>>93988637>If international law protects mass murderers, should we abide by it?Yes and no.
The law - any law, not just international - ideally protects everybody. In practice this isn't always the case - corruption, institutional bias, and the simple economics of providing 24/7 law enforcement coverage mean that some are denied justice.
But as far as the law itself goes, yes, we should extend the protections it requires to criminals; otherwise, we run the very real risk of the law being perverted to a mere tool of revenge, not directed by our peers but by powerful individuals who tire of "the bad guys" "getting away with it".
Take Pinochet as an example. Mass-murderer or director of mass-murder, take your pick; fucked up his home country so bad it's still fucked up today, the economy is in the shitter and corruption is widespread.
He did spent 8 full years under house arrest in London after visiting and being arrested there. You might say that's not justice; that this obvious failure/obvious criminal escaped punishment for his failure/crimes. But leaving aside the issue of whether a gilded cage still feels like a cage to the occupant, his arrest and detention led to an important sea-change in international law, as he slowly but surely exhausted every possible argument that might have seen him released. Even as he started his ninth decade of life he was clearly afraid of being prosecuted, and argued vehemently against the right of nations to arrest heads of state or former heads of state; this argument was heard and rebutted by the courts so that today it's much, much simpler to both arrest and try dictators for their bullshit.
In a very real sense we have Pinochet - and the money he stole which he mostly ended up spending on jailing himself in opulence and funding his defense - to thank for that. Unless he'd been granted the right to argue his case, instead of being knocked on his ass, we'd still have uncertainty about the legitimacy of his position today.
