ISRAELI UN DELEGATION CONCERNED OVER INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT PROPOSAL

BYLINE: Marilyn Henry

THE JERUSALEM POST

August 13, 1996 Tuesday

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The UN opened a two-week session yesterday designed to iron out a proposal for a standing international criminal court, 50 years after the Nuremberg tribunal. with an agenda that includes discussions on crimes against humanity, terrorism and the definition of genocide, the prospects for the proposal were bleak, observes said.

"You can't get 185 nations to agree on how to milk a cow, let alone solve these problems," said Benjamin Ferencz, a former Nuremberg prosecutor who has written the standard texts on international criminal courts.

The Israeli delegation is concerned that such a court would become a political tool. "We cannot create a situation which will allow individual states to make use of the inherent jurisdiction of the court to harass other states for political and propaganda purposes by filing spurious or baseless charges," the Israeli delegate, Hemda Golan, said in an earlier debate about the court.

States should have the right to refuse to surrender a person for a number of reasons, including to maintain the security or other essential interests of the requested country, Golan also said.

There are enough other contentious issues to keep delegations wrangling for years, although a proposal was expected to be presented to the General Assembly, which opens next month.

Some delegations want a sharper definition of the crime of genocide, although the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime and Genocide defines it. "You don't need a political body to tell you that someone is committing genocide, " said Thomas Buergenthal of the George Washington University Law school, an authority on human rights law. "All of those crimes are perfectly defined."