The affirmative’s promotion of global jurisprudence is inseparable from international law’s concern for human rights. Since Nuremberg, humanity has been the guiding moral principle of international courts, and the Rome Statute—in letter and spirit—testifies to the common humanity of its members and non-members alike. The resolution’s deliberate focus on “crimes against humanity” highlights the importance of the human condition to the affirmative’s juridical order. However, the notion of international sovereignty has no legal basis and threatens to disrupt the coherence and consistency of law. Anne Caldwell writes:

A sovereign power that acts in the name of and for a life defined solely by its belonging to humanity is a power that has become global. To take these emerging global dimensions of sovereignty and life as straightforward indications of an all-inclusive humanity would be a mistake. New forms of global sovereignty and global human life remain defined by the categories of natural life, political life and homo sacer defining the Western tradition. In the classical world and the modern world, natural and political life once included and excluded one another to constitute local or national forms of being. Today, those same patterns reappear in global relationships between national life and international life, which constitute and exclude one another as the ground of the sovereign exception. In an international world, the ground of the sovereign decision is humanity as such. And what sovereignty decides is the status of that humanity.

The affirmative’s submission to an international court subjects humanity to a form of unlimited sovereignty, perpetuating the global state of crisis. Caldwell-2 continues:

The equivocal status of a humanity dependent on the sovereign decision increases as national sovereignty breaks down without wholly disappearing, and without being clearly integrated into a new form of supranational sovereignty. As the boundaries of the nation state become more porous, sovereignty as the power to determine boundaries becomes more pervasive. The status of life, in a parallel manner, becomes increasingly precarious. More and more, life across the globe exists in a state of crisis, caught within and subject to a sovereign power itself indeterminate. This indeterminate sovereignty increasingly ranges over all territories and all peoples: over humanity as such.

An operable definition of humanity as the subject of violence and basis for universal jurisdiction requires the possibility of determining the public and private rights of the individual. This distinction emerges only in the relation of citizens to a sovereign power, and is absent in the relation between an international court and a defendant. The court, detached from any given society and operating solely on the basis of humanity has no ability to make the fine distinctions required of law. Thus, instead of functioning as the paragon of an international legal system, the ICC actually eliminates the possibility of effective international law by deracinating it from specific national powers, so modern notions of sovereignty are not ready for an international court. Without a firm grounding in established precedent with reference to existing models of sovereignty, legal decisions are backed only by the use of coercive force, i.e. violence.

The impact story is that affirming sets a legal precedent for international law unconstrained by the rule of law. My argument is not that the ICC will become a tyrannical global government; it is more akin to a state with no constitution, because it is a world court in the absence of a world state, with no basis for world citizenship, and lacking the components of case law necessary for the fair determination of justice. Caldwell-2 proves the link: the partial breakdown of national sovereignty via the ICC’s complementary jurisdiction gives way to an indeterminate sovereignty. Caldwell-1 proves the stakes: this indeterminate sovereignty can decide the very status of the human. Thus, supporting the ICC eliminates the possibility of any hope for international law and sets a legal precedent for the unjustified and illegitimate use of violence.

Caldwell 2004 [Anne, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville. “Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity.” Theory and Event 7.2.]

Trinity Prep	Whatever Being NC	1/1

Jake Nebel

2009-05-01

Trinity Preparatory School