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Welcome back to the dirt show. I missed you. I don't like these long hiatuses between Wednesday and Monday, especially when so many things are happening in the world.

You can't ignore obviously Ukraine and what's happening there. The big issue that's being discussed all over the world today is whether or not Putin and Russia have committed war crimes and whether they could be prosecuted in the hagg for their crimes.

Sometimes as usual on the media tremendous amount of ignorance and lack of knowledge and failure to understand the law and the limited jurisdictions about the international court of justice and the international criminal court.

So today you get a law school seminar. You get to hear what the law is, at least what I think the law is.

International law isn't much law. I mean, it's not based mostly on statutes that have been read upon by the people. No taxation without representation is not the rule of international law. Much international law is just created in ivory towers by academics and then voted on.

Some of it comes in the United Nations, some of it comes through treaties. So let's go over some of that and at least I'll give you a basic outline of what happens. There are several mechanisms for enforcing international law. One is the international court of justice.

We'll talk about that for a minute, but only a minute because it's worthless. Then there's the international criminal court, which is controversial. We'll talk about that.

And then every domestic court has what's called universal jurisdiction. It's been very controversial. You'll recall that sometimes Israeli former prime ministers are arrested in Holland or in England and hell to be brought in front of local courts for violating some sort of international law.

Nobody knows what its content is for their self defense measures and the Basin. They're normally thrown out, but still there are those mechanisms. And then there are essentially two types of war crimes. And this is important because the media mostly misses this.

There is the crime of aggressive war. That is the crime of war. That was established at Nuremberg. People were hanged as the result of fighting an aggressive war that is attacking Poland attacking Czechoslovakia, ultimately attacking other nations as well.

So on the one side is the crime of war. On the other side is crimes within war. So regardless of whether a war is legal or illegal, even if it's completely legal, a completely defensive war, you can still commit war crimes.

You cannot target civilians, civilian entities. You cannot bomb cities that have no strategic importance. You can't do, for example, what the United States did on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what Britain did in the United States didn't dress in and what Germany did over London.

There are no war crimes. We've committed them. Most every country in the world has committed them. And then of course, you can't just kill civilians. You can't kill soldiers who have surrendered and put down their arms. There are all kinds of war crimes. You can't rape during war time. It's a war crime.

So again, to distinguish very importantly, the crime of waging an illegal, aggressive war, that's generally a crime against the country, but the leader of the country can be brought in front of various courts.

The international criminal court doesn't have jurisdiction over that kind of war crime. That has to be referred by the United Nations Security Council, which is never going to happen, hasn't happened in the past.

Aggressive war is probably only going to be prosecuted, if it's ever going to be prosecuted, and I think it won't. Through domestic courts that apply universal principles, the Nuremberg principle.

So let's focus most of the attention on what really could happen. And that is crimes within war. I'm not going to bore you with the Latin terms. There are lots of Latin terms for these different kinds of procedures and indictments.

So let's distinguish now between the international court of justice and the international criminal court. The international court of justice is not a court. Let's start with that. It's a United Nations organ in which the judges are selected by the countries and they're told how to rule.

They're not independent judges. Obviously the Russian judge is told by Putin what to do. And even the American judge, he's not really a judge. He's there on behalf of the United States. And it's just, you know, not really a court.

I like to say the international court of justice is not international because many countries have never served on it. For example, as you might imagine, Israel has never had a permanent judge on the international court of justice. It's ruled against Israel many, many times.

But it's never had an Israeli judge as a permanent judge. I think once there was a visiting judge for a short temporary period of time. So it's not international. It's not a court. It doesn't consist of independent judges who don't have to report any judge who doesn't do his country's bidding can be removed by the country. There's no other procedure for that.

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