The group decried the "opt-out" clause, which would allow countries to exclude themselves from the court's jurisdiction over war crimes for a period of seven years; the restrictive provisions on jurisdiction, and the Security Council's control over the Court. The ICC could well end up "a paper tiger", its members argued.

"The problem is no longer the crime, but getting the perpetrators, " Rhonda Copelon of the Women's Caucus said in an interview Friday. "The Security Council is the only one free to refer cases, despite states' objections," she added (referring to Articles 12 and 13 of the treaty).

"When we started out, we had a vision of the ICC as a court of universal justice, but that was a long time ago," said Eleanor Conda, co-director of the Women's Caucus at the ICC. "We have achieved gender and sex violence provisions, but women are the most likely victims of the opt-out regime on war-crimes," she warned.

Women's groups also expressed concern at language in the chapeau to Article 7, saying that the use of the phrase "..with knowledge of the attack" would make it very difficult to get conviction of soldiers. 

On the definition of forced pregnancy as a war crime, Alda Facio, director of the Women's Caucus, commented that "intent" is very hard to prove in any crime, particularly crimes against women.

"Having fought so hard for women's issues here from the inside, I see a retrogression from (the Fourth World Conference on Women) Beijing. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has stated very clearly that the UN is committed to mainstreaming gender in the UN system." Facio said. 

Her views paralleled earlier observations by women activists that the ICC had seen a rehash of debates on fundamental concepts like gender, which they thought had been settled in the Beijing conference. Caucus members had lamented that delegations seemed to be retracing the old debates on gender, despite widely accepted and well-used language on gender in numerous UN documents and conventions, not least the declaration that resulted from the 1993 Vienna conference on human rights and the Beijing conference.

Copelon concurred: "The definition of gender is going to look odd. It's outrageous that we had to fight a ridiculous five-week battle to hold on to something that was widely acknowledged by the UN system."

The Statute says that "the term 'gender' refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society". Language in the ICC Statute was not settled until the last moments, because of fractious debates among definitions of terms like gender that led to the bracketing of provisions that mentioned these terms. 

At one point, the debates threatened to degenerate into a tussle over abortion and enforced pregnancy, featuring objections by the Vatican the several Arab states. They had expressed fears that language declaring forced pregnancy as a war crime would serve as a back door to legitimise abortions - even though NGOs said this was a illusory debate.

"The conference shows that forces of reaction exist. The Vatican and the Arab league are going to claim they've pushed back Beijing, but this is an illusion. The issues are too important," Facio said. "It's a victory for us that the crimes against women and the concepts are in the Statute and it's a paper victory for them that their definitions were so narrow," she added.

On the proprio motu Prosecutor, Copelon said that the requirement that the prosecutor give "confidential notice" to all states parties was "a recipe for rendering him or her ineffectual". She added: "The Prosecutor will be incapable of pulling the evidence together."

Others shared Copelon's concern at the inclusion of the so-called 'Singapore compromise', which allows the Security Council to suspend trials and investigations for up to 12 months and to renew such suspensions thereafter. As no limit on the number suspensions is allowed, the Women's Caucus fears this could be a means of indefinitely removing political 'hot potatoes' from the Court's docket.

Copelon also posed the question of what to do in the cases of countries such as Rwanda, where the penalties for the "traditionally underpunished" crimes of sexual violence were so low that cases would not be admissible to the Court.

Having fought a bruising struggle in Rome, though, activist Vahida Nainer said: "The Conference may be at its end, but we have a lot of work to do. We have to go back to our constituencies and educate groups on the statute and on what effective use women can make of its provisions."

"We need to continue to press states to take steps to see that crimes against women are brought to justice and not get lost in the technicalities and loopholes of language," Nainer stressed. Alison Dickens