It's an easy question to ask when you're the guy at the top of the pile with the biggest guns and the ability to kill or capture your perceived enemies anywhere in the world.
For everyone else, global institutions based on universal human rights are a welcome safeguard against the abuses of 20th century style sovereignty.
The US is making it very explicit that they are above rules. They have the right to commit war crimes, while holding other countries accountable for their war crimes, and even for things that aren't even crimes at all. The US is a bully, and is very explicit about it.
You are an anarchist then? Otherwise as an sovereign individual, how can you justify being part of nation with laws over you?
It's not so much giving up sovereignty as pooling it. ie you trade your right to do so as you wish, for a guarantee that others can't just do as they wish on agreed areas - like rape, murder, stealing etc.
Same argument applies to countries - they submit to the ICC, but are also party to shaping it - it's an agreement between countries about what is 'beyond the pale'.
The sad fact is, however the US see's it's self, the rest of the world is increasingly seeing the US as the largest threat to world peace. https://fullfact.org/news/america-world-peace/
In my view, the US need to have a long hard look at themselves and re-discover their moral mojo.
They why be subject to U.N. and it's ICJ? Submitting only to institutions in which we have extraordinary influence or can veto out of unfavourable circumstances is not 'protection of sovereignty'; it's hypocrisy and disregard to delivering justice.
What would effectively be the difference for you as an individual. You don't have sovereignty, you don't have self determination, the huge country you live in does. You have zero influence over your country's laws, constitution and institutions.
Why do you prefer to be ruled over by the US, which is corrupt to the bone and ruled by whoever pays the largest 'campaign contributions' (a.k.a. bribes). vs. something like the ICC ?
Because in doing so in the form of an agreement, others can be made to give up their freedom to do bad things while you also give up the freedom to do those bad things? Like the normal social contract, but explicit and on a larger scale.
This dates even to the 1899 Hague Convention, which the US was very keen on following earlier work by Abraham Lincoln. The way to get the enemy to treat your prisoners of war humanely is to agree to treat theirs humanely, and this held fairly well even in the horrors of WW2.
The post-Holocaust international order is devoted to the idea that there is always a risk of rogue states deciding to end the freedoms of their citizens or engage in mass murder and other crimes against humanity. There are also risks of states turning on one another and escalating economic disputes to actual wars. In order to guard against these, supranational institutions were built. Not just the United Nations and the ICC, but the whole Bretton Woods system, the WTO, the NATO mutual defence organisation, the ECHR, and the EU and its antecedants.
How can the US ask China to end its human rights abuses, and expect to be taken seriously, when the US refuses internal or external accountability for its own human rights abuses and war criminals? The official position of the United States, having determined that Edward Gallagher was deliberately murdering civilians and prisoners of war, is that he should be pardoned and have his position reinstated? That's fine and no reason for imposing sanctions on the United States?
Yes, this is a tu quoque argument, but at the level of international propaganda it works.
The point is that human rights are above national laws. If an American citizen commit serious human right abuses abroad he/she should naturally be put on trial.
In particular American involved in kidnapping and torturing foreigners to obtain information ought to be put on a human rights trial. I am thinking in particular about all the human rights violations during the Bush/Cheney years.
ICC members follow universal jurisdiction when it comes to war crime.
“The Court may exercise jurisdiction in a situation where genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes were committed on or after 1 July 2002 and:
the crimes were committed by a State Party national, or in the territory of a State Party, or in a State that has accepted the jurisdiction of the Court; or the crimes were referred to the ICC Prosecutor by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) pursuant to a resolution adopted under chapter VII of the UN charter.”
The only way the ICC can exercise jurisdiction over a non-member is through referral from the UN Security Council.
The US, in general, is defensive of its sovereignty. We have our own institutions and we are very protective of them. For example, we have a right to a jury trial by one’s peers n a criminal case. The ICC has no juries, and panelists are generally foreigners to the defendant. Criminal convictions in US federal courts (and nearly all states) require a unanimous verdict. The ICC requires a simple majority. The ICC allows trials in abstentia, regularly relies on hearsay evidence, etc. Our highest court is the United States Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court cannot hear appeals from the ICC and cannot issue judgments binding on the ICC. Our practices in these areas, such as jury trials, are the part of an unbroken line of law and tradition dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215. Those practices can be refined and improved, but that’s completely orthogonal to submitting to the jurisdiction of supra-national organizations like the ICC. Our institutions can always be improved. But that doesn’t mean we have to submit to someone else’s institutions.
In my view, the real question is why others are so willing to give up their sovereignty and right to self determination? Why submit to the will of some foreign court that’s totally outside the framework of your own country’s laws, constitution, and institutions?