Pardons by #45, limitations to immunity, and "ecocide"

The pardons being given by POTUS45 (#45) are like giving the rats * fleeing a sinking ship life-jackets. 

Putin has been doing something similar for himself. 

Something that's worth contemplating is that crimes against humanity cannot be protected against that way - they fall into a special class of law referred to as universal jurisdiction (which is reserved only for the most appalling of crimes) which means offenders must be prosecuted by whatever nation catches them. 

Thus, strictly speaking, Argentina, far from sheltering Eichmann, should have actually put the monster on trial. This is why the UK had to arrest the monster Pinochet. Both those actions were seen as "novel", or new, but they actually drew on existing laws. 

On that, the move towards an "ecocide" law is a good thing, but the email claiming the terms crime against humanity and genocide were made during the Nuremberg trials is wrong: crimes against humanity came out of a protests by the Allies against the Armenian genocide being committed by the Ottoman Empire (now a denialist Turkey) which were changed from "crimes against Christianity" because the UK's empire then included predominantly Hindu India, and the word genocide was created by Raphael Lemkin in the early 1940s. 

The two terms largely came together in the Genocide Convention of 1948 - two years after the main Nuremberg Trials being referred to. The charges at Nuremberg did not include genocide. 

(The four charges were: (1) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace [which goes back to the Paris Pact of 1928, a part of customary international law which was also the basis for charges against Japan - and could potentially be used against the USA for actions such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but not the first Gulf War nor the actions in Afghanistan after 9/11]; (2) Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; (3) Participating in war crimes [defined by a series of Hague Conventions going back to the late 1800s]; and (4) Crimes against humanity. Incidentally, the fact that some charged were found not guilty shows this is not a case of "victor's justice", and the previous treaties relied on shows it was not "ex-post facto".) 

Putin's actions internationally could potentially make him subject to international law, but I don't know whether - bad as they are - they meet the requirement for severity that would trigger that. On balance, I suspect Putin will escape international justice - and his law means he will likely escape domestic justice.

#45 has had little interest in international matters, other than the trade war against China, and hasn't, in my opinion, done enough to generate even any interest in international charges. Ironically, his culpability for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA from the pandemic does not meet the strict criteria for the Genocide Convention, which covers defined actions against "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" for a specific, defined purpose - and, in this context, national refers to another nation, not your own. 

This means that the genocide committed by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia does not strictly meet that definition either.

However, unlike Putin, #45 is potentially subject to domestic law for his abuses while President . . . which he can possibly pardon himself for, but the debts he is reported to have, dating back to before his election, are a different matter entirely. 

All told, 2021 may be an interesting year for justice. 

 * By the way, I've known people with pet rats, and they are actually quite personable, pleasant and clean. Mice, on the other hand, have odour issues. The association of rats with despicable character or flaws possibly goes back to when humans needed to protect granaries of crops, and rats were difficult to find animals eating from the same food source. I couldn't find a good online explanation, but the Online Etymological Dictionary  suggests the negative connotation goes back to the 1620s, and came about from the belief that rats would leave a "ship about to sink or a house about to fall".