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["Comitato Paul Rougeau (RM)" <prougeau at tin.it>]

Powell: U.S. To Quit Court Treaty 

Monday, May 6, 2002 


WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States will tell the United Nations this week
it is renouncing formal involvement in a treaty creating the first
permanent war crimes tribunal, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.
Powell said the Bush administration will notify U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan that the United States has no intention of ratifying the treaty and
now considers itself ``no longer bound in any way to its purpose and
objective,'' Powell said on ABC's ``This Week.''
The International Criminal Court gained the necessary international backing
to come into being when 10 nations joined 56 others last month in
announcing their ratification of the treaty negotiated in Rome in 1998.
President Clinton signed the treaty, but never submitted it to the Senate
for ratification. The Bush administration has made its opposition clear.
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said
Saturday that that opposition was expected to be formalized Monday in a
speech by Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman and at news briefing by
Pierre-Richard Prosper, the State Department's ambassador for war crimes
issues.
The United States fears the impact on American citizens, arguing that
safeguards against frivolous or politically motivated prosecutions of U.S.
soldiers and officials are not sufficient.
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, said he was dismayed by the withdrawal from the treaty. ``Beyond
the extremely problematic matter of casting doubt on the U.S. commitment to
international justice and accountability,'' Feingold said, ``these steps
actually call into question our country's credibility in all multilateral
endeavors.''
The Washington Working Group on the ICC, a coalition of organizations that
support the tribunal, issued a statement Sunday saying, ``This rash action
signals to the world that America is turning its back on decades of U.S.
leadership in prosecuting war criminals since the Nuremberg trials.'' The
coalition includes human rights organizations such as Amnesty
International-USA and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The court, to be formed this summer without U.S. participation, will fill a
gap in the international justice system first recognized by the U.N.
General Assembly in 1948 after the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials for World War
II's German and Japanese war criminals.
Tribunals have been created for special situations - like the 1994 Rwanda
genocide and war crimes in former Yugoslavia - but no mechanism existed to
hold individuals criminally responsible for serious crimes such as genocide.
``We are the leader in the world with respect to bringing people to
justice,'' Powell said. ``But ... we found that this was not a situation
that we believed was appropriate for our men and women in the armed forces
or our diplomats and political leaders.''