Talk:International Criminal Court

Reassessment

International Criminal Court

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • GAN review not found

Result: The consensus is to delist due to ongoing problems that require more significant attention than can be given in a reasonable time. There are problems regarding sourcing, with challengeable statements and large chunks that remain unsourced. The lead needs attention, it is large and sprawling. The prose in the article is choppy in places, with a feel that notes have been added to the article without thought given to flow and readability, as a result there are sections of the article that are tiring to read, and the information is not adequately conveyed. There is often too much detail, and the article would benefit from trimming back to the essential points. Article fails GA criteria 1(a), 1(b), 2(b) and 3(b). SilkTork *^{Tea time} 10:14, 26 May 2011 (UTC)}

I completely agree. The article reads like a press release.

The first priority should be to draft a section that properly outlines the criticisms. It is for example, a fact that the ICC does not provide for jury trials. Why not just tell the truth and then leave it as a fact? I

It is a fact that where jury trials are a fundamental human right that the ICC denies this human right. The ICC does not consider a jury trial to be a human right. Just tell the truth. That is the truth. Instead of telling the truth, why go off on spin? It doesn't really matter to this article if the US military get jury trials or not. The whole topic is irrelevant to the ICC article and should not even be here.

It is also a fact that where public trials are a fundamental human right that the ICC also denies this human right. Just tell the truth, that the ICC simply does not consider this to be a human right.

The article incorrectly claims that the US Uniform Code of Military Justice does not allow for a jury when it does. Just as with any US court, an accused may either request a judicial trial or to be tried by a panel of their peers who are not judges or lawyers.

This is but one example of why the article is biased and is not factual. It cannot be fixed with a few edits. Fixing the issue that I raise would only be a good beginning. The ICC like everything else has its good points and its bad points. Only an ICC press release would read like this article does. Raggz (talk) 03:50, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

An IP editor who chooses not to register for privacy reasons requested this. His reasons were: 3+ years since a review, 500+ edits, high profile institution, and bare URLS. --Obsidi♠n^Soul 23:17, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I checked dabs, one found in ref#1 but I understand this is deliberate. I repaired 49 dead links and tagged a further 7 for which no archived version could be found. Checklinks added titles to bare urls, but references could do with consistent formatting, including author and publisher details. The majority of sources are from the ICC itself. there are some largely uncited sections. Images appear OK. Prose appears to be OK. Stable. Needs more detail on states which have not signed or are critical of the court. The lead does not fully summarise the article. Jezhotwells (talk) 17:51, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

The nominating editor, 01:48, 30 July 2007, User:Sideshow Bob Roberts, has not edited since 18:36, 13 September 2009[1] Jezhotwells (talk) 18:03, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

I have informed the Law and Human Rights projects of this reassessment. Jezhotwells (talk) 18:13, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi all, I reached this page via the Human Rights Article Alerts page, my initial assessment (independent of the GA criteria) is that this still remains one of our best articles, with brilliant content that is probably unrivaled in any other tertiary source. On the other hand, there are very obvious areas for improvement, in particular in relation to the ongoing investigations and in progress cases and the relevant criticism thereof. Ultimately this article is probably due a reassessment and I would love to help improve any particular areas of weakness that are identified, but at the same time this is a huge and continually developing topic, and we probably do not have the manpower to keep it up to GA status in the longterm ( this pending any new involved editor comments, I would love to be wrong about this!) Ajbpearce (talk) 23:01, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Jezhotwells. And hello Ajbpearce, GA is mostly concerned with technical stuff rather than content, but you're already aware of that, heh. I was also technically not the one who nominated it for reassessment and I'm not a reviewer nor an involved editor so I can't actually pinpoint where it might fail the GA criteria. I did it as help for an IP user (I'm a helper volunteer in our IRC channel), since IP's can't nominate articles for WP:GAR themselves. Jezhotwells has pinpointed several problems though, I suggest fixing those (the uncited sections seem to be the most pressing concern at the moment). Thanks again.--Obsidi♠n^Soul 01:32, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

minor note, on the 27th feb Jezhotwells added a primary sources tag to the article. I don't really think that it was appropriate criticism / review for this article. Generally - the primary sources seemed to be used descriptively to support factual statements about, e.g the composition of the court, or the content of the articles of the rome statute - where they are the authoritative and most helpful sources for us to link to. I obviously have not gone through all of the 150 citations in detail though, so if you had specific concerns I've missed/overlooked, then could you raise them here? (and i'll obv try to deal with them) Ajbpearce (talk) 23:03, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Some improvements have been made, but:

• There are citations to other Wikipedia articles, e.g. #24, 25 Fixed, these were places when a blue link would have been fine
• Outstanding dead link tags - These links all go to the website of the ICC, which is not working at the moment, when/is it is fixed these links should come back, if that site remains down permanently (unliley for a major international organisation) then this is a bigger problem though
• Publisher details still missing form citations, inconsistent citation style - As I understand it, the GA criteria do not require that there is a "consistent" style, beyond that they are inline citations from reliable sources, which I think this article has everywhere except at Victim participation where there are two paragraphs that need citations

WP:CITEVAR is the applicable guideline. Jezhotwells (talk) 19:45, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

• Victim participation and reparations section has outstanding citations needed tag - Agreed, see above, will try and work on this
• The Duplication Detector and Earwig indicate a number of likely copywrite violations. If sections of the establishing statutes are used, they need to be rendered as quotations - Any non-trivial section of the statue appears to be rendered as quotations already as far as I can tell, in regards to the reports generated by earwig, they are all almost certainly examples of people C&P a sentence or two from the wikipedia article, or just coincidence when discussing a related topic

Jezhotwells (talk) 15:10, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

The Territorial jurisdiction section has a lrge section which should be in quotes.

Also Office of the Prosecutor

All of these lengthy quotes should be rendered in blockquotes to make them stand out better.

There are still a lot of stray sentences.

Delist: There has been editing activity, but none seem to address the points that have been raised. There appear to be many books, news articles and journals which cover the establishment and activities of the court which could be used. Long outstanding dead links, weasel words, and references needed tags. Jezhotwells (talk) 14:47, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Updated with response to 3 of the 4 specific issues you raised, if you could say where weasel words are used, I could fix those, i did not notice them on a read-through Ajbpearce (talk) 18:09, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

The court's creation perhaps constitutes the most significant reform of international law since 1945 "perhaps"

45 United Nations member states have neither signed nor ratified the Rome Statute; some of them, including China and India, are considered by some[who?] to be critical to the success of the court. twice, in lead and artcile. The lead sentence is identical to that in the body, which is not right, the lead should be summary style.

Some commentators have argued that the Rome Statute defines crimes too broadly or too vaguely.

Some argue that the protections offered by the ICC are insufficient.

Taking into account the experience of the ICTY (which worked with the principle of the primacy, instead of complementarity) in relation to co-operation, some scholars have expressed their pessimism as to the possibility of ICC to obtain co-operation of non-party states.

It is sometimes argued that amnesties are necessary to allow the peaceful transfer of power from abusive regimes

For example, the outstanding arrest warrants for four leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army are regarded by some as an obstacle to ending the insurgency in Uganda

The fact that so far the International Criminal Court has only investigated African countries and only indicted Africans is creating resentment in some African countries, even in countries which are state parties to the Court.

All of these instances of "some" or "sometimes" need in-text attribution. The issue of the majority of sources being primary, when there are many available books, journal articles and news items which could be used has not been addressed. The strcuture of the article is not good. There are a number of short sections. Full quotes from statutes are not always needed, summary style is more applicable. This is an artcile for the general reader. The footnotes and external links can provide the detail. Jezhotwells (talk) 19:45, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

• Delist. This can't stay in rehabilitation forever, its had long enough to improve but isn't there. Szzuk (talk) 07:18, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, I fixed the easy issues raised, and I am not sure all of the complaints made against the article are valid, but its clear it has issues that its become clear I have neither the time or interest to solve, so.... Ajbpearce (talk) 20:22, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Agree. There have been improvements but it needs someone to spend a few hours on it. It would be quite a lot of effort, and in my opinion that would be unrewarding. As it's had 10 weeks here I think it's fair to conclude other potentially interested editors have the same opinion as us. It's time to close this one. Szzuk (talk) 14:48, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Please read WP:DEADREF before dealing with the dead link tags; it was substantially revised earlier this year. Dead links are not actually prohibited by the GA criteria. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:57, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Ecocide would shift priorities toward the Global North?

At the end of § Jurisdiction over corporations, there is this claim:

Supporters of criminalizing ecocide argue that it would shift the ICC's priorities away from Africa, since most environmental degradation is caused by states and corporations in the Global North.

This is a pretty bold claim, so I checked the source—an online article in Time magazine. This seems to be the passage used to defend the assertion:

Historically, the ICC has been criticized for targeting only African dictators while turning a blind eye to Western leaders responsible for mass atrocities. But with an ecocide law, powerful white men—who are often disproportionately represented in extractive industries—could face criminal charges. “The ecocide movement is powerful not only in the legal precedent it could set for protecting rivers, forests, oceans and the air but also in the names and faces it identifies as being behind this destruction,” says Anderson. “[They] may not look like the picture we’re used to seeing.”

I don't think this passage supports the claim at all. The goalposts have notably shifted from causing environmental degradation to simply being employed in extractive industries, and from the "Global North" to "powerful white men." If that kind of slippery misrepresentation wasn't bad enough, it's not even clear how the source Time links to support its claim about overrepresentation is relevant to the subject. Time includes a bewildering inline hyperlink (the typical implication being that it constitutes a relevant reference, in the scholarly sense) to statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about the overall racial makeup of laborers in various U.S. industries.

There are several leaps of logic to get from U.S. labor statistics to accusing the Global North of ecocide. This appears to proceed from the assumption that environmental degradation simply equates to extractive industry (dubious). From there, we leap again to the assumption that nations with more extractive industry will be guilty of more environmental degradation, and therefore more vulnerable to prosecution for ecocide.

Another assumption is then required to change the "names and faces" expected to be prosecuted by the ICC: that Africans are underrepresented in extractive industry. The author presumably could not find any credible justification for this assertion, since she chose to cite U.S. labor statistics instead of a global dataset that could be used to compare the relative culpabilities of various groups of people. To reach the desired conclusion from this source, you have to assume that the racial makeup of a given U.S. industry is representative of the racial makeup of that industry across the globe, which is facially absurd. In fact, these data aren't even relevant to assessing ecocide culpability within the United States, since there is a well-known difference between the racial & sexual composition of a typical American company and the racial & sexual makeup of its executives. So, it's quite plausible that "powerful white men" are largely culpable for ecocide attributed to American companies, but these labor force statistics don't even substantiate that vastly more modest claim.

Even if they did, the cited statistics do not tell us anything about how much environmental degradation is caused by states and corporations in Africa (or the rest of the Global South), or even about how much is caused by the U.S. These data are not about "powerful white men" either; they're about the overall labor force—the likes of coal miners and loggers. Needless to say, merely being employed in an "extractive industry" is not an international crime.

Even if it was, the article offers no African data to compare these numbers to, to substantiate any of the various claims, loosely conflated here, that most environmental degradation or extractive industry is caused by powerful white men or the Global North. For all we know, the opposite is true: there might be more "extractive industry" laborers and/or executives in the Global South than in the North. In the absence of any global data, that is not implausible, since the Global South has a much higher population than the Global North (more than 6 times greater), and the developed post-industrial nations of the North are well known to have much larger tertiary and secondary sectors than primary sectors (i.e., more of their citizens are employed in so-called information economies than in the harvesting of natural resources).

But the cited source only concerns U.S. laborers, where a higher proportion of white men in some primary industries is to be expected. To support the claim that an ecocide law would refocus the ICC's attention away from Africa and towards the "Global North", it would need to demonstrate global overrepresentation, and not among laborers but among the key decision makers with the authority to commit ecocide. The types of people who might be prosecuted by the ICC constitute a tiny fraction of the overall "extractive industry" workforce, and a class known with near-certainty not to be representative of the overall workforce, so the labor force statistics are entirely irrelevant.

So clearly the cited source does not support the claim that states and corporations in the Global North are disproportionately responsible for extractive industry. But that's not even the assertion at hand; what was actually claimed in this Wiki article was about responsibility for environmental degradation. Setting aside the misused reference, the claim is not even likely to be true. The worst environmental offenders in the world right now are generally agreed to be China and India, followed by other developing nations. For example, Chinese industry has already devastated all ecosystems within its borders, and has now moved on to decimating fish ecosystems in international waters with its indiscriminate trawling fleet (see Fishing industry in China for example).

The canard and cliché that all primary industry in the Global South (or Third World, or developing world) is controlled by Western corporations with white executives, extracting indigenous resources for white Westerners to enjoy a la 19th century colonialism, is frankly insulting to the people of the Global South, implying that they can't mine their own coal or harvest their own palm oil without the help of the white man (which they certainly can and do).

In any case, extractive industry is not a simple proxy for environmental degradation. The U.S. does have a sizable primary sector, which, thanks to its regulation and advanced technology, is far less polluting than equivalent sectors in many developing nations. Evidently, there can be extractive industry with more or less attendant degradation. Cutting down trees is never an environmental positive, but it can be handled more or less sustainably and responsibly. More importantly, it's not even a given that most ecocide is caused by extractive industries. Much of the most publicized environmental damage in China is within the secondary sector, including for example the dumping of chemical byproducts and surplus products of manufacturing. By contrast, the manufacturing industries of the Global North are far cleaner. Their most concerning environmental impact today is the emission of greenhouse gases, but they lead the world in minimizing this impact, with very low emissions ratios compared to Chinese industry (which still relies mostly on coal).

So, for all these reasons, I would simply remove this sentence from the article. If the Time article presented any evidence in defense of its initial assertion, then I would argue for rephrasing the sentence to better align with Time's claim. It's obviously wild to jump from "powerful white men are overrepresented in the U.S. extractive industry labor force" to "most environmental degradation is caused by states and corporations in the Global North," so at minimum the reference is misused. On top of all the disconnects I've already mentioned, white people are only about 8% of the world population, so even if they were overrepresented as CEOs of multinational extraction companies at a rate 5x greater than in the general population, they probably still would not be responsible for most extraction, let alone for most environmental degradation.

But the Time article doesn't even defend its own claim, no matter how you read it. If you read it as charitably as possible, it's saying powerful white men are overrepresented in American extractive industry. This would have essentially zero relevance to whether Africans would be prosecuted for ecocide, but assuming that's what is meant, the linked article does not provide any evidence for that claim, since it's not about "powerful" white men but about laborers! And that's with the charitable reading. It's obvious from the context that the real intent is to assert that white men are overrepresented in driving the extraction of natural resources all around the world, which is not supported by the article. Given these shaky foundations, and the fact that the article only touches on the subject so briefly, it should not be cited to make this point (or any similar point) at all. I'm fully open to some other source being marshalled to make this point, but not the Time article.

GlacialHorizon (talk) 07:16, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Editorializing that should be removed

The article currently has the following paragraph under the "Victim participation" heading:

One of the great innovations of the Statute of the International Criminal Court and its Rules of Procedure and Evidence is the series of rights granted to victims. For the first time in the history of international criminal justice, victims have the possibility under the Statute to present their views and observations before the Court.

I feel that this runs afoul of the Manual of Style (MOS), but lack the ability to be bold and make an edit, so I would kindly request that someone else does. Specifically:

1. "great" in the first sentence is a peacock term and should be removed.
2. The tone of the second sentence in particular is inappropriately jubilant.

My suggestion would be to remove the first sentence entirely and cut the first part of the second, folding into the following paragraph, as follows:

Victims have the possibility under the Statute to present their views and observations before the Court. Participation before the Court may occur at various stages of proceedings and may take different forms, although it will be up to the judges to give directions as to the timing and manner of participation.

Thanks, 2003:D5:AF3B:B400:65CB:5415:CF56:66BB (talk) 19:04, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

ICC bias

ICC against Africa 102.90.103.96 (talk) 22:26, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Hi there, hope you are well! Could you please specify the ways in which the ICC is biased against Africa? L.E. Rainer 22:36, 9 December 2024 (UTC)