the case, which is a distinct improvement over some of the NYT’s past coverage.

However, this story is an example of how the Court’s own supporters often set it up for failure, by expecting it to accomplish tasks that are beyond its competence.

The ICC is a court of limited jurisdiction. Adhering to those jurisdictional limits is not optional, or a sign of weakness. The court is not able to try cases from non-member states without a UNSC referral, but it’s also not able to invent the flying car, turn water into wine, or develop an un-chippable nail polish. Failing to achieve those things shouldn’t be a cause for disappointment, because there was never any reason to believe they would happen.

Seriously, guys: this is how the rule of law works. We set up institutions, give them limited power and a set of rules by which to wield it, and we don’t let them do more than that. If they try to do more, we smack them with a rolled-up newspaper and say “NO! BAD INSTITUTION! GO BACK TO YOUR JURISDICTION” until they learn. The ICC isn’t Dirty Harry, or the Machine Gun Preacher, or that new Tom Cruise character who apparently “doesn’t care about the law,” and “only cares about what’s right.” The ICC cares about what’s right. But like all functional courts, when push comes to shove, it has to say that “the law” beats “what’s right.” The court can’t go about arresting and prosecuting people outside its jurisdiction, no matter how appealing that might sound, because that would be an activity more commonly known as “kidnapping.”

We don’t call this a “disappointment,” we call it a “cornerstone of the rule of law.” People who want something else should hire Tom Cruise.

Lord Black, fresh from federal prison, has an important Fourth of July message for us all. It’s “shoulda stayed a colony, bitchez!”

Apparently, being colonized is awesome and full of win:

If the Americans had maintained their British status, they would control Britain and Canada and Australia and New Zealand now (another 120 million people and over $5 trillion of GDP), have all their energy needs met, and enjoy better government than they have actually endured for the past 20 years. It would have been much easier to abolish slavery and, if there had been a Civil War, it would not have lasted long, nor cost a fraction of the 750,000 American lives that it did. There would have been no World Wars or Cold War, or at least no conflict remotely as perilous as those were.

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that America controlling Britain by remaining its colony is the opposite of how colonization works.

The rest of the world should also, in Black’s view, be lining up for re-colonization. The French were “splendid city planners” with a “civilizing mission.” The British empire was really an educational enterprise, bringing a “justice system and the English language, and some spirit of market economics” to the eager natives before leaving with “scarcely any violence.” And there were “no Darfurs” in British-ruled Sudan.  (I would venture a guess that there was in fact precisely one Darfur, given that it is a geographical region, not an atrocity.)

According to Black, the Belgians were “frequently inexcusably heavy-handed” in the Congo (and they left the Congolese a little light-handed, amirite?), but “never generated the horrific casualties that have routinely occurred in the civil strife in that country in 50 years of independence, much less the approximately 1 million dead in a single month in the Rwandan massacres of the Tutsi in 1994.” (This is codswollop.)

The Dutch were “no joy in Indonesia,” but “at least the natives did not run amok.”  (A direct quote, I swear.)

Gosh, now that Lord Black mentions it, I do feel a bit of savagery coming on.  This must be the tragic yet predictable result of my premature decolonization.  If the British had never left, I’m sure I could absorb the misinformed blatherings of a felonious bore without any further incident.

(Update: the report described below is actually from 2009, not new.  Still interesting, though.)

Via Shelby Grossman, a very interesting new 2009 USIP report on the Liberian justice system, which is a hybrid of a “formal” system based on the U.S. justice system, and a “traditional” system that relies on local chiefs to mediate and resolve disputes.  The researchers found widespread mistrust of the formal system, including a general belief that it only served the interests of those who had money to pay for lawyers and substantial court “fees.”

I thought this part was particularly interesting:

“Most Liberians would still be unsatisfied with the justice meted out by the formal system, even if it were able to deliver on [its basic stated mission].  This is because the core principles of justice that underlie Liberia’s formal system, which is based on the American legal system, differ considerably from those valued by most Liberians.[...]

[There is a deeply held assumption in Liberia]  that incorrect or injurious behavior is usually rooted in damaged and acrimonious social relations. Redressive action is thus considered deficient if it does not also produce reconciliation among the parties. [...]

Our research indicates that there are cases in which behavior is judged to be so horrific that perpetrators are viewed as entirely beyond social repair, and in which Liberians often demand extreme forms of justice such as the death sentence. However, in the vast majority of situations, including many cases of murder and rape, social reconciliation is viewed as a more important objective than punishment per se. In fact, the infliction of some form of pain or loss (social, physical, economic) upon a perpetrator in a manner that does not directly contribute to reconciliation is seen as augmenting adversarialism in undesirable ways that impede, rather than contribute  to, true justice.”

This has some pretty interesting implications: it suggests that the more the formal justice system succeeds, the more it will fail, because the better it gets at delivering dispassionate, rules-based judgments, the less legitimacy it will have within Liberian society.

Things that make you go hmmm…

This week’s winner comes from the Ukraine where, the BBC reports, the right-wing Freedom Party has attacked the decision to select Gaitana, a Ukrainian singer with a Congolese father, to represent the country in the Eurovision song contest.

But don’t worry, their concerns are purely practical:

“Millions of people who will be watching will see that Ukraine is represented by a person who does not belong to our race,” said Yuri Syrotyuk, whose party is preparing to contest the parliamentary elections later this year.

“The vision of Ukraine as a country located somewhere in remote Africa will take root,” he added.

Yes, that would be a logical conclusion for viewers of the Eurovision song contest to draw from the presence of a mixed-race musician.  Happily, these views have been greeted with widespread condemnation by other political parties, as well as celebrity boxers Vitaly and Volodymyr Klitschko.

Gaitana aside, tomorrow’s contest promises to be a hell of a show.  The favorites  to win, Russian senior-citizen singers Grannies from Buranovo, are really quite something.