HERALD TRIBUNE

SATURDAY-SUNDAY, JUNE 13-14,1998

EDITORIALS/OPINION

A Permanent Court

For more than a century, people have entertained a vision of a permanent international criminal court that would try the perpetrators of great crimes who could not otherwise be held to account in their home countries.

Like Pol Pot and Radovan Karadzic: the worst.

The trial of German war criminals at Nuremberg gave the idea a first life.

The end of the Cold War gave it a fresh opening. In the human rights movement, it found a constituency. Ethnic conflicts made it urgent. A United Nations conference to write the vision into reality opens in Rome on Monday.

The idea has its appeal, along with its limitations. An international criminal court could deter and, that failing, punish future instances of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. But several threshold and procedural questions still need to be addressed.

Why not stick with the one at a time, cut to size pattern of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda war crimes tribunals rather than set up another permanent and expensive United Nations bureaucracy? "Tribunal fatigue" and the possibilities of economics of scale are cited, along with tile preferences of General Assembly members who resist Security Council control over the two existing tribunals. But these claims do not sweep all before them.

In fact, a strong Security Council role is essential for the United States to meet its unique global responsibilities for peace and security, humanitarianism and rescue, counterterrorism, counter-drugs, counterproliferation and other post-Cold War missions. The far-flung military deployments that serve these interests cannot be left exposed to mischievous criminal legal proceeding.

The dismal precedent of NATO's hesitancy to use its massive military superiority to round up all Yugoslav war crimes suspects also must be confronted. It goes to a matter untouched by court procedures: political will.

What reason is there, beyond NATO's very slow progress in Bosnia, to expect that a permanent court could elicit more courage from its members than they are showing now? It is easier to deal with a prosecutor run amok - a prosecutor can be legally constrained - than with a membership that shrinks from armed conflict.

These tensions are familiar to the Clinton administration. Many foreign friends of the United States are pulling one way, while skeptics at home - and in the Senate, which must ratify - are leaning the other. The administration is struggling to present a treaty that would at once respect American interests and win American support. It is probably right in believing that a judgment on whether a permanent criminal court is either essential or feasible awaits resolution of the myriad differences in the text that the negotiators will sit down to for a month in Rome.

- THE WASHINGTON POST.