Morton Halperin, vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund, said that Washington may be resisting the inclusion of terrorism on the ICC docket in part because it does not want to endanger its own policy of having terrorists extradited to the United States. Similarly, Washington does not want drug traffickers, whose extradition it seeks, turned over to an ICC instead.

"It's kind of a strange argument," Halperin explained. "For example, if the ICC were in charge of trying terrorists, Libya could say, 'Fine, we'll turn over our suspects (linked to the 1988 bombing of Pan American flight 103) to the ICC at the Hague'. Then what would the US do?"

The terrorism debate has also put other nations in a bind, precisely because there is no definition of terrorism which does not rely on some political considerations. Several governing parties, including South Africa's African National Congress and the Palestinian territories' ruling Palestine Liberation Organisation, were labelled terrorists by various governments as recently as a decade ago; the Irish Republican Army may soon join their ranks as a legitimate political actor.

Yet problems of jurisdiction and definition have not prevented some nations from insisting on including terrorism and drug trafficking on the ICC agenda. Algeria, riven by a civil conflict between a secular government and Islamist radicals, has called for the ICC to take just such a step.

Trinidadian Attorney General Ramesh Maharaj, whose country first proposed the creation of the ICC as a drug-combating entity in 1989, urged delegates in Rome to keep drug trafficking on the Court's agenda. "The trans-boundary activities of drug traffickers and that of their armed supporters pose a grave threat to humanity," he argued.

Halperin doubts that the drug and terrorism issues will make it onto the ICC docket for now: "The US is certainly in no mood to see that happen."