The naive idealism of Gordon Brown’s Nuremberg trial

Vladimir Putin hasn’t won the Ukraine war yet and already they’re talking about putting him in the dock. Gordon Brown’s call for the establishment of Nuremberg-style trials, ‘indicting President Putin and his inner circle for the crime of aggression against Ukraine’, is well-meaning and emerges from a sincere Christian socialist worldview. I once termed Brown a ‘moral romantic’ and his Nuremberg proposal is pure moral romanticism. In a world governed by right and wrong, he is obviously right but in the world as it is, fallen and wicked, his plan to bring Putin before an international tribunal is little more than wishful thinking.

Except through some fundamental change in the circumstances of power in Russia (a palace coup, a popular uprising), Putin will never see the inside of an international courtroom. On Wednesday, the International Court of Justice provisionally ordered Russia to ‘immediately suspend’ its military operations in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, Russia did not comply.