In a paper circulated to delegations Thursday, the Lawyers Committee questions US assertions that states will be willing to rely on the Court's jurisdiction, and can be relied upon to trigger the ICC's investigations.

The US paper rejects what it calls the "entirely cynical ... notion that the community of states is so lacking in moral and political courage that, when faced with an atrocity meriting the attention of the Court, not one state will respond."

In reality, says the Lawyers Committee, "there has not been a single instance in which a state party used the state complaint mechanism provided for in universal human rights treaties to allege that another state was not fulfilling its international obligations, in spite of ample opportunities to do so." Any dependence of the ICC on state referrals is likely to fare similarly, the rights group argues.

Contrary to the US, which pointed to UN Security Council support for war crimes tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the Lawyers Committee also contends "the Security Council has also remained passive in the face of heinous crimes committed in international and internal conflicts worldwide over the past half century."

The group rejects US arguments that an independent prosecutor will be swamped with a flood of complaints, which will be time-consuming and costly to sift through. In the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals, where a prosecutor has such powers, the Lawyers Committee notes, there have only been some 100 indictments over five years - and the ICC could expect to make even fewer.

To prove that a self-initiating prosecutor would face too much work, the US paper argues that "the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights received nearly 30,000 communications under 'Resolution 1503' procedures and another 1,200 under the first optional protocol of the ICCPR".

Both those figures are wrong, the Lawyers Committee charges, citing statistics from the High Commissioner's website. The 30,000 complaints included all complaints submitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights, including through special rapporteurs, while the optional protocol complaints, far from numbering 1,200 in 1997, totalled 818 individual complaints since the protocol entered into force in 1976.