If you kill one person, an old joke goes, you get sent to jail. Kill 20, you get sent to a mental asylum. Kill 20,000, you get sent to Geneva for peace talks. The story is very much a reflection of the mass atrocities of the 20th century. The search for universal justice is rooted in the determination to get rid of the source of such cynicism. Writing in 1946 to her former professor Karl Jaspers, who had remained at Heidelberg University throughout World War II, renowned political philosopher Hannah Arendt questioned how one could comprehend what the Nazis had done within the existing compass of criminal law. "The Nazi crimes explode the limits of the law," she wrote. "We are simply not equipped to deal with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue."
Objecting that such a moral vocabulary would endow Nazi crimes with "satanic greatness," Jaspers insisted on seeing them instead "in their total banality" -- a phrase that Arendt famously used in the subtitle of her book published nearly two decades later.
The International Criminal Court, or ICC, is both the culmination of the search for universal jurisdiction, where jurisdiction depends not on the location of the crime but its nature, and an emblem of the difficulties that lie ahead in translating the vision into reality.