Taken together, Venezuela and Nigeria point to a troubling pattern. International law is increasingly shaped, not by agreed pathways, but by acts that succeed and then justify themselves after the fact. Practice accumulates. Repetition breeds acceptance. What begins as exception hardens into precedent… This is not an argument against accountability. It is an argument against reducing accountability to dominance. When enforcement collapses into unilateral action, the distinction between justice and power thins.
The forceful seizure of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuelan territory and his appearance before a court in New York has received equal measure of criticism and celebration, depending on which side of the divide you pay attention to. But that is not my focus. The episode raises a question far more unsettling than whether Maduro deserves prosecution. It asks who now decides how international law is enforced, and by what means.
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The publicly known sequence matters. An armed intervention on foreign soil. Custody secured without the consent of the territorial state. A rapid shift to domestic criminal proceedings in the United States. And, hovering over it all, political rhetoric about control, transition, and stewardship of another country’s future. This is not simply the story of a suspect arrested. It is a story about jurisdiction asserted through capacity, rather than process.
International law was built to manage distrust. Its core promise was not moral clarity, but restraint. Rules on the use of force, jurisdiction, and immunity exist precisely because states do not agree on who the villains are, or how urgently they must be stopped. When enforcement skips those rules, the claim being made is not just that justice requires speed. It is that procedure itself has become optional. The UN Charter system draws a sharp line. Force is prohibited except in tightly defined circumstances, principally Security Council authorisation or self-defense against an armed attack. Criminal culpability does not, on its own, dissolve that line. An indictment, however serious the allegations behind it, does not authorise a state to enter another’s territory and extract a suspect by force. Treating transnational crime as a standing justification for military-style enforcement stretches self-defense beyond recognition.
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Some have reached for universal jurisdiction to fill this gap. That move does not succeed. Universal jurisdiction is about the reach of courts, not the reach of guns. It allows certain crimes to be prosecuted, regardless of where they were committed, because of their exceptional character and the collective interest in repression. It does not confer a general power to enforce arrest across borders by force. Historically, universal jurisdiction has operated through extradition requests, mutual legal assistance, or post-custody prosecution. It has never been a blank cheque for unilateral capture.
Immunities deepen the problem. Under settled international law, certain office-holders enjoy immunity from foreign criminal jurisdiction while in office. This protection is structural, not ethical. It exists to prevent precisely the kind of coercive entanglement that occurs when courts become instruments of interstate pressure. The debates around the Rome Statute’s removal of immunity in article 27, concern prosecutions for core international crimes before an international court exercising delegated jurisdiction. They do not apply to domestic prosecutions for ordinary crimes, nor do they license the forcible apprehension of sitting heads of state.
…the Maduro episode exposes a deeper tension within international criminal law. Complementarity was designed to manage that tension. Domestic systems were given first responsibility. International mechanisms were residual. Accountability was meant to move in stages, not leaps. Regional complementarity emerged later to address the political and practical gap between national failure and global intervention. By situating justice closer to affected societies, it aimed to preserve legitimacy, while dispersing power.
The familiar reference to Pinochet obscures more than it clarifies. That case involved a former head of state, treaty-based obligations concerning torture, and prolonged judicial scrutiny in a third country. It did not stand for the proposition that incumbents may be seized wherever found, nor that universal jurisdiction dissolves the law on the use of force. The lesson of Pinochet was cautious expansion, not unbounded enforcement.
Against this background, the Maduro episode exposes a deeper tension within international criminal law. Complementarity was designed to manage that tension. Domestic systems were given first responsibility. International mechanisms were residual. Accountability was meant to move in stages, not leaps. Regional complementarity emerged later to address the political and practical gap between national failure and global intervention. By situating justice closer to affected societies, it aimed to preserve legitimacy, while dispersing power.
What we are now witnessing is impatience with that architecture. Domestic processes are dismissed as compromised. Regional mechanisms are treated as aspirational, rather than decisive. International institutions are criticised for delay. Into this vacuum steps unilateral power, recast as necessity. Once that move is normalised, the layered structure of international law collapses into a single axis: Who has the ability to act.
Nigeria offers a parallel illustration, albeit without troops crossing borders. Under the Trump administration, Nigeria is being subjected to sustained unilateral pressure through the threats of sanctions, travel restrictions, and designation regimes tied to governance and rights concerns. These measures bypassed African regional processes and were not framed as shared accountability. They were instruments of leverage. The implicit message was the same: Regional institutions may exist, but they do not control outcomes.
The strain this places on universal jurisdiction and complementarity is real. These doctrines are not obsolete, but they are being tested by a geopolitical climate that rewards speed and spectacle over process. If national and regional systems wish to remain relevant, they must become capable of delivering consequences. Investigations must lead somewhere. Cooperation must function in practice, not only on paper. Political backing must endure beyond easy cases.
Taken together, Venezuela and Nigeria point to a troubling pattern. International law is increasingly shaped, not by agreed pathways, but by acts that succeed and then justify themselves after the fact. Practice accumulates. Repetition breeds acceptance. What begins as exception hardens into precedent.
This is not an argument against accountability. It is an argument against reducing accountability to dominance. When enforcement collapses into unilateral action, the distinction between justice and power thins. The states most exposed to this model are not those with global reach, but those without it. They know, from experience, that necessity is rarely invoked against the powerful.
The strain this places on universal jurisdiction and complementarity is real. These doctrines are not obsolete, but they are being tested by a geopolitical climate that rewards speed and spectacle over process. If national and regional systems wish to remain relevant, they must become capable of delivering consequences. Investigations must lead somewhere. Cooperation must function in practice, not only on paper. Political backing must endure beyond easy cases.
If that does not happen, international criminal law risks a quiet transformation. It will not disappear. It will simply be reordered around capacity rather than principle. Jurisdiction will follow force. And the language of law will remain, not because it constrains power, but because it provides power with a vocabulary it can still use.
Seun Solomon Bakare holds a PhD in international criminal law from Leiden University. He is the author of Regional Complementarity in International Criminal Law: Making Sense of the Four-Tiered Justice Paradigm. He can be reached at [email protected].
