NC Whatever Being

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    The affirmatives promotion of global jurisprudence is inseparable frominternational laws concern for human rights. Since Nuremberg, humanityhas been the guiding moral principle of international courts, and the RomeStatutein letter and spirittestifies to the common humanity of itsmembers and non-members alike. The resolutions deliberate focus on

    crimes against humanity highlights the importance of the human conditionto the affirmatives juridical order. However, the notion of internationalsovereignty has no legal basis and threatens to disrupt the coherence andconsistency of law. Anne Caldwell writes:

    A sovereign power that acts in the name of and for a lifedefined solely by its belonging to humanity is a power that hasbecome global. To take these emerging global dimensions ofsovereignty and life as straightforward indications of an all-inclusive humanity would be a mistake. New forms of global sovereignty andglobal 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 ornational forms of being. Today, those same patterns reappearin global relationships between national life and internationallife, which constitute and exclude one another as the ground ofthe sovereign exception. In an international world, the groundof the sovereign decision is humanity as such. And whatsovereignty decides is the status of that humanity.1

    The affirmatives submission to an international court subjects humanity to aform of unlimited sovereignty, perpetuating the global state of crisis.Caldwell-2 continues:

    The equivocal status of a humanity dependent on thesovereign decision increases as national sovereignty breaksdown without wholly disappearing, and without being clearlyintegrated into a new form of supranational sovereignty. Asthe boundaries of the nation state become more porous,sovereignty as the power to determine boundaries becomesmore pervasive. The status of life, in a parallel manner,becomes increasingly precarious. More and more, life acrossthe globe exists in a state of crisis, caught within and subjectto a sovereign power itself indeterminate. This indeterminatesovereignty increasingly ranges over all territories and all

    peoples: over humanity as such.An operable definition of humanity as the subject of violence and basis foruniversal jurisdiction requires the possibility of determining the public andprivate rights of the individual. This distinction emerges only in the relation

    1 Caldwell 2004 [Anne, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at theUniversity of Louisville. Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity. Theory andEvent7.2.]

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    of citizens to a sovereign power, and is absent in the relation between aninternational court and a defendant. The court, detached from any givensociety and operating solely on the basis of humanity has no ability to makethe fine distinctions required of law. Thus, instead of functioning as theparagon of an international legal system, the ICC actually eliminates the

    possibility of effective international law by deracinating it from specificnational powers, so modern notions of sovereignty are not ready for aninternational court. Without a firm grounding in established precedent withreference to existing models of sovereignty, legal decisions are backed onlyby the use of coercive force, i.e. violence.

    The impact story is that affirming sets a legal precedent for international lawunconstrained by the rule of law. My argument is not that the ICC willbecome 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, withno basis for world citizenship, and lacking the components of case lawnecessary for the fair determination of justice. Caldwell-2 proves the link: thepartial breakdown of national sovereignty via the ICCs complementaryjurisdiction gives way to an indeterminate sovereignty. Caldwell-1 proves thestakes: this indeterminate sovereignty can decide the very status of thehuman. Thus, supporting the ICC eliminates the possibility of any hope forinternational law and sets a legal precedent for the unjustified andillegitimate use of violence.