3 ms·

beyond reasonable doubt is not the standard in civil suits, internationally or not. Any laws or contracts only have meaning if backed by some remedy and enforc

• dane-pgp 5y ago
  > International "law" is essentially "might makes right", nothing else. All law is "might makes right" if you want to be completely reductionist about it. A more nuanced take is that, just as civilised people choose to submit to a system of laws which punish those who break the social contract between people, so civilised nations choose to submit to a system of international law which can pass rulings against (and occasionally punish) nations that fail to respect the accepted boundaries that apply to the actions of nations. What we see in practice is that, of course, nations don't like being particularly limited in what they can do, so international law only tends to cover things that almost every nation almost never wants to do (like commit genocide or bomb foreign hospitals). In the rare cases that a pariah nation does transgress one of the few constraints on it, though, the international community has various means to bring the nation back into compliance, such as economic sanctions. The fact that America wasn't convicted in an international court for the Crime of Aggression when it invaded Iraq, for example, isn't so much a failure of international law as it is a reflection of the support the US received from countries who would in some sense constitute the jury of its peers (even though that's not exactly how international law is intended to function).