A court not in Damascus

There was an interesting piece on the conservative news site CNSNews.com, reporting a recent conference on the capacity of the International Criminal Court to deal with crimes committed in the Syrian conflict.

Image from here

The conference was fairly gloomy about the Court's power to intervene, noting

"how narrow the ICC’s jurisdiction is over such matters since the ICC can only act “if a state party refers a situation to the prosecutor, if a non-state party accepts the ICC’s jurisdiction over a situation, or if the UN Security Council refers a situation to the prosecutor,” [with one of the speakers] adding that, “neither Syria nor Iraq are state parties and neither has accepted ICC jurisdiction over the situation.”

Image from here

I find myself wondering then whether this means the court is useless, or whether it needs a wider jurisdiction.  Readers of the story leaned towards solutions based on use of force.  For example -

these are the most brutal bunch of slime since the nazis of ww2 its simple EVERY SINGLE MEMBER OF isis THAT IS TAKEN ALIVE SHOULD BE HANGED UNTILL DEAD DOWN TO LAST MAN WOMEN AND CHILD

After the last few years of Syrian history, one wonders what on earth more bloodletting will achieve.  Maybe the time has come to follow Benedict XV, and accept that there are worse things than international courts.