The Washington Post - World News

Thursday, June 18, 1998

CLOUT WITHOUT A COUNTRY: THE POWER OF INTERNATIONAL LOBBIES

By Charles Trueheart

Washington Post Foreign Service

ROME, June 17-- At 27, shambling and Kennedyesque, Marco Cappato navigates the diplomatic world with all the confidence and authority of a nation's ambassador.

His nation is only an office, a cell phone and a global network of like-minded human rights activists. But Cappato and No Peace Without Justice, the young organization he represent, at the United Nations, have had more of a role than many countries in shaping the debate here over creating a permanent world court to try war criminals for genocide.

Cappato's group has done high-impact, work-lobbing to set a firm date for the Rome conference now under way here, collecting the signatures of legislators, writing newspaper broadsides, securing the Dalai Lama's blessing, educating diplomats and jurists, working the media, monitoring the negotiation and even placing a few of its own people on national delegations to the diplomatic conference.

"The influence of France on African counties has been effective," Cappato said. "Why shouldn't we be just as effective?"

Delegates of several major powers acknowledge that No Peace Without Justice and some 200 other non-governmental international lobbies are agenda-setting players in the late-century world of global summits on big issues like genocide, women's rights, population and the earth.

"Let me tell you, they are very, very, very important here," said one Western ambassador with grudging admiration.

Collectively called NGOs, for non-governmental organizations,

these international pressure groups have coalesced to steer the way the world's nations set policies for international law and conduct in the 1990s. The NGOs' potency was most striking in the drive they led to secure an international land mine ban last year, an effort against the initial better

judgment of most major and minor powers.

But they have left their mark elsewhere as well. In regional crises such as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or last year's strife in the Congo, international relief agencies-not national governments have played the central role in aiding victims. That pattern is being repeated today in northern Albania, where international aid organizations are leading efforts to assist refugees fleeing the fighting in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

Opening the five-week conference here, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan paid tribute to the way the work of diplomats and statesmen is being opened up to a broader and more contentious public through NGOs.

"In my judgment, this is a new diplomacy" he told reporters here. "We at the U.N. travel the world encouraging participatory democracy. I think we should apply a bit of it to ourselves."

The most important organizations, Anmesty International and Human Rights Watch, might as well be major countries for the clout they have in laying the intellectual and political groundwork for the kind of permanent court they want-making what they term "bilateral' calls on foreign ministers around the world, briefing lawyers and jurists and politicians, producing reams of legal documents and deploying teams of experts.

They are supplying, free of charge, the demand of smaller, poorer countries who want a negotiating voice here but don't have the resources to support their participation.

Mona Rishmawi of the International Commission of jurists said NGOs and the media work hand in hand to open up the process.

"Politicians prefer to do their work behind closed doors so the electorate doesn't know what's going on and can't point out the contradictions," she said. "But these are major policy questions that the public should know about, and we and you make it simple for them."

Interest in establishing a permanent court was quickened four years ago when U-N. criminal tribunals were established to investigate war crimes in what had been Yugoslavia and Rwanda. A loose coalition of academics, jurists and human rights organizations persuaded the United Nations to put the issue on its agenda.

Activists for an international criminal court described regional conferences they organized starting in 1995, often working closely with local NGOs and state governments. Lawyers and diplomats, including many of the people who eventually would constitute a major bloc of votes at this conference of more than 150 nations, were invited, often with all expenses paid, to seminars on the proposed International Criminal Court.

No Peace Without Justice went even further. It has provided more than a score of Countries - Cappato named only Senegal - with delegates themselves, skilled people from another country serving national delegations as legal advisers, with their expenses paid by the NGO.

In effect, the NGOs are providing their expertise to needy governments.

"Privatizing ideas can be good, especially for the weaker nations who don't have the means to be informed," said Cappato, whose group is an offshoot of Italy's Transnational Radical Party.

For major powers, aggressive and well-financed NGOs can often be a "nuisance," Rishmawi said. But they are also an influent resource. Even wealthy countries are seeing their diplomatic personnel reduced and have begun to rely on NGOs for guidance and back-ground.

"We've thought through the issues. We have developed substantial position papers and circulated them to capitals. And we have an understanding of the strategic issues: Who is meeting with whom in which capitals and what are they saying to each other?' said Richard Dicker, Human Rights Watch's man at the Rome conference.

NGOs have been around a long time-the Red Cross got its start in 1863 - but came into their own modern political juggernaut in 199 at the Earth Summit in Rio Janeiro. They have brought their agendas to bear on a dozen major conferences since. Their greatest triumph was the negotiation in Oslo to ban land mines. The achievement won the NGO coalition that lobbied for a land mine ban and its American leader, Jody Williams, the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Rome, some 225 nongovernmental groups have set aside their differences and special interests (women's rights, children, environment, nuclear arms) to agree on 10 major points about what they will fight for in any treaty-generally speaking, a stronger court and more independent prosecutor than most major nations are prepared to accept.

"We agree on so much we shouldn't concentrate on what we don't agree on," said William R. Pace of the World Federalist Movement.

By coordinating their criminal court activity, the NGOs became a potent political force. "I think governments, friendly and unfriendly, recognize the strength in numbers that we represent," Dicker said.