"We feel that this Court cannot mete out justice to women and men if it's going to be a weak Court," said Eleanor Conda of the Women's Caucus, an umbrella group of non-governmental organisations. "Justice cannot be compromised away."

Conda argued that the sluggish pace of the conference has helped prompt some governments to attempt to forge compromises on key issues, including whether the ICC will need to obtain consent from involved states before it can try cases. But many NGOs have worried that any compromise on state consent - or on the issue of whether the UN Security Council can remove items from the Court's docket - will cripple the ICC from the outset.

The slackening of the conference's pace comes at a time when women's groups are pushing to place several of their own concerns onto the agenda. In recent days, at least 23 governments have swung their support behind a proposal to secure gender balance on the Court, even if criteria on expertise in criminal trials for ICC judges would need to be adjusted.

Many countries boast qualified women judges, argued Vahida Nainar of the NGO 'Women Living Under Muslim Laws', but many have only recently entered practise and thus lack substantial trial experience. However, she added, just as geographic balance is essential to a credible ICC, so too does the body need officials who have special expertise in gender concerns.

Gender balance need not require perfectly equal representation between men and women in the Court's various offices, Nainar noted. But Rhonda Copelon of the Women's Caucus warned that there needs to be an adequate number of women on the ICC to prevent the tokenism she argued has marked UN war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

"There is one woman on the Rwanda tribunal and two on the Yugoslavia tribunal; they have had an enormous burden," Copelon said, noting that one of the women in the Yugoslavia tribunal had to push for sexual violence to be prosecuted in it. "They are in essence a token representation of women."

The fight for gender balance nevertheless looks to be a challenging one, with many countries wanting to emphasise criminal trial experience in selections of judges.  By contrast, other groups are pushing for a diversity of geographic and religious perspectives in the ICC as well. One diplomat pointed to the blocking of Egyptian law professor Cherif Bassiouni, now chair of the ICC drafting committee, from serving as a prosecutor for the Yugoslav tribunal as an example of how groups like Muslims have been under-represented in the UN war crimes organs so far.

If the battles over representation seem difficult, at least one concern of women's groups has been picking up steam in recent days: the desire for a victim's unit to be included in the ICC registry.  Betty Murungi, of Kenya's Federation of Women Lawyers, noted that the registrar's office of the Rwanda tribunal, newly bolstered by financing from a voluntary trust fund, has provided a victim's assistance unit, separate from its own witness protection unit, that has helped out survivors of the 1994 genocide.

However, until recently, US officials had taken an entirely different lesson from the Rwanda tribunal. One senior US official had contended that the two UN tribunals had showed that the care of witnesses and victims is not handled best by the registry but by the prosecutor's office - and Washington, as a result, wanted the ICC prosecutor to be in charge of those tasks.

That insistence had befuddled rights groups. "It's extremely important to establish (the victim's rights) unit in the registry so that its primary responsibility is the protection of victims," said Barbara Bedont of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Placing the office under the prosecutor, she said, would open victims to potential conflicts of interest in their role as witnesses to crimes.

The arguments seem to have swayed the United States, which sources say has now shifted toward accepting, despite its objections, the proposal that the registrar's office handle such tasks as women's and victim's rights. Other fights loom ahead for women's rights activists. Conservative Islamist and Catholic governments are gearing for a battle on enforced pregnancy, since they do not want any protection of women who have been raped and forced to bear children to be taken as a defense of women's right to abortion.

Bedont cautioned that women's groups will also have to push for language that could allow sexual crimes to be treated as crimes against humanity, even if they do not fall within current ICC statute definitions of such crimes as "widespread" or "systematic". "Sexual violence often occurs during wartime because of the culture of war," she argued, noting that fighting forces often employ sexual aggression without any systematic intention to do so. Farhan Haq/IPS