United Nations in deadlock over court for Darfur trials
By Valentine Marc Nkwame
The U.N. Security Council is now split over where to try war crime cases from
Sudan's Darfur region, with Europe, China and the United States, pushing
different options and diplomats seeing no easy solution.
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UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan during
his visit to ICTR. |
For the first time, 12 of the 15 Security Council members
decided that perpetrators of atrocities should go before the new International
Criminal Court ICC in The Hague, which the Bush administration opposes.
According to the International news Agency- Reuters, the opposition during the
last week's consultations, also came from China and Algeria, both of which,
agreed with Sudan that Khartoum should use its own courts and want no referral
to either the ICC or to the U.S.-proposed, UN-Tribunal court currently sitting
in Arusha.
Although the Bush administration has been in the forefront of recommending tough
action on Sudan, it rejects using the ICC, which it fears could bring political
prosecutions against Americans abroad.
Instead, America has lobbied for a new court for Sudan be convened here in
Arusha, using facilities of the 1994 Rwanda genocide tribunal, based at the
Arusha International Conference Centre (AICC) complex.
"Our position hasn't changed," said Richard Grenell, spokesman for the U.S.
mission to the United Nations. "We want immediate sanctions and that is what we
are pushing for," Grenell said. "We certainly want to hold them accountable and
the exact mechanism we will talk about later."
The United States proposed a draft resolution last Monday that would impose an
arms embargo, and asset freeze on violators of a cease-fire in Darfur and
restrictions on offensive government military flights. But the draft omitted a
venue for the trials.
The issue of prosecutions became acute after a U.N.-appointed panel last month
gave Secretary General Kofi Annan a list of 51 suspects and evidence of
killings, pillaging and rape in Darfur where at least 70,000 people died, while
over 2 million others were forced out of their homes. The panel of law experts
recommended the ICC.
"There is no hope for sustainable peace in Darfur, without immediate access to
justice," the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, told the
council last Wednesday, while presenting the report.
"This is a case where to indict and arrest certain persons could actually
prevent the commission of crimes and actually save lives and protect victims."
According to diplomats at the meeting, France, Greece, Denmark, Brazil and
Argentina strongly backed the ICC.
"The ICC has the mandate, the capacity and the funding to ensure swift and
cost-effective prosecution," Danish Ambassador Ellen Margrethe Loj said on
Thursday.
Japan and Philippines supported a referral to the court while Russia, Romania,
Benin and Tanzania, backed the ICC, but said there was a need for council unity.
Britain strongly backed the ICC but emphasized that, the entire council had to
decide.
The meeting came after Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy
representative, told Reuters that, the EU might fail in its bid to refer the
Darfur crisis to the ICC because of Washington's opposition and may forced to
settle for the Arusha court option.
France's U.N. ambassador, Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, said a referral to the ICC
could "certainly not" be ruled out yet. He and other EU envoys apparently hope
the United States might abstain on an ICC vote if offered an exemption from
prosecution in Darfur, although there is little sign of this.
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