EU Commisionner For a Strong Global Court

By Barry James

International Herald Tribune

BRUSSELS - United Nations negotiators begin a fresh round of preparatory talks Monday aimed at creating a permanent International Criminal Court to investigate and judge cases of genocide and other gross crimes against humanity.

The talks are expected to lead to a full-scale diplomatic conference in Rome next June that will establish the nature and competency of the court.

The initiative is backed by the European Union, whose commissioner for humanitarian affairs, Emma Bonino, flew to New York over the weekend to lobby for the court to be made as independent as possible. She said in an interview here that several countries, including the United States and France, were pressing for the court to be placed under the control of governments or the UN Security Council - a move that, in her view, would seriously weaken the credibility of the court.

The European Union has thrown its weight behind the conference, which will coincide with the 50th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention.

Mrs. Bonino said she was confident that the court would be created. Public opinion is swinging behind the initiative, she added, just as it did with the internationalthe campaign to ban land mines.

Her fear now is that the court will be limited by a veto power of the Security Council, which she said would subject it to undue pressure from the major powers and limit its effectiveness and credibility.

The United States wants the Security Council to be the arbiter of which cases go to the courts. It is also concerned that if the court has too broad a jurisdiction, it could open the way to frivolous complaints about U.S. global deployment of military power.

But Mrs. Bonino said such concerns were without foundation, since the court would act only when countries failed to take action. France, although also in, favor of the court, also wants serious limits on its scope. It says cases should only be brought with the assent of the states where crimes take place, where the victims lived and where the alleged perpetrators were resident. At the heart of France's concern is its reluctance to see troops involved in delicate peacekeeping operations having to explain their actions to anyone other than their senior officers.

For her part, Mrs. Bonino said that the court would be stillborn if it was "loaded with all the problems in the world." The court's work should be confined to "very well-defined crimes" covered by conventions signed by most of the countries in the world, she said. The permanent court would build on the experience of the UN ad hoc tribunals set up to investigate and judge crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, president of the Hague tribunal, which is judging crimes in the former Yugoslavia, said at a Brussels symposium last week that if a decision were taken to convert the ad hoc tribunal into a permanent court, we could take it on, and I would be ready. But she warned that the efficiency of a permanent court could be impaired if, like the ad hoc tribunals, it had no power to order or make arrests.

Mrs. Bonino said the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals had demonstrated that international justice works. "it is not as though we are starting from scratch, or with only a vague idea or a theory," she said.

That some of the principal war crimes suspects - such as Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian-Serb leader - have avoided arrest, could not be blamed on the trial, which has no Police or Power to enforce indictments, Mrs. Bonino said.

She said that it was vital to ensure the independence of the prosecutor, so that even if the alleged perpetrators of crimes could not be arrested, evidence could be gathered and held for an eventual trial.

A leading campaigner for establishing an international court, Gijs de Vries, president of the Liberal group in the European Parliament, said a permanent tribunal with global jurisdiction was needed for three reasons: "First, to satisfy the fundamental human need for dignity and justice; second, to deter potential future war criminals, and third, to counter the failure of states to bring such criminals to justice."

He added that the independence of the court's prosecutor to investigate crimes, on the basis of information supplied by individuals or humanitarian organizations, if necessary, would be vital to the credibility of the court. "We must not allow the International Criminal Court to be made subservient to a Security Council which has left Pol Pot unpunished," he said.