RIGHTS
Progress Slow on Formation of Intl. Criminal Court
By Farhan Haq
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 2 (IPS) - Plans to create an International Criminal Court (ICC) will not take any coherent form until the world summit on establishing the body convenes in mid-June, human rights experts agree.
''Nothing is going to be resolved until the governments meet (to discuss the ICC) at Rome on Jun. 15,'' says Jelena Pejic, senior programme coordinator for the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights in Europe. ''Nobody has any illusions about that.''
Three weeks of preparatory discussions on the shape and composition of an ICC, due to end here Friday, have failed to resolve any of the major disputes about what the Court can and cannot do, Pejic adds.
In recent days, the debate has heated up here, with high-level officials from many countries arriving to push for some significant changes in the Court's powers.
Richard Dicker, associate counsel for Human Rights Watch, cautions that, despite the debate, several key nations - notably France and the United States - remain wary about creating an independent body capable of investigating and trying genocide charges and war crimes.
That wariness has been underlined by right-wing Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who heads the powerful U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. When U.S. President Bill Clinton, visiting Rwanda last week, mentioned the intention to create a global court to try war crimes, Helms quickly shot back with a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declaring that he was ''unalterably opposed'' to any such body.
''Any permanent judiciary within the U.N. system would be totally inappropriate, inasmuch as, like the creation of a standing army, or the power to collect taxes, it would grant the United Nations a principal trapping of sovereignty,'' Helms wrote. ''The United Nations is not now - nor will it ever be, so long as I have breath in me - a sovereign entity,'' he added. If U.S diplomats establish a proposal for any Court that could not be checked by a U.S. veto, Helms warned Albright, ''it will be dead on arrival at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.''
Human-rights advocates who have monitored the progress of the ICC debate said that, following Helms's outburst, the U.S. delegation to the talks, headed by Ambassador David Scheffer, has barely budged on most disputes.
Few expect that Scheffer - who earlier had been expected to drop or at least to mute U.S. demands for U.N. Security Council oversight of the Court - will now back down from previous efforts to limit the Court's authority.
Similarly, France in recent days has pushed to rally its allies in Francophone Africa to its insistence that any prosecution of war crimes should require the consent of the states being investigated.
Several Francophone African countries have been calling for a strong and fairly independent Court, most recently during a meeting of 35 African governments held in February in Dakar, Senegal.
If France and the United States insist on the consent of parties potentially involved in war crimes to an investigation in their own work, Dicker argues such a requirement ''would straitjacket the Court'' and actually produce a less effective system to prosecute war crimes than currently exists.
Pejic , however, observes that France has indicated its desire to move on its insistence that the prosecutor of any ICC not have 'ex officio' powers that would allow the prosecutor's office to initiate its own investigations, without the consent of either the Security Council or the governments involved.
This week, French officials confirmed that they may drop their concerns that an independent prosecutor could pursue frivolous or politically biased charges if a compromise, suggested by Argentina and Germany, wins approval.
The Argentine-German proposal suggests that ''if the prosecutor concludes that there is reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation, he or she shall submit to (an ICC) pre-trial chamber a request for authorisation of an investigation, together with any supporting material collected.'' The pre-trial chamber would then decide if there is ''reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation.''
Pejic saysd that French officials are satisfied that a pre- trial chamber would prevent any chance of abuses by the prosecutor's office and would therefore drop any other objections to the prosecutor's independence.
Scheffer - who repeatedly has voiced U.S. fears that its military forces abroad could be targeted unfairly by the Court - has continued to object to that principle, offering instead the idea of a ''self-initiating'' prosecutor who could investigate freely once Security Council or state consent is given initially. Many rights activists believe that such an office would be ineffective. (END/IPS/fah/mk/98)