For the foreseeable future, international courts provide the only realistic prospect of justice for Syrians

There are few regimes as cruel as the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. There was seemingly no limit to what it would do to sustain his grasp on power, including dropping chemical weapons and barrel bombs on civilians in territory held by the armed opposition, and starving, torturing, “disappearing” and executing perceived opponents. The victims numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Since December, Assad is gone, toppled by the HTS rebel group that now controls the interim government in Damascus. The leader of the interim authorities, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has promised a far more inclusive and rights-respecting rule. The jury is still out on whether he will live up to those vows, but one place where he has fallen short is in satisfying the Syrian people’s quest for justice. Both he and international courts could play a role.

Assad’s flight to Moscow has not diminished the desire for justice, nor should it. Vladimir Putin is much older than Assad and will not be Russia’s president forever. Just as in 2001 the Serbian government sent former president Slobodan Milošević to The Hague in return for the easing of sanctions, so a future Russian government may be persuaded to surrender Assad and his henchmen who joined him in exile as the price for, say, lifting sanctions or even maintaining Russia’s military bases in Syria.

Justice is always better if it can be provided locally, but for the time being, the Syrian judicial system cannot deliver. Under Assad, Syria’s courts mainly facilitated his extraordinary repression. They currently offer little hope of the fair and transparent trials that are essential for justice. Railroading people to conviction would only compound the Assad regime’s injustice, not remedy it. Most of Syria’s judicial system needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

For the foreseeable future, international courts provide the only realistic prospect of justice. One possible route would be for national courts to exercise universal or extraterritorial jurisdiction. That is possible because Assad’s crimes are so heinous that they fall within the category of crimes that are subject to global prosecution.

There already have been modest steps in this direction. Most involve Syrian perpetrators who happen to have fled abroad and been discovered. The most noteworthy was brought by German prosecutors in Koblenz against a Syrian intelligence officer who had run a torture center. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity. Yet so far the most senior perpetrators have not been detained, even though, since Assad’s fall, they are more vulnerable.

One government – France – has gone a step further and charged Assad himself for a particularly heinous crime, the use of a nerve agent, sarin, to kill more than 1,000 people in 2013 in Syria’s Ghouta region near Damascus. Trials in absentia are best avoided because, without the suspect present to defend himself, they do little to advance justice. But charges in absentia, with the aim of generating pressure for arrest, are laudable. More governments should follow in France’s footsteps.

But national prosecutions require a major investment by the prosecuting country, even assuming assistance from the body established by the UN general assembly to assemble evidence in support of such prosecutions, the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism. A more logical forum would be the international criminal court (ICC), where governments could pool resources in support of prosecution.

The ICC was absent in Syria during Assad’s reign. An effort by the UN security council to confer jurisdiction in 2014 was blocked by the Russian and Chinese vetoes. And with little prospect of securing custody of the most culpable officials while Assad retained power, the ICC prosecutor showed no discernible interest in pursuing other possible routes to jurisdiction.

Assad’s overthrow has changed that. Karim Khan, the current ICC chief prosecutor, has already visited the interim authorities in Damascus. But despite Assad’s litany of atrocities, no further progress is known to have been made. The fault lies in part with the new interim Syrian authorities, in part with Khan.

The easiest way for the ICC to secure jurisdiction would be for the new authorities to join the court and grant it retroactive jurisdiction. Acceptance of the court would be an important signal that they intend to respect Syrians’ rights, but al-Shara has not taken that step or indicated that he will. His reasons are not entirely clear.

One factor may be that he fears the ICC would prosecute him or fellow HTS commanders for human rights violations they committed in north-western Syria, which they controlled since 2017. This is not a trivial fear, but those abuses paled in comparison to the Assad regime’s atrocities, so it is hard to imagine they would be Khan’s priority.

Another reason may be that some of the foreign forces operating in Syria have signaled their displeasure with the prospect of ICC jurisdiction. Turkey, the principal backer of the interim authorities, may not want oversight of the territory it has seized in northern Syria. The United States, whose decision to maintain Assad-era sanctions presents the principal impediment to economic and hence political stability in Syria, undoubtedly doesn’t want scrutiny of its forces fighting the Islamic State in the northeastern part of the country.

Israel, whose officials already face ICC charges for starving and depriving Palestinian civilians in Gaza, clearly doesn’t want additional vulnerability for its ongoing operations in Syria. Even Russia undoubtedly opposes ICC jurisdiction, given the vulnerability of its commanders and even president Vladimir Putin to charges of bombing hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in north-western Syrian. They, too, already face ICC charges for their conduct in Ukraine.

Given these competing factors, there may be no overcoming the interim authorities’ reluctance to join the ICC, but that is not the end of the story. The ICC prosecutor on his own could establish jurisdiction over an important subset of the Assad regime’s crimes.

The key would be to follow the same strategy pursued in Myanmar. It has never joined the court, but adjacent Bangladesh has, which gives the court jurisdiction over any crime committed on the neighbor’s territory.

Although the ICC had no direct jurisdiction over the mass atrocities – murder, rape and arson – committed in 2017 against the Rohingya of Myanmar’s western Rakhine state, it did have jurisdiction over the crime of forced deportation because that crime was not completed until Rohingya stepped into Bangladesh. That became a backdoor method of addressing the atrocities that drove more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee. The court has approved that jurisdictional theory and is now considering the prosecutor’s request for an arrest warrant for the Myanmar army leader, Min Aung Hlaing.

Khan could do the same thing in Syria. Jordan is an ICC member and the Assad regime’s atrocities drove more than 700,000 Syrians to flee there. Charging Assad-era officials with this crime of forced deportation would be a way of addressing many of that regime’s atrocities. That partial justice would be far better than no justice at all.

This approach to jurisdiction would pose little threat to the interim authorities, whose cooperation Khan would need at least to conduct on-site investigations. Whatever their misdeeds in north-western Syria before seizing Damascus, they would have had little if anything to do with why people on the other side of the country fled to Jordan. Nor do any of the current international actors in Syria seem to be contributing to any exodus to Jordan.

Maybe Khan is secretly advancing this plan, but I doubt it. In the case of Myanmar, the ICC prosecutor’s office, beginning under Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, publicly signaled that it was pursuing this approach. Khan has given no such indication for Syria.

He should. I am a strong backer of the ICC, but when I have defended it publicly, detractors commonly note its lack of action on Syria. For years, I defended the court by arguing that its lack of jurisdiction over Assad’s atrocities was not its fault. But with the forced-deportation route to jurisdiction now approved by the court for Myanmar, the decision whether to pursue it for Syria lies mainly with Khan. Assuming that the interim authorities continue to eschew court membership, Khan should exercise that option for jurisdiction. The people of Syria deserve it.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Justice is always better if it can be provided locally, but for the time being, the Syrian judicial system cannot deliver.’ Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on April 27, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

Coerced Uyghur workers are still part of the export chain.

U.S. President Donald Trump is notoriously indifferent to human rights, and he makes no exception for China. Rather, Trump’s dominant concern with Beijing has been America’s trade deficit—prompting the full-blown trade war that now consumes headlines. In his last term, he secured a largely unfulfilled pledge from Chinese leader Xi Jinping to buy more American goods. But a greater focus on Beijing’s abysmal human rights record would have positive trade effects.

Today, Beijing’s most severe repression is directed at China’s Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic group of 11 million people, mostly Muslim, who live primarily in the northwestern Xinjiang region. Beginning in 2017, the Chinese government detained some 1 million Uyghurs.

Even when Chinese officials decide that detained Uyghurs are sufficiently loyal to Beijing, many are “freed” only to be placed in forced labor. No one knows the precise numbers, but Uyghur forced labor is said to be pervasive in Xinjiang, with an estimated 2.5 million at risk. Some 80,000 Uyghurs are estimated to have been forced to work in other parts of China as well.

Under focus of the highly intrusive surveillance regime that Beijing has established in Xinjiang, Uyghurs have been detained for as little as traveling abroad or communicating with people overseas, donating to mosques, or preaching the Quran without authorization. Beijing claims to be fighting terrorism, but the sweeping nature of the detention belies that pretext.

Many Uyghurs are still in custody, held at least until their jailers think they have sufficiently abandoned their religion, culture, and language. Hundreds of thousands of families have had Han Chinese “guests” imposed upon them to monitor their behavior. Some Uyghurs, especially intellectuals, have now been charged with trumped-up crimes and given long prison sentences.

The persecution has been so severe that human rights groups concluded that it constitutes a crime against humanity. A plummeting birthrate among Uyghurs—caused by the widespread detention as well as the use of forced birth control—led the first Trump administration and others to find that Beijing was committing genocide.

In his last term, Trump seemed as if he couldn’t care less. He reportedly told Xi that the mass detention of Uyghurs “was exactly the right thing to do.”

Since then, the U.S. government’s response has been tougher. In 2021, it adopted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Sponsored by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s secretary of state, the legislation presumptively bars all imports from Xinjiang unless the importing company can demonstrate that forced labor was not used. Given the opacity of supply chains in Xinjiang, that is difficult if not impossible to show.

Unfair Chinese competitive practices are typically thought of in terms of government subsidies or concessional loans, but the use of forced labor, apart from being a serious human rights abuse, is also one way for Chinese producers to unfairly undercut competitors’ prices. People subject to forced labor have no capacity to insist on a fair wage or to switch jobs if wages are too low.

A growing list of industries is affected, including cotton (about 20 percent of the world’s cotton comes from Xinjiang, creating a major problem for the apparel industry), tomatoes (representing some 15 percent of the world’s tomato paste), and aluminum (10 percent). But the affected industry of the greatest strategic importance is polysilicon, which is used to make solar panels, one of the green products for which Beijing hopes to corner the global market. Some 45 percent of the world’s polysilicon is produced in Xinjiang.

Beyond his infatuation with tariffs, Trump should address China’s unfair competitive practice of using Uyghur forced labor. Some steps are straightforward. He should augment the number and expertise of U.S. customs agents assigned to examine Chinese imports to determine which came from Xinjiang.

That is especially needed to ensure there are sufficient agents to support Trump’s announced plan as of May 2 to end the exemption from customs inspections for packages worth less than $800 that importers can use to evade the ban on goods using Uyghur forced labor. Trump’s attempt in February to close that loophole was quickly stymied by the insufficient number of inspectors that caused serious delays.

Customs inspectors need added resources because they must do more than simply examine certificates of origin. Why should any customs official believe Chinese shipping documents when Beijing has already tried to cover up the detention facilities for Uyghurs by claiming that they were merely “vocational training centers,” as if no one would notice the walls, barbed-wire fences, and guards?

But Trump sees himself as a disruptor, and there are certain disruptive steps that would be productive to take. The European Union has a policy against importing goods that are made from forced labor, but it has not adopted a presumption against imports from Xinjiang.

Given the difficulty of identifying any particular good as the product of forced labor, the EU blocks few imports. While exports from Xinjiang to the United States have plummeted, exports to the EU in 2022 increased by a third. As part of resolving his trade war, Trump should press the EU, as well as Britain, Canada, and Australia, to adopt a similar presumption against any import from Xinjiang.

Chinese businesses are also evading the presumption by quietly shipping goods from Xinjiang to the United States via other parts of China or third countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand. The high tariffs that Trump has threatened to impose on these countries do not preclude their ongoing use to evade the ban on imports of the product of Uyghur forced labor. Greater customs scrutiny is needed.

To make matters worse, Beijing has imposed hefty fines on the people conducting the private due diligence that the U.S. government recommends importers undertake to ensure that a supply chain is free of forced labor. Some local employees of major firms conducting due diligence have been detained, although one group was released in March.

Unless Beijing opens up and allows free investigation of supply chains throughout the country to ensure they are not tainted by Uyghur forced labor, Trump should threaten to apply the presumption against imports to all goods from China. In addition, Trump should impose sanctions on Chinese subsidiaries in third countries that facilitate evasion of the presumption and add more companies to the “Entity List” from which imports are presumptively banned.

A focus on forced labor has potentially wider appeal than the use of tariffs. Trump’s tariffs have prompted global anger and retaliatory measures. But no government can afford to show indifference to forced labor. International law has banned forced labor since 1930.

In short, a trade policy that includes attention to China’s use of Uyghur forced labor could be a win-win. Regardless of what one thinks about Trump’s war against global trade, there is no question that China’s use of Uyghur forced labor is an unfair trade practice that should be stopped. It would undercut a major unfair competitive advantage for Chinese businesses, helping to whittle down the trade deficit, while addressing a serious human rights violation. Rubio gets it. Trump should, too.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Farmers pick cotton in a field in Hami in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, on Oct. 14, 2018. STR/AFP via Getty Images

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by Foreign Policy on April 22, 2025. You can also read it here foreinpolicy.com.

We must persuade Trump to do the right thing – securing peace in the Middle East – for the wrong reason

Donald Trump’s instinctive deference to the Israeli government is at odds with his self-image as an expert dealmaker. Much as it may seem laughable that the president wants the Nobel peace prize, his quest may be the best chance we have for securing any US government regard for the rights and lives of Palestinians in Gaza.

Trump currently seems to endorse the strategy of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of trying to pummel Hamas into accepting defeat. To force Hamas to release its remaining hostages and to disband its diminished military force, Netanyahu has resumed Israel’s strategy of starving and bombing Palestinian civilians. In less than a week, about 600 Palestinians have already been killed.

The second phase of the ceasefire was supposed to have led to the release of Hamas’s last hostages in return for the freeing of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and a permanent end to the fighting. Instead, the Israeli government has unilaterally changed the terms. It wants the hostages released and Hamas dismantled without committing to end the war. Hamas has rejected that one-sided ultimatum, evidently worried that Netanyahu would then resume attacking Palestinian civilians unimpeded.

This is not an idle fear. The point of the renewed attacks may not be simply to wrest concessions from Hamas. The vast majority of the hostages freed so far have been released after negotiations rather than by military action, and most families of the hostages, prioritizing survival of their loved ones, want a negotiated solution.

Rather, Israel’s aim may be to advance the project of expelling Palestinian civilians from Gaza, the longtime dream of the Israeli far right. Already the defense minister, Israel Katz, is threatening to seize and annex parts of Gaza, and Netanyahu is reportedly planning a new and larger ground invasion. Now that Trump has endorsed the forced permanent deportation of 2 million Palestinians from Gaza – a massive war crime and crime against humanity – Netanyahu may feel he has a green light to pursue that callous strategy.

Tellingly, the far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir has rejoined Netanyahu’s governing coalition as police minister now that the temporary ceasefire, which he opposed, has ended. Head of the pro-settler, nationalist-religious Jewish Power party, Ben-Gvir has long been unabashed about his desire to “solve” the conflict in Gaza by getting rid of the Palestinians. And we should recognize that Gaza would most likely be just a prelude to the occupied West Bank.

In these circumstances, a deal with Hamas seems unlikely. Why would Hamas capitulate if that would permanently separate the Palestinian people from their homeland?

Netanyahu and Trump may calculate that overwhelming military force, if applied with sufficient brutality, would force Hamas’s hand. That has long been the Israeli strategy. Trump has even resumed delivery of the enormous 2,000lb bombs that Joe Biden had suspended because Israel was using them to indiscriminately decimate entire Palestinian neighborhoods.

The international criminal court prosecutor has already hinted that this indiscriminate bombardment may be the next focus of his war-crime charges. Trump himself would be at risk of being charged for aiding and abetting these atrocities – an eventuality that would not lead to his immediate jailing but would severely limit his ability to travel to the 125 governments that as members of the ICC would have an obligation to arrest him. (Trump might ask Vladimir Putin about how it felt not to be able to attend the August 2023 Brics summit in South Africa for fear of arrest.)

Hamas has so far shown no inclination to succumb to this war-crime strategy, and the surrounding Arab states have rejected becoming a party to another Nakba, the catastrophic forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The big question is whether Trump comes to recognize that a deal, not forced surrender, is the most likely way out of the current horrors in Gaza that he had vowed to end.

For now, Trump’s deference to Israel seems firm, but one should never take anything for granted with Trump. If there is any constant to his rule, it is that his self-interest overcomes concern for others.

That’s where the Nobel prize comes in. If Trump wants to be known as the master of the deal, it won’t be by underwriting more Israeli war crimes.

Trump alone has the capacity to force Netanyahu to adopt a different approach. Despite Israel’s dependence on US military assistance, Netanyahu got away with ignoring Biden’s entreaties to curb the starvation and slaughter of Palestinian civilians because the Israeli leader knew that the Republican party had his back. But Trump has become the Republican party. If he pressures Israel, Netanyahu has nowhere to the right to turn.

That is how Trump played a decisive role in securing the temporary ceasefire that began shortly before his 20 January inauguration. He could do the same thing now to force Netanyahu toward a more productive, less inhumane path.

What might that look like? The best option remains a two-state solution – an Israeli and Palestinian state living in peace side-by-side. The main alternatives would be rejected by Israel (recognition of the “one-state reality” with equal rights for all) or most everyone else (the apartheid of endless occupation).

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has said that he will not normalize relations with Israel, which Trump craves, without a Palestinian state. Both the Saudis and the Emiratis have also insisted on a state as a condition for financing the rebuilding of Gaza.

But wouldn’t a Nobel peace prize for Trump be preposterous? No more so than the one granted, however controversially, to Henry Kissinger. He had directed or approved war crimes or mass atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh and Chile, but the Nobel committee honored him nonetheless for concluding a peace deal with Vietnam and withdrawing US forces. A Trump pivot away from Netanyahu’s endless war would be no more surprising than Kissinger’s about-face.

Admittedly, it would be foolhardy to bet on Trump becoming an advocate for a Palestinian state, but it is worth recognizing that his personal ambitions could lead him in that direction. It speaks to the topsy-turvy world of Trump that the Palestinians’ best hope in the face of an Israeli government that respects no legal bounds is to play up what it would take for Trump to secure his coveted Nobel. We must persuade Trump to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Israel’s aim may be to advance the project of expelling Palestinian civilians from Gaza, the longtime dream of the Israeli far right.’ Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on March 26, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

Trump should reverse his misguided effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump administration’s threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil seems to reflect a dangerous disregard for freedom of expression – a blatant example of official censorship to curb criticism of Israel.

Khalil was a recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He holds a green card, giving him permanent residence status, and is married to a US citizen. They are expecting their first child soon. Immigration agents arrested him last week in his university housing and sent him for detention from New York City to Louisiana. He had been a leader of protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Beyond that, the facts are contested. His friends called him “kind, expressive and gentle”. A Columbia professor described him as “someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue. This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things.”

But Donald Trump, hailing his arrest, suggested Khalil was among students “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. The administration has presented no facts to back up these assertions, but even were it to do so, the suggestion that permissible speech can be a basis for deportation is deeply troubling. Trump vowed more such deportation efforts.

Ordinarily, the first amendment protects even offensive speech. Although the government retains greater latitude to deport non-citizens, Trump’s rhetoric suggests an intention to step way over the line of propriety. What does it mean to be “anti-American”? As we saw during the McCarthy era, people can face that accusation for a wide range of legitimate political views. Such campaigns are the antithesis of the free debate that is essential for US democracy.

As for the charge of “antisemitism”, Trump seems to be fueling a disturbing tendency to use claims of antisemitism to silence criticism of the Israeli government. Antisemitism is a serious problem that threatens Jews around the world. But if people see accusations of antisemitism as mere efforts to censor critics of Israel, it would cheapen the concept at a time when the defense against real antisemitism is urgently needed.

Even Trump’s unsupported suggestion that Khalil is “pro-terrorist” needs unpacking. To begin with, opposing Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on Palestinian civilians, as well as its starvation of them, does not make anyone pro-terrorist. Israel is required to carry out its military response to Hamas’s appalling murders and abductions of 7 October 2023 in accordance with international humanitarian law. War crimes by one side never support war crimes by the other. Pointing that out, if that’s what Khalil did, does not make him “pro-terrorist”; it makes him pro-civilian.

The Trump administration’s retaliation against Khalil is part of its larger attack on campus protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Just days earlier, the administration announced the withdrawal of $400m in federal funding from Columbia for supposedly failing to protect Jewish students and faculty during anti-Israel protests, the vast majority of which were entirely peaceful. Other universities have now been threatened with a similar suspension of their funding.

Coincidentally, I spoke on the Columbia campus days before Khalil’s detention. As a Jew, I did not feel the least bit threatened. Indeed, many of the protesters against Israeli atrocities have been Jewish. Again, Trump’s pretext for censoring critics of Israel is transparently thin.

If we tolerate an Israel exception to our rights of free speech, we can be sure that other exceptions will follow. Trump likes to half-jokingly refer to himself as a “king”. Are we heading toward a Thailand-style lèse majesté under which criticism of the king is criminalized?

But censoring criticism of Israel is a poor strategy even for protecting Israel. Trump’s plan to “solve” Israel’s Palestinian problem by forcibly deporting millions of Palestinians would be a huge war crime; it has been rightly rejected by the Arab states that Trump envisioned receiving the refugees or later paying to rebuild Gaza.

Failing that plan, the Israeli government would prefer the status quo – endless occupation – but the world increasingly rejects that option as apartheid, as did the international court of justice in July. Another option would be to recognize the “one-state reality” created by Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, but the Israeli government refuses to provide equal rights to all residents. Roughly the same number of Jews and Arabs like between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, so Israel would lose its Jewish majority.

The most realistic, legal and enduring option remains a two-state solution, an Israeli and Palestinian state living side by side in peace. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has devoted his political career to avoiding a Palestinian state, but it is the best prospect for lasting peace.

In pressing Netanyahu to agree to the current temporary ceasefire in Gaza, Trump showed his capacity to exert pressure on the Israeli government to take steps toward peace that it resists. He could do the same for a two-state solution.

But to build a political support for this important step, we need free debate in the United States. Trump’s efforts to censor criticism of Israeli misconduct is a recipe for endless war and atrocities. Free speech is required if we hope to do better. Trump should reverse his misguided effort to deport Khalil.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘If we tolerate an Israel exception to our rights of free speech, we can be sure that other exceptions will follow.’ Photograph: Jeenah Moon/Reuters

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on March 14, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

JD Vance says Europe should not shun far-right parties. He seems to have forgotten 1933, but hits a key conundrum

In his speech last week at the Munich Security Conference, JD Vance pressed European leaders to stop excluding extremist parties from government. Alluding in particular to Germany’s neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, or AfD, he accused European leaders of “running in fear of your own voters”. The US vice-president underscored the point by then meeting with the AfD candidate for chancellor.

In his view, these extremist parties should be welcomed into the mainstream because they reflect voters’ concern about migration. He evidently was not troubled that the AfD also has a history of using Nazi rhetoric, making racist and antisemitic comments and plotting to overthrow the German government.

What could go wrong with simply trusting the people? Germans evidently have a more acute memory than Vance of 1933, when voter preferences led to Adolf Hitler becoming chancellor and shutting down Germany’s democracy. It was all the more shocking that Vance made his comments just after visiting the site of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, the culmination of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Yet Vance did hit on a conundrum – how to respect the freedom of speech that is essential for democracy without unleashing popular forces that would shred the rights at democracy’s core?

As a career human rights lawyer who grew up with the first amendment and attended Yale Law School, as Vance did, I understand his free-speech absolutism. But since then, I have worked around the world and come to appreciate a more qualified approach to free speech. Notably, the leading human rights treaty on the subject, the international covenant on civil and political rights of 1966, allows limitations on speech to protect national security, public order, or public health or morals. It also provides that “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law”. Most democratic governments prefer this more limited conception of free speech because they recognize the fragility of democracy and want license to defend it.

But to resurrect the adage that constitutional rights should not be “a suicide pact” does not explain how democracy should be defended. The danger of creating exceptions to free speech is that it risks unwarranted government censorship and can lead to autocracy.

The US has tended to avoid the problem by delegating the regulation of public speech to the private media, but that solution is no longer viable. For decades, Americans received most news through a handful of established media outlets that kept discourse within mainstream parameters. Even as growing numbers of people received their news through social media, we relied on private platforms to use content moderation to limit extremism.

There was always something perverse about democracy entrusting such an existential issue to a handful of private institutions, but in any event, those days are now gone. The traditional media have become just one of many avenues for the dissemination of information. The major social-media platforms have largely abandoned content moderation. And X, formerly Twitter, still the most important platform for news and politics, is tainted by the rightwing and often bizarre missives of its owner, Elon Musk, whose algorithm forces his opinions to the top of everyone’s content feed. The need for a governmental role is increasingly recognized.

But how can we trust governments to protect democracy – to limit censorship to genuine hate speech or dangerous disinformation – rather than silence views that are simply critical or inconvenient? Autocrats such as the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have found pretexts to shut down independent media and, at times, arrest journalists and civic leaders whose views were deemed too critical. These governments now produce managed elections on a playing field that is sharply tilted toward the ruling party.

Even a well-established democracy is capable of unwarranted censorship. Germany has suppressed legitimate criticism of Israel. Vance is right that we must not allow dislike of certain controversial views, such as limiting immigration, to exclude those views from the political domain. Such censorship reinforces the sense of some people that the democratic system is leaving them behind, which makes them ripe for autocratic appeals. Only positions that undermine core rights and democratic values should be viewed with suspicion.

One option has been to entrust the policing of permissible speech to governmental institutions with some independence from the ruling party. Germany, for example, has a panoply of institutions devoted to blocking the emergence of extremist political parties. But Trump has shown that institutional checks on executive power are not immune to tampering.

Ignoring the problem – saying, as Vance seems to advocate, that government has no role in policing speech – may not yield a level electoral playing field either. In today’s world of bots fueled by artificial intelligence, Russian propagandists and others are quite capable of using social media to flood the public with disinformation. Romania illustrated the threat in December when an obscure far-right pro-Vladimir Putin candidate emerged as the leader of the first round of elections for president after 25,000 newly activated accounts inundated the information space. At the same time, the Trump administration is shutting down an important antidote – USAid’s support for human rights defenders, democracy promoters and independent journalists.

Ultimately, we must recognize the limited capacity of law. There is no way to write laws that enable only censorship of threats to democracy without also opening the door to censorship of merely disfavored views. The traditional American answer is to avoid any governmental role – as Vance advocates – to assume that the risk of tyranny by the people is less severe than the risk of tyranny by the government – but in today’s world of populist autocrats, that distinction is less clear.

I see no alternative but to recognize that, beyond laws, we need leaders of integrity to apply those laws. Integrity is a pliable word. I’m sure every autocrat thinks of himself as having that attribute. But there are certain virtues that are necessary for the defense of democracy.

We must seek leaders who accept responsibility not only for advancing particular political programs but also for reinforcing democratic values. We need leaders of restraint who do not grasp for power by whatever means necessary but respect constitutional injunctions, legal rules, and customary limits. We need leaders who promote a national community where the rights of everyone deserve respect rather than pushing an us-v-them agenda that excludes demonized segments of society from that community.

In today’s sharply divided societies, it may seem anachronistic to seek politicians with virtues of restraint and integrity rather than ones dedicated to a no-holds-barred quest for power, but I see no other option if we are to preserve our democracy. Trump lacks that temperament and relishes jettisoning taboos and flouting democratic norms. But just because democratic virtues can be breached does not mean they are elusive. For much of US history, Americans demanded leaders of such character. Trump is an anomaly who must not be taken as the norm.

Vance is right that in the end we must look to voters to elect such leaders. But elections do not happen in a vacuum. They are influenced by, among other things, the campaigns that candidates wage. In the United States, Democrats seem to have concluded that the defense of democracy doesn’t poll well compared with more bread-and-butter issues. But given the severity of the autocratic threat, proponents of democracy need to find more persuasive ways to elevate the issue. Regardless of the rules that govern free speech, electing leaders with the temperament to respect the laws and traditions that underwrite democracy is essential if our system of self-governance is to survive.

With four more years before the next presidential election, the public also needs to find ways to make itself heard now. Although the Republican party seems to have accepted his outrages, Trump is sensitive to public opinion. The key is to speak out, to let him know that his steps to undermine democracy are beyond the pale – that they are not why he was elected and will not be countenanced.

COVER IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘How to respect the freedom of speech that is essential for democracy without unleashing popular forces that would shred the rights at democracy’s core?’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

IMAGE 2 DESCRIPTION: ‘Trump is sensitive to public opinion. The key is to speak out, to let him know that his steps to undermine democracy are beyond the pale.’ Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on February 21 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

In decades spent convincing world leaders to protect human rights, I’ve learned a thing or two about working with his type

The common wisdom is that Donald Trump’s foreign policy will be a disaster for human rights. Certainly his penchant for embracing autocrats and breaching norms bodes poorly, such as his outrageous proposal to force two million Palestinians out of Gaza – which would be a blatant war crime – or his suggestion that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion. But Trump also likes to cut a deal, as shown by his paradoxically positive role in securing the current (precarious) Gaza ceasefire. If Trump the dealmaker can be nudged in the right direction, he might, against all odds, be brought to play a productive role for human rights.

As executive director of Human Rights Watch, I spent more than three decades devising strategies to pressure or cajole leaders to better respect rights. I have dealt with brutal dictators, self-serving autocrats and misguided democrats. My experience shows that there is always an angle – something the leader cares about – that can be used to steer them in a more rights-respecting direction.

Trump is no exception. In his case, the key is his self-image as a master dealmaker. The challenge is to make his reputation depend on securing deals that strengthen human rights.

The Gaza ceasefire accord is illustrative. The same deal, in essence, was on the table since May 2024, when Joe Biden first advanced it. But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was reluctant to accept it because two far-right ministers threatened to topple his government if he did. Biden was never willing to use his obvious leverage – conditioning US arms sales and military aid – to tip the balance toward a deal.

To change Netanyahu’s calculus, it took Trump’s threat that there would be “all hell to pay” if there were no deal. He never spelled out what he meant, but if a deal was sought by even Trump, who in his first term was as pro-Israel as they come, Netanyahu could argue to his ministers that he had no choice but to comply.

Yet Trump seeks a bigger deal. He wants Saudi Arabia to normalise relations with Israel as part of his effort to build a unified front against Iran. But the Saudi crown prince, attentive to Saudi public opinion, has said that a prerequisite is at least a clear path to a Palestinian state – a position that the Saudi government reiterated even after Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Other key US partners in the region, including Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates, are also pressing for a state. Netanyahu’s response has long been, in effect, over my dead body.

As a close friend of Israel, Trump is well positioned to change Netanyahu’s mind. Netanyahu ignored appeals for restraint from Biden knowing that he had a strong base of more conservative support in the US, his most important benefactor by far. But if he crosses Trump, there will be nowhere else to turn.

Trump could yet play a similar role in Ukraine, now that the US and Russia have announced that they intend to start formal consultations on a peace deal on Ukraine. Despite his latest claim that Ukraine should have capitulated to Putin early on, Trump’s position is that the war with Russia has gone on long enough, and that the enormous loss of life is not worth the modest chunks of territory in eastern Ukraine that have been changing hands.

Russia and Ukraine have very different views about how the conflict should end. The Ukrainian government wants to preserve its democracy and sovereignty by obtaining security guarantees from at least a significant segment of Nato nations. Vladimir Putin wants to snuff out Ukraine’s democracy, ending an enticingly dangerous model for Russians, and turn the country into a vassal state of the Kremlin.

Because of Trump’s peculiar admiration for him, Putin had every incentive to keep fighting with the hope that Trump would stop selling arms to Ukraine and force it to surrender. But if, despite Putin’s efforts to bamboozle and flatter him, Trump were to come out in favour of a deal closer to Ukraine’s terms, Putin would have a hard time resisting. Losing soldiers and equipment in unsustainable numbers, Putin could no longer hope that a sympathetic US president would extract him from his disastrous decision to invade. A deal could be had.

When it comes to China, Trump seems to care little about human rights, going so far as to stop US diplomatic involvement with the UN Human Rights Council, even though Beijing today poses the greatest threat to the global human rights system. Rather, Trump wants to reduce the trade deficit and avoid Beijing’s monopolisation of key strategic industries. Indeed, Trump was even reported to have told the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, that detaining Uyghurs “was exactly the right thing to do” – a reference to the mass detention of about one million of the 11 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang to force them to abandon their language, religion and culture.

But Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, has been far more concerned about human rights in China. Most significantly, Rubio as senator sponsored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which presumptively bars all imports from Xinjiang.

In crafting a deal with China, why not look at Uyghur forced labour as not only a serious human rights violation but also an unfair government subsidy, with an effect similar to cheap government loans and concessionary tax benefits in reducing producer costs? Indeed, it appears to play a particularly significant role in polysilicon, which is used for solar panels – one of the markets that Beijing is trying to corner. If Trump were to insist as part of a bargain with Beijing that the Uyghur forced-labour subsidy end, he could reduce the US trade deficit with China while curbing the Chinese government’s most serious case of repression.

Trump’s mercurial temperament remains an obstacle to any of these deals, but as with other difficult leaders I have addressed, the key is to focus on what he wants. He is concerned with his reputation as a dealmaker. He seeks a Nobel peace prize for a Middle East deal. He does not want possible appeasement of Putin to leave him tarred as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century. He does not want to be snookered again by Xi Jinping, who promised during Trump’s last term to reduce the trade deficit by buying more American goods and never followed through.

A master dealmaker wants to be known for making good deals. And from a human rights perspective, there are such deals to be made. The task is to ensure that Trump sees that his reputation depends on securing them.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Donald Trump, right, talks with Xi Jinping in Beijing, on 9 November, 2017. Photograph: Andy Wong/AP

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on February 19 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

Netanyahu and Gallant could show up and contest the charges against them. Obstructing justice is not the answer

Donald Trump’s executive order reauthorizing sanctions against international criminal court (ICC) personnel reflects a disgraceful effort to ensure that no American, or citizen of an ally such as Israel, is ever investigated or prosecuted. Quite apart from this warped sense of justice – that it is only for other people – the president’s limited view of the court’s powers was rejected in the treaty establishing the court and repudiated by the Joe Biden administration and even the Republican party. But that didn’t stop Trump.

The US government traditionally has had no problem with two of the three ways that the court can obtain jurisdiction because it could control them. Washington is fine with the court prosecuting citizens of states that are members of the court because it has no intention of joining them. And it accepts that the United Nations security council can confer jurisdiction because it can exercise its veto to block prosecutions it doesn’t like.

But the court’s founding document, the Rome Statute, allows a third route to jurisdiction. The court can investigate or prosecute crimes that occur on the territory of a member state, even if the perpetrator is the citizen of a non-member state. That was why Trump in his first term objected to an ICC preliminary examination in Afghanistan (and imposed sanctions – freezing assets and limiting travel – on the chief prosecutor at the time, Fatou Bensouda, and one of her deputies) because the investigation might have implicated CIA torturers in that country under George W Bush. Trump in his new executive order alludes to the prosecutor’s actions in Afghanistan, but it is a non-issue because the current ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has made clear that those past crimes are not his priority.

The real issue is Israel. That same territorial jurisdiction is how the ICC was able to charge Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for their starvation strategy targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Israel never joined the court, but Palestine did, conferring jurisdiction for crimes committed on Palestinian territory, including Gaza, regardless of the perpetrator’s citizenship.

Referring to the United States and Israel, Trump’s executive order says: “Neither country has ever recognized the ICC’s jurisdiction, and both nations are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war.” These claims are legally irrelevant.

The US opposition to territorial jurisdiction was rejected by the drafters of the ICC treaty by an overwhelming vote of 120-7. The only governments to join the United States in opposing it were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen.

Moreover, there is no ICC exception for “thriving democracies” or governments that purport to respect the laws of war. As any justice institution should, its jurisdiction applies to governments regardless of their character or stated policy. The sole exception is under what is known as the “principle of complementarity”, in which the court defers to good-faith national investigations and prosecutions.

But Israel has no history of prosecuting its leaders for war crimes, and despite the ICC charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, it has announced no investigation of their starvation strategy in Gaza. To the contrary, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency threatened Bensouda – the former ICC prosecutor – and her husband. That hardly reflects good-faith pursuit of possible war crimes.

For two decades, the US government objected to territorial jurisdiction, but when the ICC charged Vladimir Putin, it abandoned that position. Putin was charged for kidnapping Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia. Russia has never joined the court, so the sole basis for the court acting was territorial jurisdiction – Putin’s alleged crime took place in Ukraine, which had conferred jurisdiction.

That was a game-changer. Biden called the charges “justified”. Even prominent Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, one of the foreign policy leaders in the Senate, shifted. Joined by a long bipartisan list of sponsors, he secured unanimous adoption in March 2022 of a resolution endorsing the ICC’s prosecution of war crimes in Ukraine. Graham said that Putin’s “war crimes spree” had “rehabilitate[d] the ICC in the eyes of the Republican party and the American people”. Other Republicans visited the ICC prosecutor to support the prosecution of Putin.

Yet this shift turned out to be only tactical. It did not survive the Israel exception to human rights principles. Now that senior Israeli officials have been charged, Trump has resurrected the objection to the ICC’s territorial jurisdiction.

There is nothing the least bit radical about asserting jurisdiction over people who commit a crime on foreign territory. If I, an American citizen, murdered someone in London, Washington could hardly object if British authorities prosecuted me. By the same token, Britain would have every right to delegate that power to the ICC if, because of a crisis such as an occupation, it were unable to pursue the matter itself.

Trump is inviting trouble with his unprincipled stand. Article 70 of the Rome Statute authorizes prosecution for what Americans call “obstruction of justice” if anyone tries to impede or intimidate an official of the court because of their official duties. Bensouda essentially turned the other cheek when Trump sanctioned her. I would be surprised if Khan, the current prosecutor, were so understanding. The court would have jurisdiction over Trump because he is interfering with a pending prosecution.

Trump might try to shrug off ICC charges, figuring that no one would dare to arrest him, but he would face other consequences. Because all 125 ICC member states would have a legal duty to arrest him were he to show up, they would probably tell him quietly that he is not welcome. Trump should ask Putin, who had to skip the August 2023 Brics summit in Johannesburg for the same reason, what it feels like to be a global pariah.

Israel has other options. It could open a genuine, independent investigation of the starvation strategy and let the chips fall where they may. Netanyahu and Gallant, if they have a defense, could show up in the Hague and contest the charges, the way former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta did. But Trump obstructing justice is not the answer.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Israel has no history of prosecuting its leaders for war crimes and announced no investigation of their starvation strategy in Gaza.’ Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Reuters

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on February 9 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

The lasting significance of Donald Trump’s stunning plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip and “permanently” resettle the roughly 2 million Palestinians who live there may be that it legitimized one option that, as a possible solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, had been widely considered beyond the pale.

Trump’s plan would “solve” the Palestinian problem by physically removing Palestinians. It is one way to understand the devastation that Israel has caused in Gaza—to render it uninhabitable so that Palestinians would leave “voluntarily,” as the far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, put it. But it would also be a war crime and a crime against humanity, and surely invite further charges by the International Criminal Court, as well as global condemnation. A week ago, the idea was considered anathema.

That’s where Trump stepped in, at his Feb. 4 news conference beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later tried to walk back the President’s comments, suggesting that Trump meant the displacement to be only temporary while Gaza is rebuilt. But that is not what Trump said, which is why a smiling Netanyahu responded, “it’s worth paying attention to.” Since its founding in 1948, Israel has treated the forced deportation of Palestinians as permanent—which is why they refer to their expulsion from the land that became the Jewish state as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”

If Trump seems either oblivious or unbothered by the implications of his plan, the world was not. Outrage at the proposal has been widespread, and the two governments that Trump envisions accepting the Palestinian refugees, Egypt and Jordan, want nothing to do with it. Indeed, it quickly became clear that Trump was largely speaking off the top of his head without any serious planning. Still, the damage had been done. Trump seemed to be embracing a blatantly illegal scheme.

Yet he could make amends by pushing the Israeli government toward a more just and sustainable peace. Palestinians must hope that Trump is willing to change course.

There have long been four options for ending the century-old conflict. The first would be to recognize the “one-state reality” that Israel and Palestine have become because of extensive Jewish settlements. An occupying power’s transfer of its population to occupied territory is a war crime, in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, but successive Israeli governments have ignored that prohibition, and the U.S. government has kept billions of dollars of aid flowing anyway. The settlement project was pursued in part to render a Palestinian state impossible.

The view from a West Bank hilltop is illustrative. The proliferation of Israeli settlements, outposts, and bypass roads have left the West Bank a Swiss cheese of Palestinian enclaves. In 2017 B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights group, counted 165 disconnected “islands,” leaving no prospect of a viable contiguous state.

The option of a single state would recognize that reality. It would abandon the goal of a Palestinian state but insist that all residents between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River be given equal rights in the overarching state. But Israeli governments of all stripes have opposed a single state because roughly the same number of Jews and Palestinians live in these lands, and the government wants to maintain a substantial Jewish majority. 

Netanyahu prefers the status quo, which is the second option. Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, each Israeli government has claimed to be open to negotiating about a Palestinian state. But that is a fiction, an excuse to stall, as settlements continue to expand. After more than five decades of occupation and three decades of a supposed “peace process,” it is no longer tenable to regard Israel’s occupation as merely temporary. The “peace process” is moribund.

Every serious human rights organization that has examined that occupation has determined it is apartheid—a regime for the Jewish population to dominate and repress the Palestinian one. The situation might have been defended for a short time pending the establishment of a Palestinian state, but there is no state on the horizon. That is why there is growing recognition that the status quo is intolerable. 

Forced mass expulsion is the third option, promoted by the Israeli far-right. It would avoid the obligation of granting everyone equal rights in a single state and the opprobrium of the current apartheid. It is the option that Trump shamefully embraced at the news conference, but the President could redeem himself by moving on to the fourth option—a two-state solution, an Israeli and Palestinian state sitting side by side. Netanyahu has devoted his political life to avoiding that option. So long as he had the backing of the Republican Party, he felt secure in his intransigence. But if Trump were to endorse it, Netanyahu would suddenly find himself isolated.

Why would Trump do that? Because he sees himself as a master dealmaker and wants to negotiate a separate deal, between Israel and Saudi Arabia, one that would cement a regional alliance against Iran. The Saudi government has made clear that the price of normalizing relations with Israel is a Palestinian state. 

Trump prides himself as a disruptor, a leader who doesn’t accept things just because they have long been that way. Rather than urge a reprehensible war crime as the solution to the Gaza conflict, he could be a more constructive disruptor if he were to pivot and insist, despite Netanyahu’s protests, on a Palestinian state.

We know Trump is capable of pressuring Netanyahu. He was instrumental in making the current ceasefire in Gaza come about. Far more intense pressure will be needed to secure a Palestinian state, but the reward would be far greater as well. And Trump would indeed enshrine himself in history as a deal maker par excellence.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. on February 4, 2025. Bryan Dozier—AFP/Getty Images

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Times on February 9 2025. You can also read it here time.com.

The US president’s plan to expel 2 million Palestinians from Gaza clashes with his desire to be a dealmaker. He should push for a Palestinian state instead.

Donald Trump’s proposal to expel all 2 million or more Palestinians from Gaza is so mind-bogglingly outrageous that it seems designed to stun us into paralyzed acquiescence. It is the latest example of the US president’s tendency to normalize the unthinkable, to bring ideas that were rightly considered beyond the pale and force them into the realm of policy discussion. Yet there are plenty of reasons to overcome our shock and reject this appalling scheme.

It does have its supporters. The Israeli far right is salivating at the proposition. It has long sought to “solve” the Palestinian problem by getting rid of the Palestinians. No wonder Benjamin Netanyahu, sitting next to Trump during their White House press conference, could barely contain his glee.

Moreover, Gaza in all likelihood would be only a first step. If such ethnic cleansing ever became acceptable, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem would surely follow. Even the so-called Arab population of Israel might not be exempt. Far from the “Free Palestine” chants that are heard these days on college campuses, the area from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River might become Palestinian-free. That would allow Israel finally to accomplish its goal of being both a Jewish state and a democracy.

Lest we forget, forcibly removing people en masse from their homeland is a war crime and a crime against humanity. It would invite charges by the international criminal court. It would flout the recent judgment by the international court of justice upholding Palestinians’ right to self-determination. It is something that no democratic leader should countenance, but Trump is, obviously, no ordinary leader.

Trump tried to dress up his proposal as an act of benevolence, noting the devastation of Gaza and the dangers of unexploded ordnance. But that destruction was primarily the result of Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on Palestinian residences and neighborhoods. Such war crimes, and arguably genocide, are not rectified by another huge war crime.

Moreover, Trump was not proposing a brief interim relocation while reconstruction proceeds. He envisioned Palestinians’ permanent displacement: another Nakba. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, tried to walk that back, suggesting that Trump meant the displacement to be only temporary, but that’s not what Trump said. Instead, he envisions building the “Riviera of the Middle East” and then repopulating Gaza with the “citizens of the world”, by which he clearly means anyone but Palestinians.

Rubio called Trump’s plan “very generous”, but few Palestinians would see it that way. It is as if someone would reduce Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to rubble and then “generously” offer to rebuild it on the condition that Trump never return.

Trump wants Jordan and Egypt to take the Palestinians, but they both understandably dismiss the idea. Quite apart from not wanting to be complicit in such an enormous crime, they have their own reasons. More than half of Jordanians are of Palestinian descent – a source of demographic sensitivity for the country’s Hashemite rulers – and the Jordanian government has long rejected arguments that it could become “Palestine” while Israel emptied the occupied territory of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Egypt fears that a large influx of Palestinians would burden its already-sputtering economy and reignite a simmering insurgency in the northern Sinai.

Trump’s plan, of course, raises the question: why not Israel? More than 80% of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugees, their families having been forced from their homes in what is now Israel during its 1948 war of independence. Why should they be forced to move to foreign countries rather than allowed to return to their ancestral homes? Indeed, Israel does not allow most Gaza residents to move to even the West Bank or East Jerusalem – a key element of the apartheid that it maintains in the occupied territories.

Or for that matter, why not the United States? It is far wealthier, much bigger, and better able to resettle Palestinian refugees, but that would run counter to Trump’s anti-immigrant fixation.

Who will pay for the billions upon billions of dollars required to rebuild Gaza? It should be Israel as a matter of reparations, but no one is holding their breath for that. As Trump cuts US foreign aid commitments, he seems to hope that the Arab Gulf states would pick up the tab, but why would they rebuild this Palestinian enclave without Palestinians? And why would their publics, even given the severe restrictions on freedom of expression under the Gulf monarchies, countenance investment in a real estate project on what they rightly see as a central part of the Palestinian homeland?

Trump’s plan clashes with his desire to be a master dealmaker. Trump wants all of the hostages freed, but why would Hamas agree if that were just a prelude to mass deportation for the Palestinian people? Trump hopes to persuade the Saudi government to normalize relations with Israel, but it has insisted on a Palestinian state as a prerequisite, including shortly after Trump’s proposal. Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, all key US allies, are also pressing for a state.

If Trump wants to be disruptive, as is his wont, there are more productive ways to proceed. Netanyahu has long refused to countenance a Palestinian state, and he has gotten away with his recalcitrance because he always knew that the US far fight – the pro-Israel Aipac lobby, the Christian evangelical supporters of Israel, and their Republican party allies – would have his back.

But if Trump were to insist on a state, there would be few left in the United States, Israel’s primary benefactor, to whom the Israeli prime minister could turn to second his refusal. He might ultimately have to accept a Palestinian state living side-by-side with an Israeli one as the only just solution to the longstanding conflict. If Trump could pull that off, he might well merit the Nobel peace prize that he has long coveted but felt he was unfairly denied.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Gaza in all likelihood would be only a first step.’ Photograph: Lenin Nolly/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on February 6, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

The sudden toppling of Syria’s tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, provides an opportunity for justice that until recently few would have thought possible. The Assad regime was one of the world’s most brutal. Now its senior officials are scattered. Assad has found a haven in Russia, but others remain in the region and are vulnerable to arrest and prosecution. That requires deploying all possible resources to secure justice, including the International Criminal Court.

Assad and his lieutenants did seemingly anything to retain power, including deliberately targeting civilians and civilian institutions in areas held by the armed opposition. They attacked people with chemical weapons, including chlorine and the nerve agent sarin. They dropped barrel bombs – oil drums filled with explosives and metal fragments to maximize damage – on civilian neighborhoods, often targeting hospitals. They besieged opposition-held areas and starved the residents into submission.  They detained, tortured, executed, and disappeared at least 150,000 people.

Because of the magnitude of the atrocities, the international community has long sought to bring the perpetrators to justice. The obstacles were formidable while Assad retained power, but important steps were taken.

A commission of inquiry established by the U.N. Human Rights Council has long reported on government atrocities. The U.N. General Assembly created and tasked an investigative body — known as the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) — to collect and analyze evidence for any available justice forum. Various national courts, aided by the IIIM, have prosecuted Syrian officials who happened to be found in their country under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction.

[Editor’s note: Readers may be interested in Claus Kress, A German Sentence of Life Imprisonment for Crimes Against Humanity – A Small Measure of Justice for Syria; Fritz Streiff and Hope Rikkelman, Syrian Regime Crimes on Trial in The Netherlands]

But these efforts were necessarily ad hoc. The most senior perpetrators remained in Syria, out of reach. Now that has changed.

The new transitional authorities in Syria understandably would like to prosecute these officials themselves, but the Syrian justice system is a shambles. For decades, it served as the Assad family’s tool of repression. Many of its leading officials should be in the dock, not judging others.

It would be a mistake to entrust the Syrian system to conduct trials if they would not be seen as fair. Among the top duties of the transitional authorities is to establish the rule of law and to avoid a new round of bloodletting. Those goals will be undermined if “trials” look more like summary vengeance than impartial justice.

Following the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government conducted rushed and inadequate trials, leading to the quick execution of Saddam and some of his henchman. That did nothing to build the rule of law in Iraq or to avoid a horrible descent into sectarian violence.

One option in Syria would be for international jurists to assist the transitional authorities to build a proper justice system. Such efforts would be laudable and should begin immediately, but they take time and are not easy. They are unlikely to make enough progress to satisfy Syrians’ understandable quest for justice.

The institution that could make an enormous difference is the International Criminal Court. Karim Khan, its chief prosecutor, visited Damascus on January 17 to speak with the transitional authorities. But so far, the ICC has been stymied. That could change, but it will require action by the new Syrian authorities, Khan, or both.

Because Syrian never ratified the Rome Statute, the court’s founding document, the main route to jurisdiction over the Assad government’s atrocities had been via the U.N. Security Council. Members of the council made one effort to refer Syria to the ICC, in 2014, but Russia and China vetoed it. Russia, in particular, is unlikely to change its position, given that senior Russian officials are themselves vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes in Syria in light of the Russian military’s repeated bombing of civilian institutions among other actions.

The obvious alternative would be for the new Syrian authorities to join the court – or at least to file a declaration giving it retroactive jurisdiction, as the Ukrainian government had done before joining the court in October. Beyond opening an avenue for justice, that would signal that the new authorities intend to comply with international human rights and humanitarian law, because their conduct, too, would be subject to ICC scrutiny.

The new authorities might be reluctant to take this step because of their preference to try Assad officials themselves, but the two are not necessarily contradictory. The ICC is guided by what is know as the principle of complementarity, which requires the court to defer to good-faith national investigative and prosecutorial efforts. As noted, there is little in the Syrian justice system that merits deference today, but if that were to change, the new authorities could ask the ICC to send prosecutions to them, which the court would be required to do. In the meantime, these cases could proceed.

Even short of action by the authorities in Damascus, Khan has another route to jurisdiction. So far, he has been reluctant to use it in light of the other demands on his time and resources, but given the dramatic new possibilities for justice in Syria, he should recalculate.

Without Security Council action or the Syrian government’s approval ,the ICC lacks jurisdiction for most crimes in Syria, but there is one important exception. Neighboring Jordan has joined the court, providing jurisdiction for crimes committed there. Because the crime of systematic forced deportation was not completed until refugees stepped from Syria into Jordan – at its height, some 730,000 Syrians – the court has jurisdiction over that crime, which would provide a window into at least some of the Assad regime’s atrocities.

This is not a wild theory. The ICC prosecutor has deployed the same theory to investigate the Myanmar army’s use of murder, rape, and arson to chase some 700,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh in 2017. While Myanmar never joined the court, Bangladesh did. An ICC pretrial chamber approved an investigation on these terms, and Khan has now charged the Myanmar junta leader, Min Aung Hlaing. If other routes to jurisdiction in Syria fail, Khan should pursue this back-up plan.

The Assad atrocities have long served as a painful example of the limits of international justice. It is remarkable that there is now a chance to change that. But it will require action either by the new authorities in Syria or the ICC’s leadership. Despite the significant other pressures on both, this opportunity is too important to squander.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An aerial view of destroyed buildings in the suburb of Jobar on January 18, 2025, in Jobar, Syria. The Damascus suburb of Jobar was destroyed by years of bombing by government forces and in the hands of opposition fighters. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by Just Security on January 27, 2025. You can also read it here justsecurity.org.