Our sense of the free market is variable, shifting from a more welfare-oriented model after the Great Depression to a capital-driven market after the collapse of socialism as a viable alternative.

It would not be desirable to include 'terrorism' among international crimes subject to International Criminal Court jurisdiction if defined to apply only to anti-state acts of violence. The failure to include terrorism as a distinct crime was due to the inability to agree upon its proper definition.

American special relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia blind us to their dreadful encroachments on human rights, as well as confer impunity on their leaders with respect to accountability for crimes against humanity.

There is no effort to acknowledge some equivalent accountability by associating "terrorism" with all violence that is deliberately aimed at civilians, either directly or as foreseeable effects of violent acts, whether the actor is a non-state individual or group or the state.

The systemic incompatibility between free-market capitalism and the quality of democratic life and respect for human rights has to be modified to take account of such contextual variables as wartime, security threats, and the societal balance between entrepreneurial and working classes.

Human rights and international criminal law both illustrate the contradictory potential of international law. On one level, the imposition of human rights norms is a restraint on interventionary diplomacy, especially if coupled with respect for the legal norm of self-determination. But on another level, the protection of human rights creates a pretext for intervention as given approval by the UN Security Council in the form of the R2P (responsibility to protect) norm, as used in the 2011 Libyan intervention. The same applies with international criminal accountability.

It should be appreciated that this whole effort to hold leaders of states criminally responsible is a rather radical challenge to territorial sovereignty and a repudiation of the whole related ethos of 'sovereign immunity'.