Today, the Department of Justice announced an indictment against former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, charging him with several offenses, including murder.
Clark Neily, the senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute, issued the following statement:
The Justice Department’s unsealing today of a superseding indictment charging Raúl Castro and five Cuban military pilots with murder and related offenses arising from the 1996 shootdown of unarmed Brothers to the Rescue aircraft over international waters is a significant legal and diplomatic event. The alleged conduct is grave, and if the allegations are true, those responsible should be held accountable. But criminal indictments of foreign leaders rarely function purely as prosecution vehicles, and the legitimacy of accountability efforts—even when legally warranted—depends in part on whether the standards being invoked are ones we are prepared to apply universally.
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