ANP NO THANKS The U.S. doesn't want its soldiers being hauled before the ICC

America Is Not Pleased
	The International Criminal Court is launched, but how effective can it be without U.S. support?
	By JAMES GRAFF | Brussels

Posted Sunday, June 30, 2002; 11:45 a.m. BST
No more Pol Pots. No more Milosevics. No more Idi Amins. Beginning July 1, in the words of activist William Pace, "thousands of years of impunity" for authors of genocide and war crimes come to an end. With that worthy aim in mind, more than 70 countries, including all 15 members of the European Union, have ratified the 1998 treaty establishing the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which is intended to deter and if necessary prosecute any future Hitler.

Equipped for now only with a skeletal staff and housed temporarily in the former building of the troubled Dutch telecom giant KPN, the court is nevertheless ready to receive complaints and secure them for the future consideration of 18 international judges to be elected early next year. For Edmond Wellenstein, Director General of the Dutch ICC Task Force, the court's creation is "an event of joy and an event of hope for victims and their families."

But there is at least one enormous damper on all that good feeling: the intractable enmity of the United States government, which for generations has been the world's most powerful advocate of the rule of law. To U.S. Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman the new court is "an institution of unchecked power" that "undermines the democratic rights of our people and could erode the fundamental elements of the United Nations Charter." For Jesse Helms, sponsor of a bill passed by the U.S. Senate last month that calls for an invasion of the Hague to free any U.S. citizen or ally who falls into the court's clutches, the ICC is a "kangaroo court" that invites the abuse of U.S. military personnel serving around the world.

Thus it was perhaps predictable that the week leading up to the court's formal birth brought a flurry of diplomatic dispatches and fevered negotiations as signatories to the treaty establishing the court tried to head off a last-ditch effort from Washington to gut it. At the Security Council in New York, the American delegation introduced proposals that aimed to exempt from the court's jurisdiction U.N. peacekeepers from states that aren't party to the ICC. The pawn in the piece was the normally routine six-month extension of the U.N. peacekeeping mandate in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unless blanket immunity is granted, the U.S. threatened not only to veto the U.N.'s mandate in Bosnia but also to stop paying its 27% share of the U.N.'s peacekeeping budget. The 2,200 or so U.S. peacekeeping troops in Bosnia are there as part of NATO, but other contingents — notably the Dutch and Germans — can be part of the force only because it is also sanctioned by the U.N.

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USA for the International Criminal Court A pressure group aimed at changing the stance of the U.S. government Office of War Crimes Issues The US State Department's website for the department involved with policy on the ICC. Coalition for the ICC A site billing itself as the primary NGO provider of online information about the International Criminal Court. The Red Cross The internationaly renowned organisation's web page on the ICC

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