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July 14, 1998, Heather M. Ross (Knight Ridder / Tribune)
I'm disappointed with our government's position on a permanent International Criminal Court.
The purpose of the proposed court, under consideration at a month-long 161-nation conference winding up this week in Rome, is to prosecute those who commit crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
This permanent court would replace the ad hoc courts that have been set up to prosecute those who committed these crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. However, the United States is not fully cooperating in the formation of such a court.
The U.S. plan for the court involves a "states' consent" policy. For somebody to be prosecuted under this policy, the victim's state, the suspect's state, the state where the crime occurred, and the state making the charge would all have to be in agreement. The United States does not want the court's jurisdiction to automatically extend to war crimes or crimes against humanity. And for genocide, the United States wants the court to have automatic jurisdiction only if the suspect country has signed the treaty.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, said, "We must not turn an international criminal court or its prosecutor into a human-rights ombudsman open to, and responsible for, responding to any and all complaints from any source."
But under this plan, nobody would have been brought to justice for the massacres in the former Yugoslavia. Nobody would have been tried for filling mass graves with Rwandan children. And very few, if any, of the people responsible for killing 11 million civilians in
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