Summary
Vietnam’s High People’s Court upheld the death sentence for real estate tycoon Truong My Lan, convicted of embezzlement and bribery in a record $12 billion fraud case.
Lan can avoid execution by returning $9 billion (three-quarters of the stolen funds), potentially reducing her sentence to life imprisonment.
Her crimes caused widespread economic harm, including a bank run and $24 billion in government intervention to stabilize the financial system.
Lan has admitted guilt but prosecutors deemed her actions unprecedentedly damaging. She retains limited legal recourse through retrial procedures.
Selling weapons to parties engaged in a conflict, to an extent even if they are used for warcrimes is not among the list of crimes that the ICC has jurisdiction for. You can argue that it should be on the list and I’d be inclined to agree with you, but the entire point of a court like this is that it REALLY has to do things by the book to maintain its acceptance.
Not really, it’s actually quite diverse!
Define white… They are prosecuting 6 Russians, 3 Israelis, 3 Georgians, 3 Palestinians and 1 person from Myanmar of 65 people total, the remainder being from a variety of African countries.
Okay, you can of course say that no one prosecuted is white, by setting the standards for being white arbitrarily high. If you demand someone whose ancestors for the last 10 generations have lived in a Norwegian Fjord, then yes, none of them are white. Let me guess, you are from the US? Because this really isn’t a European perspective, the entire distinction between white and non-white matters a lot less here. And not even because there is necessarily less racism, but because the racism that is around isn’t really about whiteness.
Not necessarily, but it has done reasonably well with regards to what it sanctioned and is the relevant body who decides on the legality of wars. Which is what matters here, not whether or not you or me agree with every individual decision.
Yes, but most of those colonialists are no longer available to be judged and since the events predate the Rome statute wouldn’t be accessible to it anyways. History can explain things, but it doesn’t justify or excuse things. At the end of the day, there are more warcrimes in Africa than in Europe, East-Asia and the Americas today.
So far they haven’t and there have also definitely be some that made it clear that they will comply with the rules, as well as some that tried to avoid giving clear statements.
They don’t have jurisdiction for the US and for the other 6 there is no clear precedent. I would expect most of them to comply, though it is unlikely to come up because most of them would likely prosecute their criminals themselves if it reached the point where the ICC would look.
But that is no longer an argument about whether it would deserve the right to execute people.
It has definitely started to show some attitude with Israel. that’s more than most other institutions can say of themselves.
Yeah… That kinda highlights my whole argument doesn’t it? The ICC isn’t independent enough to go after the arms dealers who make genocide possible in the first place. Like I said, it’s bound by the governments in its member states. Sure you can go after the guy who uses the weapons I sold to do horrendous crimes, but you can’t go after the people who knowingly sold them the tools of genocide. Convenient.
Just because the judges are from a wide range of countries doesn’t mean there isn’t a bias input from wealthier nations. Most cases put forward to be prosecuted by the ICC are done by NGO, most of which operate out of wealthier member states.
“The ICC has been accused of bias and as being a tool of Western imperialism, only punishing leaders from small, weak states while ignoring crimes committed by richer and more powerful states.[315][316][317][318] This sentiment has been expressed particularly by African leaders due to an alleged disproportionate focus of the Court on Africa, while it claims to have a global mandate. Until January 2016, all nine situations which the ICC had been investigating were in African countries.”
It’s a stupid human construct that changes over time to suit “white” people’s needs. However, in this case I would say its fair to assume white means ethnicities hailing from western Europe. Historically serbs aren’t really considered white by western Europeans, but that kinda depends on your level of racism. I’m not really an expert as I am not of European descent, and my people never felt the urge to measure people’s skulls for pseudo science.
So, maybe some of the Russians are white depending on if they’re ethnically serb, Scandinavian, or turkic. So even if we’re counting all the Russians as “white”, it still means that over 90% of all people issued warrants from the court are POC. Not a good look.
Lol, okay so we’re giving racism the benefit of doubt? How about we go off of something more solid, like historical context?
“. Ante Starčević, the leader of the Party of Rights between 1851 and 1896, believed Croats should confront their neighbors, including Serbs.[10] He wrote, for example, that Serbs were an “unclean race” and with the co-founder of his party, Eugen Kvaternik, denied the existence of Serbs or Slovenes in Croatia, seeing their political consciousness as a threat.”
“In the 1920s, Italian fascists accused Serbs of having “atavistic impulses” and they claimed that the Yugoslavs were conspiring together on behalf of “Grand Orient masonry and its funds”. One antisemitic claim was that Serbs were part of a “social-democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot”.[40] Benito Mussolini viewed not just the Serbs but the whole “Slavic race” as inferior and barbaric.”
"Serbs as well as other Slavs (mainly Poles and Russians) as well as non-Slavic peoples (such as Jews and Roma) were not considered Aryans by Nazi Germany. Instead, they were considered subhuman, inferior races (Untermenschen) and foreign races and as a result, they were not considered part of the Aryan master race.[48][49] Serbs, along with the Poles, were at the bottom of the Slavic “racial hierarchy”
“According to Vojislav Koštunica and British commentator Mary Dejevky, in the summer of 1995 the French president, Jacques Chirac created controversy when he commented on the Bosnian War, he reportedly called Serbs “a nation of robbers and terrorists”.[93][94”
“During the war in Croatia, French writer Alain Finkielkraut insinuated that Serbs were inherently evil, comparing Serb actions to the Nazis during World War II.[95]”
Ahh, yes please explain racism to me white European. I as a Korean person living in the west must not understand the intricate scientific system of your forefathers. Shall we pull out your grandpa’s skull measuring calipers and charts to explain how racism in Europe excludes whiteness as a concept?
I’ve lived in Europe before, and this is just a fucking lie white Europeans tell themselves as if ore their fellow countryman throw bananas at black football players. Get bent.
Legality does not dictate morality. The afghan war is very modern history, the Iraq war is very modern history, hell even the Vietnam war was modern. You are just ignoring or excluding examples that don’t suit your bias.
The coup belt that started in 2020 is a direct result of competing European colonialism in modern Africa between Turkey, Russia, and France.
Wanna make a bet?
Unless it’s something like supplying weapons to commit genocides… That’s conveniently not illegal.
How? My original assertion is that a requirement of capital punishment is a non biased court. Establishing that the court is innately biased sure seems like a cohesive argument.
I mean, it is kinda worrying that the first people who can pass as “white” being prosecuted by the court are serbs and Jews. It’s not like those have a history of ethnic persecution in Europe.