DI SPATC H E S| CORRUPTION COURT
Canada could host global tribunal
The push is on for an international anti-corruption court and Canada, as a key friend of the court, makes a befitting home for the new institution. By Robert I. Rotberg
W
hen global human rights activists and international affairs strategists campaigned for a new international tribunal to help to prevent future Rwandan genocides and other outrages, Canada was in the vanguard of those writing and creating the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Likewise, when a similar cohort of important parties gathered together to write and advocate for the Ottawa Treaty banning the further use of landmines, Canada took the lead. Now is the time for bipartisan Canadians to lead the world’s attack on wanton kleptocracy and free-wheeling kleptocrats by helping to establish an International Anti-Corruption Court. Appropriately, such a new court could find a good home in Canada, especially if Canada’s government embraced the idea and offered its support to other concerned nations. Former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, former foreign minister, 52
minister of justice and attorney-general Peter MacKay and former justice minister Allan Rock (who also represented Canada at the United Nations) are now among those prominent Canadian and world leaders who see virtue in a new tribunal to bring the world’s most corrupt, and hitherto impugn, leaders to justice through such an instrument. They argue for it, and for locating the Court in Canada, in the two following articles in this issue of Diplomat. Kleptocracy and the need for a new court
Whereas corruption is the taking advantage of public office for private gain, kleptocracy, as a form of grand corruption, is the widespread illicit shifting of a state’s patrimony into private hands. Usually kleptocrats are heads of state, heads of government, or other high-ranking elected or appointed officials who are able to control who gets lucrative contracts (to construct an airport, say) or concessions
(to dig for gold or drill for oil), and who receive the resulting kickbacks. Dictators, even more elected despots, get rich in this manner. So do ordinary politicians, as they did in Brazil during the multibillion-dollar Lava Jato Car Wash escapade involving a huge petroleum company and the largest contracting firm in South America. The proceeds of Lava Jato turned mere parliamentarians into kleptocrats. Unfortunately, where there is corruption in a country, there are often kleptocrats. And where there are kleptocrats, too often there is impunity. It is impossible for domestic courts to cope with their own national kleptocratic crooks because courts are hardly independent, being paid by and controlled by the local politicians whose avarice and actions are (or should be) under investigation. Hence the desperate need for an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC), in concept analogous to, but in function and instrumentality distinctly different from the ICC. WINTER 2021 | JAN-FEB-MAR
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Corruption remains a serious problem across the globe to the point where many are calling for an international court, one that could be located in Canada. Shown here are Indonesian protesters calling for an end to corruption in their country.
