"I really have difficulty understanding that policy," Goldstone argued Tuesday. "What the US is saying is, 'In order to be peacekeepers ... we have to commit war crimes.' That's what the policy boils down to," he said as he presented a report called 'Making Justice Work'. The report was issued by a task force he headed and which was sponsored by the Twentieth Century Fund.

Goldstone has emerged as a sharp critic of any efforts to deny an ICC or war crimes tribunal the proper resources to do its work. In particular, he said that if the ICC were to lack a police entity or any other body capable of actually arresting suspected war criminals, it may be unable to become an effective or credible body.

In its recommendations, the task force blasts NATO forces and governments for failing to apprehend many of the top suspects indicted by the Yugoslavia tribunal for war crimes, including Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and Gen Ratko Mladic.

"The failure of the international community to apprehend or ensure the apprehension by local forces of the remaining 52 publicly indicted war criminals...a full two years after the signing of the Dayton Accords has helped (to) consolidate Bosnia's ethnic partition ... poisoned its social and cultural institutions, and entrenched its ultranationalist and ethnic-supremacist forces," the task force argues.

In a recent release, the task force's European members urged the 30,000 NATO troops in Bosnia to conduct "more assertive action" to arrest the Bosnian suspects. "We need to send an unequivocal signal to those responsible for the violence in Kosovo that we will not permit the tribunal's mandate to go unfulfilled."

That failing, Goldstone argued, occurred even though the Yugoslavia tribunal was set up by the UN Security Council under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, and thus had strong authority to arrest war criminals in the interests of peace and security. If that tribunal could not expect cooperation in receiving suspects, he asked, "what hope is there for a treaty-based ICC" to do any better?

Nor is that the only problem facing the Court's authority, the South African justice said. The US objections point to another source of worry - that countries will want the Court to have broad jurisdiction, except where their own interests are concerned.

Washington's concern about the "very theoretical and very unlikely danger" of a biased prosecution against US military forces worldwide are an example of that approach, argued Twentieth Century Fund vice president Morton Halperin. The United States, he said, fears a prosecutor from another country being opposed to a US military intervention because of the belief by many in the Pentagon that, as he put it, "everyone's against us."

Yet Halperin added that such worries were not unique to the ICC. Washington also wanted unsuccessfully to exclude its own landmines on the Korean border from last year's Landmines Convention, and has favoured strong World Trade Organisation powers except in the case of European objections to the tightened US embargo on Cuba, he noted.