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	Pontificating and Legal Imperialism Forth April 15, 2010 http://forth.ie/index.php/content/article/pontificating_and_legal_imperialism/20100415/ The Catholic church has dismissed the move with Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi saying: "The claim is just a publicity stunt – it's a joke." Not for the first time, the Catholic church is wrong. Whatever one makes of the pope or the Catholic church this wrongheaded move is a disturbing attempt to circumvent politics using the courts. Here is a fact: whether we like it or not the Vatican is a sovereign state. The central office of the Catholic church is the Holy See, not the Vatican, and though they are located in the same place, they are not the same thing. The question as to whether or not the Vatican should be an internationally recognised state is an interesting one, but it is not the matter at hand. The assaults on national sovereignty have been coming thick and fast in recent years including in the form of open warmongering but, unusually, the source is not rabid right-wingers but liberals who seem to believe that people can be freed by suing national leaders and, if necessary, bombing them. The war on Iraq may have been started by conservative George W. Bush but the prototype for such foreign meddling in the name of the people of the country to be destroyed was Nato's 1999 war on Yugoslavia – started by liberals Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The idea is a simple one: in the name of 'human rights' Western powers reserve the right to use any means necessary to 'protect' the people of foreign countries. As appealing as the idea of guaranteeing human rights is, this inevitably becomes a 'right' to make a mockery of sovereignty. As many a late Yugoslav and Iraqi citizen has discovered, those hoping to extend human rights are happy to kill them to do so. No-one has suggested carpet bombing the Vatican but the assaults delivered via the courts are little better than ones that come down the barrel of a gun. The growth of liberal interventionism has its roots in the end of the Cold War. Lacking both a distinct and serious 'enemy' and a balance of power, Western politicians have instead exaggerated the threat from every petty thug in the second and third worlds – cheered-on all the while by liberals who see no difference between traditional acts of political solidarity and asking governments to intervene on their behalf. In fact the Vatican itself has an unpleasant history of using its sovereign status for political ends, from the infamous postwar 'ratlines' that allowed Nazis to escape right up to meddling in the break-up of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the fact that the Vatican has abused statehood is no reason to argue that Britain should do the same. British courts have long enjoyed believing that British justice is not only infallible but also relevant outside the country's borders – and the expanding legal empire is not confined to Britain. The move not only echos Spain's attempt to arrest the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes he committed in Chile. In addition, we have had the 'Scottish' court in the Netherlands for the (mis-handled) Lockerbie bombing trial and countless 'courts' that dealt with various leaders from the former Yugoslav states. Chileans would have been better served by stringing-up Pinochet from a lamppost than a court in Spain for the simple reason that it is not up to the Spanish establishment to protect Chileans. Though less dramatic, the move against the pope is similarly constructed. Dawkins and Hitchens want the pope to go before another such body: the International Criminal Court (ICC) – but the ICC is an absurd institution with no actual legitimacy despite its ability to pass judgement and enforce sentences. Anyone who objects to the pope's visit, from Paisleyite Protestants to angry atheists, is perfectly capable of protesting it without resorting to the dusty and undemocratic atmosphere of the courts. Doing so would be much closer to the spirit of radical and democratic politics than asking Mickey Mouse organisations like the ICC to do their dirty work for them.
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