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Notes -
Another case of culture war cancellation dropped, this time somewhat more important than the usual cases.
The case of Nicolas Guillou, French judge at the ICC, cancelled by Marco Rubio personally.
If your French is not sufficient, here is Xitter summary.
Can it happen to you?
Not in this way, not even the most IRL important mottizen is worthy of Marco's personal attention.
If it happens, it will happen because AI analyzed your online activity and decided it crossed a threshold of dangerous nihilist extremism (and you could do about it just as much as Nicolas Guillou, this means nothing at all.)
To me this post seems to be a reflection of the absurd dominance of American power, how all of EU is America's bitch, and pointing out how crazy this is without taking sides. But most comments are about defending American actions as moral and proper and how this asshole Frenchman started shit anyway. Have I badly misread this or is everybody else crazy?
The implications, issues, and tensions with the ICC's efforts to establish broad jurisdiction despite being a non-universal treaty organization have been discussed in various contexts for approaching 30 years. I can't say how much you may have misread as opposed to not read at all.
In most other contexts, it is considered absurd to try and impose treaty institutions on a state that is not part of the treaty, even when you think that treaty is a good idea or should supersede other principles of international law. Given that the French media article cited is not even inclined to argue that it is a matter of international law, but European law, it becomes even more absurd to try claim a European jurisdiction over non-Europeans for acts outside of Europe against other people not under a European sovereign aegis.
I remember one of the times someone brought up online (as a possible novel solution to some issue of the time) Congress's Constitutional power to issue letters of marque, adding that the US is not a signatory to the 1856 Declaration of Paris banning them. A few Europeans all responded with the same message: it doesn't matter what the US Constitution says. That the US claims to retain this power is face-saving cope, as are the excuses given for why the US hasn't issued such letters since. The actual reason Congress won't issue letters of marque is because they can't, because the rest of the world considers the Declaration of Paris a universal ban, binding on signatories and non-signatories alike. And were the US to try to defy this binding international law, then the rest of the world will enforce that ban on the Americans receiving those illegal, invalid letters of marque, lack of ratification be damned.
TBF, letters of marque have never really been tolerated by the countries being targetted, and I'm not sure about third-party tolerance (by which we mean, what, the French recognising British letters of marque against Spain? There aren't really that many other relevant cases for most of the period). They mostly just meant that you could claim prizes and avoid getting hanged in your own country.
Certainly, there's nothing saying a third-party country can't forbid foreign privateering in its own territorial waters.
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