RIGHTS: Support Growing for ‘Effective’ Criminal Court

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 10 1997 (IPS) - Support is growing worldwide for an international court to try genocide and major war crimes, according to human rights activists attending preparatory meetings being held here to set up such a legal body.

Wednesday marked the start of year-long ceremonies to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with such dignitaries as U.S. first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, speaking at the United nations.

Rights groups, meanwhile, are hopeful 1998 also will see the creation of a powerful International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute violations of human rights.

In particular, the rights groups contend, a growing number of nations are supporting efforts to ensure that the ICC will be able to conduct investigations without constant oversight by the 15- nation U.N. Security Council.

In recent months, many European nations, 14 Southern African nations, and the Latin American states comprising the Rio Group have all swung in favour of granting an ICC broad authority to try cases, said William Pace, convenor of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court, a grouping of non-governmental organisations.

About 50 to 75 countries altogether support an ‘effective’ and reasonably independent Court, Pace added, while perhaps 30 or 40 countries want to see a weaker ICC more beholden to national sovereignty or to U.N. bodies like the Security Council.

Even the most powerful Security Council states, however, may be moving slowly toward accepting a more active ICC. This week, Pace noted, the British delegation to the current preparatory talks – which end on Friday – has said it is now willing to accept a formula which would free the Court from having to gain Security Council approval to take on cases.

According to Pace, the British government has said it accepts the position of Singapore, which has devised a formula in which the proposed ICC could take on any case, unless the Security Council specifically asks it not to do so. By contrast, the United States is behind a proposal which would in effect compel the ICC to seek Council approval before it could try any case.

Britain’s apparent support for the Singapore formula is the first time one of the Council’s five permanent members has backed away from placing the Court – expected to be created next June at a conference in Rome – under the Council’s tight leash. France, Pace said, has now also indicated it is “willing to look at the Singapore formula.”

Of the other three, veto-holding permanent Council members, Russia and China have indicated they still intend for the Security Council to keep a check on the Court’s authority.

Joining them is the United States, which continues to insist on prior Council approval of any ICC cases – even though the head of the U.S. delegation here, David Scheffer, has conceded that “the merit of the Singapore proposal is that it recognises the legitimate role of the Security Council.”

The Singapore formula debate is just one of many disputes over the ICC that centre on one basic question: How independent will the court be? So far, rights activists admit, there is no clear answer about how much power the more than 100 governments currently involved in drawing up plans for an ICC are willing to give it.

Britain and the United States have recently come out in favour of “a reasonable approach on the threshold for war crimes,” said Richard Dicker, associate counsel for Human Rights Watch (HRW), in which such crimes do not have to be proven to have been planned to come before the ICC.

On the other hand, many other questions about ICC authority remain ill-defined. Jelena Pejic, senior programme coordinator for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, contended that there is no clear consensus among governments about whether they will allow broader measures to enforce compliance with any ICC requests.

Some governments, she said, want the Court to face the same extradition laws as other courts would – making the capture of war crimes suspects complicated, in most cases. Others want parties that do not comply with ICC requests to be found in non-compliance and dealt with by the Security Council or General Assembly.

The ultimate goal for rights groups, Pejic argued, is to get governments to “try and give this Court at least the same measure of cooperation they give national courts.”

That remains a difficult task, as just about every dispute over the ICC’s powers shows. For example, Germany, Italy and Russia want the ICC – like the post-Second World War Nuremberg Court – to be able to try any officials responsible of the crime of aggression; but Britain and the United States believe that responsibility for aggression is too ill-defined legally.

The battle lines shift in a different dispute, in which Canada and most European states want the Court to be free to examine cases brought to it by any government, but France, Russia and Japan contend that the ICC should have the cooperation of the governments directly involved before it can proceed.

The United States itself is divided over the Court. Scheffer has made it clear that Washington wants the ICC to be up and running by the year 2000. However, as Dicker noted, the Pentagon’s worry over the U.S. “status as a global military power” has made it insist that U.S. troops abroad not be subject to “unreasonable vulnerability” from ICC prosecutions.

If the international court is unable to intervene in most internal conflicts – except for genocide – major violations, like the 1988 gassing of thousands of Kurds by the Iraqi government, would not pertain to the ICC docket. “That is shocking,” Dicker sais.

While the ICC debate continued, the United Nations began its year-long commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights on Dec 10, 1948.. Dozens of officials on Wednesday called for the United Nations to do more to defend human rights in keeping with the Declaration’s aims.

Calling the Declaration “a response to human evil” and to Nazi persecution, Hillary Rodham Clinton argued that it is now time to expand the application of human rights. “We have not widened the circle of human dignity far enough,” she said.

In particular, Clinton said, women’s rights are constantly being violated – from the exclusion of women by Afghanistan’s Islamist Taliban militias to the fact that two-thirds of the 130 million children out of school worldwide are girls. “In too many places, the suffering of women is defined as trivial,” she argued.

“Human rights remain indivisible because humanity is indivisible,” added Nigerian author and pro-democracy activist Wole Soyinka.

Soyinka said that recent years had shown many examples of the failure to enforce human rights, from Sudan and Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia, but he asserted, “As long as we continue to exist, then the defense of human rights must continue – if only in rhetoric.”