A GLOBAL CRIMINAL COURT

(International Herald Tribune, 22-11-1994)

After extensive and complicated preparations, the United Nations ad hoc tribunal to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia is just now getting started. Two weeks ago the massacres in Rwanda were added to its jurisdiction. But these two examples of human rights disasters are by no means the only ones deserving the attention of the international community. What of the crimes of the Haitian junta? The Indonesian army in East Timor? Turkish and Iraqi persecution of the Kurds? It would be impossible to convene ad hoc tribunals to investigate all these -yet it seems inherently unfair that some conflicts are singled out for world attention when others, whose victims are every bit as human, are ignored.

For years, a solution to this problem has been discussed in world forums: an international criminal court to deal with war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly other intractable problems like hijacking, drug trafficking and international crimes against the environment.

In 1992 the UN Security Council unanimously requested that the International Law Commission start to draw up the terms for an agreement to set up such a court. Since then there has been a succession of study groups and high-level meetings. The International Law Commission has prepared a draft statute. Most of the international community now agrees that it is time to get serious but not the United States.

Two competing resolutions are now before the UN General Assembly. One, sponsored by the United States, calls for yet another ad hoc committee, which would just postpone the process. The other, sponsored by a group of European, Asian and Latin American countries, as well as Canada, calls for a preparatory committee to begin negotiating the text for such an agreement. The United States is reluctant to back this resolution, for various reasons. The Justice Department, the Defense Department and conservatives in Congress all have understandable worries about how such a court might infringe on America's sovereignty. But such problems can be addressed in a preparatory committee. Agreeing to such a committee would not commit the United States to anything.

The disasters in the Balkans and Rwanda, sadly, will not be the last of their kind. In the absence of such a permanent court, future human rights outrages will demand the convening of more ad hoc tribunals - an expensive, timeconsuming and cumbersome process. Finally, it looks bad for the United States to lecture other countries on human rights and international standards of decent behavior and then be the one significant holdout against a mechanism to uphold those standards.

Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg trials. It would be a fitting time to begin in earnest on an agreement by all nations to subject themselves to minimal standards of human behavior.

(THE NEW YORK TIMES)