The United States is letting itself become a dropout in the movement toward international justice.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court goes into force today, beginning the court’s jurisdiction over genocide and crimes against humanity that include murder, torture, deportation, rape, slavery and apartheid. This is a landmark moment for international justice — and one in which the United States is conspicuously absent.
On May 6, the Bush administration announced its decision to withdraw the U.S. signature from an international treaty supporting the ICC. The treaty had been signed by 139 nations, including the entire European Union, Russia, and all of America’s NATO allies except Turkey. With this decision, the United States has not only sacrificed its role in shaping the ICC and maintaining an ability to protect the rights of U.S. citizens from within the court — it has forsaken our nation’s legacy of pioneering leadership in international law that began with the post-World War II Nuremberg trials.
The primary U.S. objection to the International Criminal Court is that it will interfere with national sovereignty and that U.S. government and military personnel will be unfairly targeted by nations in which the U.S. has been an active or covert military presence.
The ICC is not intended to supplant U.S. courts or revoke the Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. The U.S. itself played an important role in defining the types of cases that would be brought before the court, establishing rigorous criteria for judges and jurists, and installing a system of checks against "spurious complaints, investigations and prosecutions." It appears that the ICC will act in accordance with fundamental standards of due process, and the accused should get a fair trial.Most importantly, as long as a nation’s own judicial system carries out a conscientious investigation of the charges against an individual, the ICC will not even take up the case. Unless America refuses to prosecute known war criminals on U.S. soil, such as despots who have fled the countries they once ruled abusively, we have nothing to fear from the ICC. Discussions about individual American soldiers being prosecuted for crimes abroad are fantasy — unless we believe the U.S. military will suddenly abandon internal discipline.
In his May 6 announcement, Under Secretary for Political Affairs Marc Grossman Grossman stated that "nations with accountable, democratic governments do not abuse their own people or wage wars of conquest and terror." For this reason, U.S. failure to support an international tribunal that will bring real violators of human rights to justice — like Chile’s Pinochet, Argentina’s Miguel Angel Cavallo, and Chad’s Hissene Habre — is an especially unfortunate decision, made all the more regrettable by the fact that we helped prop up their unsavory regimes.
Even for well-meaning people in allied countries, our absence from the international court reinforces the worry that America has little appreciation of the concept of international justice, unless we are seeking retaliation for acts against us. Particularly in the wake of Sept. 11, it is important to demonstrate that acts of terrorism and crimes against humanity are intolerable anywhere. Although the International Criminal Court will carry out its functions with or without U.S. support, our failure to participate in the process is a sad day for a nation that helped model the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after its own Bill of Rights.
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