Permanent World Court Pushed to Spur Justice

By Tracy Wilkinson

Sunday, May 18, 1997

Mass murderers run for political office. Accused masterminds of genocide

run countries. And the rank-and-file war criminal is likely to run a local

police station.

Such is the state of war crimes prosecution in the world's halls of justice. Plenty of crimes, few convictions. And then more crimes, torture, rape, forced labor. It is a bleak picture, human rights advocates say, one that is giving rise to demands for a permanent institution to hold the guilty accountable.

The movement to establish a permanent international criminal court has taken on new urgency with the hc Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda - and with the inability of the world ~mmunity to mete out justice.

Advocates in the movement are watching closely the laborious efforts at The Hague, where the international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has just issued its first verdict in three years of work.

But The Hague tribunal and its counterpart for Rwanda, which is based in Tanzania, are ad hoc prosecutors, created for the alleged crimes committed in those two conflicts. Like the Nuremberg tribunal that emerged from World War II, these bodies eventually will dissolve.

A permanent court, advocates argue, would make the potential for justice more of a constant. It would act as a deterrent, they argue, because it would make punishment more imminent.

"The more immediate the threat of indictment and trial, the more likely a potential mass murderer will think twice before embarking on slaughter," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which is one of the leading proponents of the idea.

A permanent court is well on the way to being set up, though its powers still are under debate. In about a year, the United Nations Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court is expected to draft a treaty that creates the permanent body.

The Hague tribunal, meantime, is seen as an experiment, a "laboratory" in the words of prosecutors here, that can serve as a prototype for the permanent court. Consequently, its failure could doom the larger project.

Such failure looms large: Of 74 indicted war crimes suspects in the former Yugoslavia, only eight are in The Hague's custody. Western capitals whose troops are on the ground in Bosnia refuse to order the arrest of the suspects, and the governments involved Croatia, Yugoslavia and the Serb and Muslim parts of Bosnia - have refused all but nominal cooperation.

Although momentum for the international court grows, resistance has come from powerful countries, most notably the United States.