Word: slaving
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...hydropower for its neighbors. "Multinationals are getting rich off Burma, and so is the military regime," says Ka Hsaw Wa, co-founder of EarthRights International, an NGO that sued U.S. energy giant Unocal, which eventually provided out-of-court compensation to villagers who are believed to have toiled as slave labor for the Yadana gas pipeline from southern Burma to Thailand. "It is the local people who are suffering and dying," says Ka Hsaw...
...What, then, is the alternative? How should the ICC have approached this extraordinarily delicate situation? To answer these questions, look back to 1819, when the British Empire prosecuted the human rights violators of the 19th-century: slave traders...
...Staffed by both British and local judges, mixed commissions were anything but individualistic. Through a series of bilateral treaties with the French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and American empires, Britain convinced states to cede sovereignty to Britain in its effort to crush the slave trade. Not only did these international tribunals charge foreigners with the task of judging domestic citizens, but they also worked in tandem with the Royal Navy as it seized illegal slavers on the high seas...
...Mixed-commission courts were not post-conflict institutions intended to mete out justice for war crimes. They were, instead, functional components of Britain’s global efforts to suppress the slave trade in peacetime. Countries ratified the courts’ founding treaties because of incentives like money, threat of attack, and involvement. Each nation had a judge and a commissioner of arbitration involved, holding equal power on the court benches. The model was largely successful; the mixed commissions liberated about 80,000 slaves in their 50 years of existence...
This Faustian bargain bears frightening parallels to the superfluous addition of Maine to the Union as a free state prompted by the addition of Missouri as a slave state in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Although it is unlikely that our current factional strife will plunge us into the bloody maelstrom that put to rest the question of free states versus slave states, it speaks ill of our democracy that we are now seeing our two parties resorting to the peacekeeping shenanigans employed by their Democratic and Whig forebearers...