International Law? No. Not really.

Quite a few people have been blithely trumpeting that the arrest of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela is in breach of international law. Not many of them have any idea what they are talking about.

A solid starting point is that there is not, in truth, any such thing as international law. It is a chimera. Law is – to take a fairly typical definition – a system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties. And there is precious little of that that is international.

There are a few things that people sometimes call “international law”: mostly these are treaties. Countries can sign up to treaties if they want to. Insofar as these are enforceable at all, they are enforced by means of arbitration, and some of these arbitral panels call themselves courts, notwithstanding that they are not really courts at all. But their decisions are often enforceable as a matter of national law (in the UK, for example, via the Arbitration Act). You can call that “international law” if you like. But it is only real insofar a nation says so.

So here is the thing: it is all voluntary. Nations can and do decide whether they want to sign up to and ratify any particular international treaty. If not, then the content is not “law” in any sense for that nation.

So, let us look at the Rome Treaty, which has spawned the International Criminal Court. That body does indeed sometimes prosecute individuals for doing things most of us would regard as bad. Well, very bad, actually.