The quick and simple answer to that question is: Yes. And there are very good reasons to support that answer.

In early March of this year, the New York Times in one of its news stories, announced the resolution of a two-month long dilemma facing the United States–what to do with the 15 Somali pirates who were captured by a U.S. naval vessel off the coast of Somalia in early January. The solution to this U.S. conundrum was to transfer all of the pirates to a very small nation, The Seychelles Islands, located in the Indian Ocean, for prosecution. The negotiations achieving this result were conducted at the highest levels of government: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred with Seychelles President James A. Michel in February and soon thereafter the Seychelles government announced that it would prosecute the offenders.

The case is very much an international one, since it involves six different countries: Somalia, Iran, Greece, Bahamas, the United States and Oman. Pirates from Somalia raided and captured an Iranian dhow (a sailing vessel peculiar to the Indian Ocean) in late 2011 and used it to attack other ships, one of which was the M/V Sunshine, a Greek-owned vessel registered in the Bahamas. A U.S. warship, in January, captured the Iranian vessel, the pirates, and Iranian hostages in international waters but within the exclusive economic zone of Oman.  The U.S. Navy retained the Somali pirates, freed the Iranian hostages, their vessel and the Sunshine, and allowed both vessels to continue their voyages.

This latest outrage against the peaceful use of the high seas is at the end of a long line of piracies that have occurred with increasing regularity off the coast of Somalia. The International Herald Tribune reported that Somali pirates “have typically held 15 or 16 vessels at a time. In 2011 they detained at one time 32 vessels.”

One senior naval observer noted that without a legal system to match the “tactical progress” of various navies acting to interdict the pirates and without  “effective legislation,” captured pirates have been and may be released from custody. When this has happened in the past, they returned soon after their release to their nefarious activities. A U.S. Navy Vice-Admiral added that “there is not a repeatable international process to bring them [the pirates] to justice. We lack a practical and reliable legal finish.”

Another maritime event, one that involved possible criminal negligence, took place in January of this year off the coast of the Italian island of Giglio. There, a 114,500 ton cruise vessel, the Costa Concordia, valued at $450 million capsized near the coast of the island, killing at least 11 passengers. It was a frightening event to  most of the other passengers, because of the actions of the captain in changing the bearing of the vessel from its pre-determined and assigned course and sailing too near the island’s coast, and then abandoning the ship without assisting the passengers as it leaned toward the surface of the sea adjacent to the island. The crew of the vessel also was shown to be poorly trained in emergency evacuation procedures, a fact which received pointed comments by the disenchanted passengers.

News reports of this maritime disaster, such as the one made in the International Herald Tribune, comment on the situation that “for many years, the global cruise industry has operated under a loosely defined system that tends to escape scrutiny by courts and regulators. Cruise line instances of crime, pollution and safety and health violations have gone unpoliced because no single authority is in charge.”

One obvious solution to the whole issue of prosecuting such international crimes, and certain other international crimes as well, is an international criminal court. International law practitioners and observers know, of course, that there already exists an International Criminal Court (ICC), sitting in The Hague, which was created in 1998 by the Rome Statute. Its jurisdiction, however, is limited to four specific kinds of crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression.  None of the definitions of these crimes found in the Rome Statute would cover piracy or maritime criminal negligence.

It is an interesting historic fact about the ICC that the original proposal for it, made by the Caribbean nation, Trinidad and Tobago, was that “the United Nations system consider the possibility of establishing an international adjudicative body with jurisdiction over illicit drug trafficking and other transnational crimes.”

One of the major reasons put forth for this proposal, made in the 1980s, was that “small countries cannot often handle the complex, expensive and sometimes dangerous consequences of a major trial involving international criminals.” It would not be outrageous to add to that observation, considering the circumstances off the coast of Somalia, neither can large countries.

For various reasons, the idea of an international criminal court having jurisdiction to prosecute  “illicit drug trafficking and other transnational crimes” was dropped when international jurists began seriously considering the possibility of such an international criminal tribunal. But just because those kinds of crimes were eventually eliminated when delegations convened in Rome in 1998 does not mean that the idea was a bad one, or that it should not be considered now under changed circumstances.

It appears that there are more than three areas of international criminal activity where a second international criminal court would be a valuable addition to the international legal system in general, and to international criminal law in particular. In fact there are seven discrete areas of such criminal activity that would lend themselves to international investigation and prosecution before such a tribunal, discrete areas that are increasing in scope and intensity, where such a court would be useful and perhaps even indispensable to small and large countries alike. These seven areas are:

1. international piracy
   
   
2. international terrorism
   
   
3. international organized crime
   
   
4. international drug trafficking
   
   
5. international trafficking in persons (women and children)
   
   
6. international criminal maritime acts
   
   
7. international cyber crime

There are three considerations that should be discussed in making this proposal. The first is that the International Criminal Court, in operation since 2002, if not a completely unqualified success, has been at least a tribunal with considerable effectiveness. The fears of those who initially opposed it have not come to pass. It has established itself as a genuine, serious, purposeful, and capable court and prosecution service, responsible in the actions it has taken with respect to those individuals who have been indicted and are being prosecuted, as well as those actions involving indictments that have been proposed and rejected. Its chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina, has acted responsibly in his position during his ten year tenure at the Court (his ten year term ends in June of this year). And, as Professor Kathryn Sikkink has observed in her recent book, The Justice Cascade, the Court has helped “change world politics.” National leaders who promote, incite, condone, or actively engage in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide can no longer function under the comfortable belief that they will not be held accountable for their actions.

The second consideration to be addressed in proposing a second international criminal court is that there already exists the beginnings of an infrastructure to investigate and support the prosecution of the types of international crimes referred to above. The International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol, as it is popularly known, located in Lyon, France, has as its mission the promotion of mutual assistance between all criminal police authorities and the establishment and development of institutions to “contribute to the prevention and suppression of ordinary law crimes.” This mission has been interpreted to include the investigation of the types of crimes mentioned above. And it is the second largest international organization in the world (second only to the United Nations) with 190 member states. If that many countries of the world can unite and cooperate for assistance in the investigation of “ordinary law crimes,” why can’t those same nations do the same for the prosecution of such crimes before an international criminal tribunal?

The third and last consideration in proposing a second international criminal court relates to the expansion, in the last 20 years, of the types of international crimes discussed here. Already discussed are international piracy and international maritime crimes. The need for an international system to prosecute the remaining types of crimes seems obvious. Almost all nations of the world have to face the possibility of terrorist acts within their borders, terrorist acts very likely to have connections with persons outside their borders. Thus they have to deal with international terrorism, involving acts devised, planned, directed and conducted by actors from different nations. The same is true with organized crime, with organized drug and human trafficking, and as contemporary newspaper articles continually remind us with stories of international hackers and attacks on computer systems, it is true with cyber crime.

This year, 2012, marks the 10^th anniversary of the beginning of operations of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It would be a fitting tribute to those nations and individuals who conceived and brought into being that court, and who have supported it through its first ten years of existence, if the nations of the world could begin the process in this anniversary year of creating another international criminal court, the International Tribunal for Criminal Prosecutions. This new court could begin the process of addressing those other types of crimes that are now afflicting so many nations and individuals around the globe, and which are collectively symbolized by the ever growing menace of piracy off the coast of Somalia and the inability of nations large and small to resolve effectively that menace within parameters of existing domestic and international law and institutions.