Global tribunal seeking stature
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The president of the International Criminal Court said yesterday the tribunal "is not looking for business" and has opened just one investigation from the more than 700 complaints lodged with the court since its formal opening in mid-2002.
But with the U.S. government adamantly opposed to the court, ICC President Philippe Kirsch predicted it will be a long, slow fight for the court to win global acceptance and recognition of its jurisdiction.
"The ICC's success will not be like instant coffee," cautioned Mr. Kirsch, a Canadian lawyer and diplomat before joining the international court in The Hague. "It will take awhile. For now, all we can do is try to establish our credibility through our practice."
The Bush administration has actively opposed the court, fearing it will be a vehicle for politically inspired prosecutions of American and allied military forces abroad. ICC opponents also contend that there will be no national oversight or political accounting of the court.
As of late last month, the State Department had negotiated bilateral agreements with 74 countries exempting U.S. servicemen and diplomats from ICC jurisdiction, including 32 of the 92 countries that have ratified the court's founding treaty.
Mr. Kirsch, addressing a Council on Foreign Relations conference yesterday at the end of a multi-city U.S. tour, said he was not lobbying for the court here, but simply accepting invitations to discuss the court's purposes and clear up misunderstandings about its work.
He said virtually all of the complaints, including three from the United States, have been rejected by ICC prosecutors.
Among the reasons: the actions in the complaints occurred before July 2002, when the court's jurisdiction began; the crimes listed — tax fraud, environmental crimes — are not under the court's mandate; or because the states involved are not parties to the ICC, as is the case with the United States and Iraq.
The ICC president was at pains to say he believed the ICC would assert jurisdiction only in extraordinary circumstances, when a state proves unable or unwilling to prosecute clear cases of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
He predicted the court would be able to handle a maximum of "two or three situations at any one time."
"That is the logic of our statute. We can only focus on the most serious situations," he said.
The only case to date currently being considered by ICC prosecutors involves widespread violence against civilians in the remote Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in late 2002, as part of the African country's bloody civil war.
Mr. Kirsch said ICC lawyers are also looking at several other submissions to the court, and could announce new actions by June. But he declined to discuss any pending cases, including the possibility of an ICC action against the U.S. treatment of detainees from the war on terrorism held at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
At the conference, Robert McNamara, defense secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, said he feared that U.S. military actions such as the bombing of Japanese cities in World War II and the Vietnam campaign could be seen by some as "war crimes" given the vague definitions under international law.
Mr. Kirsch said the ICC's founding statute contained a lengthy definition of war crimes, with much of the language negotiated with the help of U.S. legal and diplomatic advisers during the Clinton administration.
Besides the United States, two other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Russia and China, also have not joined the court, but Britain and France are members.
The ICC president said he hoped other Security Council powers would eventually ratify the treaty.
He said he found on a visit to Beijing in November that "the attitude of the Chinese is certainly not negative" to the court. Mr. Kirsch also plans to travel to Moscow, where he will meet with private groups as well as with government officials. |
