> what do you mean by 'invite to the table'? it's a criminal court, so it's going to deal with criminals

"Criminals" in this context is meaningless. Please hear me out.

We're dealing with the concept of "International Law", which is largely understood as agreements / treaties amongst different countries.

This means that those agreements are no more valid or better or righteous than the countries that enter into them. If the nations involved share certain basic principles and make an agreement that aligns with those principles, the enforcement of these "laws" would come from those nations that are party to the treaty.

BUT - if one nation changes its mind, or changes its internal laws or decides "nah, no thanks" then how do you enforce these so-called "laws"? Do the other nations declare war on this nation?

It gets even worse than that. Because the very concept of "International Law" contains a logical contradiction.

The idea is that we are going make war (force, violence, death, destruction, conflict) subject to some kind of rules. The problem is, you can't. You can have two parties to a conflict agree to certain things: like not to murder civilians, or prisoners etc. if it can be helped. But at the end of the day it's an agreement that doesn't have any kind of binding power or significance because the idea of war means that two groups have decided that they can't reach any kind of rational agreement and so they have resorted to violent conflict.

War, by definition, is the absence of law. The absence of reason. The breakdown of civilization. It comes about when two groups cannot reason with one another; cannot agree with one another on what the rules ought to be.

Law is not a concept that comes out of nowhere. It is the idea that in order to protect individual rights and liberty, the element of force and violence is going to be taken out of civil existence and placed into the hands of a monopoly: the government, which sets the rules and enforcement mechanisms around when force is and is not justifiable within their respective operating jurisdictions.

When you have multiple nations that operate independently, each with their own laws and rules, all you can do is get them to agree to certain things, as long as they have some basis upon which to enter into an agreement.

My thesis is that a free, rights-protecting nation has no basis for an agreement with a dictatorship that routinely violates peoples' rights. That the dictatorship has everything to gain by getting the free nation to agree to what its evil desires want, while the free nation has only things to lose (through compromise, which is part and parcel of coming to terms).

That's what I mean by "invite to the table."

> a free, rights-protecting nation has no basis for an agreement [between any two or more states] with a dictatorship that routinely violates peoples' rights.

Wikipedia quote: "States and non-state actors may choose to not abide by international law, and even to breach a treaty but such violations, particularly of peremptory norms, can be met with disapproval by others and in some cases coercive action ranging from diplomatic and economic sanctions to war."

I think isolating bad actors can be a limited solution to the absence of physical power/not wanting to start a way, which ultimately as you rightly state corresponds to a situation of absence/breakdown of law that is best avoided.

I'm using "criminals" as a short-hand for "the worst of the worst in terms of rights-violating countries and dictatorial regimes" which is what you initially said.

If there is no such thing as international law, then what "rights" are these countries violating?

> When you have multiple nations that operate independently, each with their own laws and rules, all you can do is get them to agree to certain things, as long as they have some basis upon which to enter into an agreement.

It sounds like you do think all countries should be 'invited to the table' unless they fail to meet a standard which you yourself don't think exists. Confusing.

> We're dealing with the concept of "International Law", which is largely understood as agreements / treaties amongst different countries.

Well this is true of a lot of international law, it doesn't apply here. The ICC largely deals with things that are preemptory norms which apply regardless of if you sign the treaty.