EU call for international criminal court ‘with teeth’

Date: 11/12/1997

By Leyla Linton

THE genocide in Rwanda and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia which have gone unpunished are motivating an EU campaign for an international criminal court with teeth.

Humanitarian Commissioner Emma Bonino and Gijs de Vries, president of the Liberal Group in the European Parliament, are just two of the leading EU figures spearheading efforts to ensure that the new court will be powerful enough.

They want to ensure that it would be able to try people accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes.

Wilfried Martens, president of the European People's Party in the Parliament, his Socialist Group counterpart Pauline Green, and former Commission Presidents Jacques Delors and Gaston Thorn have also joined more than 60 other international personalities in calling on the general assembly of the United Nations to establish the court at a conference in Rome next year.

Campaigners are pleased that the machinery to set up the court has gained momentum, but they remain anxious to ensure that it is independent from members of the UN's security council.

De Vries told a symposium last month in Brussels that there were serious deficiencies in the current draft statute for the court. First, he said, the draft would give the security council the right to block action by the court in situations which were being dealt with by the security council. This, he argued, “would fatally weaken the credibility of the court. It would permit the permanent members of the security council to shield their own nationals from prosecution.” The draft would also only give the court jurisdiction over genocide, and not war crimes or crimes against humanity, which De Vries described as “clearly unacceptable”.

Finally, he and fellow campaigners are unhappy that the court's prosecutor would not be able to initiate investigations, with this power reserved for the security council and individual member states.

The European Parliament has voted in favour of a resolution calling for EU money to help with long-term financing of the court. But MEPs stress that it must be “strong and independent, not subject to vetoes in the UN security council, and able to investigate cases and present indictments on its own initiative and without the prior consent of state parties”.

Italian Radical Alliance MEP Gianfranco dell'Alba says that while there is consensus internationally on the principle of the court, there are serious differences on its precise powers. He believes that the obstacles to the setting up of the court “are only political, military and diplomatic, not legal”.

Dell'Alba insists that the existence of supranational justice is crucial and points to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg which, he says, has given every Italian in every village an awareness that they are not entirely powerless before the state. “It is so important to have a deterrent for international criminals and to break this 'sacrosanct' principle of absolute sovereignty,” he added.