African non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are generally confident that a broad range of African countries - particularly including many in Southern and Francophone Africa - are committed to a Court largely free of UN Security Council oversight and to a prosecutor empowered to initiate investigations without state or Security Council referral.

But with many African delegations either hard-pressed to attend all the crucial ICC informal or working group sessions or quiet at those meetings, some activists worry that they may not press for those concerns as forcefully as possible.

"Contrary to the agreements made in Dakar and Pretoria (over the past year) by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), some African states appear to renege on this collective agreement by their failure to support an independent prosecutor," said Bisi Olateru-Olagbegi, president of the Women's Consortium of Nigeria.

Olateru-Olagbegi pointed to Nigeria as one of the countries which has opposed the independent, or 'proprio motu', prosecutor, despite the commitments by dozens of African nations at Dakar to that proposal.

More worrisome, Olateru-Olagbegi added, is the recent silence by some African nations at ICC working group meetings on many of the rights groups' key demands. "We are no longer sure where they stand," she said.

In part, that may simply be a function of the heavy load of meetings that all diplomats must attend at the ICC conference, and the particular burden it places on smaller delegations, said William Pace, convenor of the NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court. "There is no way that even middle-sized countries can cover all of what's happening," he said.

In part, however, there are also significant differences among various African nations and regions about their main interests in the Court. As one African NGO official said, the North African states often join with other African states in common positions, but many times "have a different agenda" from that of many sub-Saharan states.

Southern African countries, many of which have only recently ended years of colonial or apartheid rule, have actively pushed for ICC and prosecutorial independence, among other issues identified with the "like-minded" group of nearly 60 states.

Other countries face different pressures, notably those of Francophone Africa. "The French government has not been at all happy with the independence of Francophone African countries" on ICC issues, Pace argued.

For many African states, however, the ICC presents the best hope against selective justice and the ad hoc response to massacres exemplified by the UN tribunal in Arusha, which has indicted 36 people for involvement in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

The Arusha tribunal has 23 of the suspects in its custody but has so far tried only one of them, with another indictee, former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, expected to be sentenced next month for his guilty plea to charges of genocide, noted Betty Murungi, an attorney at Kenya's Federation of Women Lawyers. "The ad hoc tribunal is not a solution," Murungi said, adding it may take years to try all 23 suspects detained in Arusha.

Many countries have been unable to rely on the UN Security Council - which set up ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia - to follow up on their cases at all, said Mona Rishmawi of the International Commission of Jurists.

Aref Mohammed Aref of Amnesty International warned that a weak Court runs the risk of future Rwandas. "Why did the genocide happen and why was it so large scale? Because of the lack of an International Criminal Court," Aref argued.