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02 June 2010
New U.S. Cooperation for International Criminal Court
Washington — Although the United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Obama administration is looking for ways to cooperate with the international body to increase its effectiveness while also encouraging increased capacities in local judicial systems to prosecute atrocities and human rights violations.
The State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Stephen Rapp, and legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh are leading the U.S. observer delegation to the May 31-June 11 conference in Kampala, Uganda, reviewing the 1998 Rome Statute that established the ICC. They told reporters June 2 that the United States strongly supports accountability for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Koh said that after years of resistance to the ICC, the U.S. push to cooperate with the court under the Obama administration can be seen as part of President Obama’s broader agenda to increase its engagement with international institutions, also exemplified by U.S. participation in the December 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen and its election to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Rapp said the United States supports international justice “focused on atrocity crime,” but wants to ensure that U.S. and international assistance can also be targeted “to strengthen national systems and to have these cases prosecuted close to the victims and the affected communities.”
The ICC is a “court of last resort,” he said. It should be used “only when there is no will or capacity” on the local or national level, “and then only [for] the most serious offenders, with the national system being reinforced to handle the rest of the accountability issue.”
But in the future, “when it comes to situations where mass atrocities are committed and where there is no possibility of achieving justice at the national level and you need to go to an international level to have accountability, it’s the ICC where that will happen,” Rapp said. “For that reason we want to look for ways to engage with the ICC to make sure that it’s effective.”
For example, the ambassador pointed to recent African conflicts such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan where “it was far more dangerous to be an innocent woman or child that it was to be a soldier.”
Koh said that in its approach to the ICC, the United States has a “long-term commitment to promoting accountability by supporting the responsible development of international mechanisms of criminal justice.”
The United States signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but the treaty requires ratification by the U.S. Senate before the country can be bound by the agreement.
Rapp said the United States “takes a long time when it comes to international treaties and conventions, and studies things very carefully” before a president of either party will submit a treaty for Senate approval. “We’re nowhere near that point,” he added, but the Obama administration is “looking for ways to support this court constructively” as one of the Rome Statute’s observer nations.
Rapp said the United States has been participating in the Rwanda Tribunal and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. For the war crimes trials covering killings and abuses that occurred in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, Rapp said, the United States has paid one-quarter of the tribunal’s costs and provided it with assistance for law enforcement, intelligence sharing and victim assistance.
“Whether we can provide all of that in regard to the ICC is a matter of study under our law, but we’re going to work to try to find ways that we can … support these prosecutions to make sure that the people who are committing these mass atrocities are held to account,” Rapp said.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
