But here in Rome, it looks like there will be no resolution of how justice can be obtained for victims of unresolved crimes like political disappearances - and whether an International Criminal Court can deal with desaparecidos.

Instead, dealing with this sensitive issue will be postponed - as has been done in the countries where there had been political disappearances - for the sake of obtaining an agreement on the ICC.

This will make way for a wide variety of issues considered to be of national interest by the political establishment, the most important of which is political stability (in other words, fear of military resistance).

Those opposed to the ICC taking on the case of the desaparecidos argue the matter cannot rightly be tackled because the Court is not to be retroactive.

But political disappearances are among those crimes that - legally - are neither subject to amnesty nor to statutes of limitations because they may be considered "ongoing" crimes such as kidnap cases, a South American delegate told Terra Viva.

And while some agree that the court should indeed deal only with future offenses, they concede that there is room for political considerations. As one diplomat said: "It is a universal juridical principle that penal law applies only for the future, except when the new regulations may benefit the convict."

"It would be a juridical aberration," he added, "but political considerations may prevail".

Answers in the debate about the nature of political disappearances were not clear, let alone final, at a press conference by Latin American NGOs Tuesday.

"Forced disappearances are a permanent crime, until the person’s remains are found," said Francisco Soberón of Perú, vice president of the International Federation of Human Rights. By this logic, disappearances cannot be considered past crimes for the simple reason that they remain unresolved.

Will the NGOs push to explicitly include this crime in the Court’s jurisdiction? -We will encourage the Court to take a stand on this kind of crime. It will spark a discussion, but is an issue that will have to wait.

Will the Court deal with the thousands of unresolved cases still pending in Latin America, and which have put a question mark on the democratisation processes underway there?

It must, if democracy is to be real, say human rights groups and relatives of desaparecidos.

No, say governments that are keener on looking toward the future than digging into the disturbing past, recent as that may be.

Privately, some NGOs agree with the governments’ stand, because insisting that the ICC take on the question of disappearances may be divisive and prompt some countries to withdraw their current support for the Court.

Argentina is one such country. The government of president Carlos Menem is often lauded as being among the most determined supporters of a strong Court from Latin America. Yet human rights organisations also accuse Menem of complicity with human rights abusers, for granting pardon to the generals who led the bloody military dictatorship (1973-1983).

The organisations grouping relatives of desaparecidos in Argentina are bitterly divided between those, like the Grandmothers, who prefer a moderate path such as legal actions to recover their grandchildren, and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, whose traditional leadership has taken a more radical, purist approach.

The 1976 coup leader, general Jorge Rafael Videla, has been brought back to jail by the grandmothers’ lawyers - without governmental support. They have also recovered 59 children of missing political prisoners who had been adopted by their captors.

But this path is rejected by people like Hebe Bonafini, among the traditional leaders of the Madres who think that accepting financial compensation and the exhumation of bodies are a "betrayal" of their children - because this, in a legal sense, stops what had been an ongoing crime.

The most important thing now is the future, says Leonel Suárez, of the Colombia-based Latin American Institute of Alternative Legal Systems. "The mere fact that crimes such as forced disappearences are included (in the Court’s s jurisdiction) will send a clear message to governments that so far have rejected internal laws on the matter." Alejandro Kirk/IPS