Opinion - Editorials

DUPLICITY ON DARFUR

WHEN THE INTERNATIONAL Criminal Court was signed into existence in 2000, the United States under Bill Clinton was among the last to join up. Six months later, the new Bush administration pulled out of the Rome Statute, the international treaty that set up the court. It swiftly followed this up with bilateral agreements with several countries including India — also a non-signatory — that committed the governments of these countries against turning in American military or government personnel to the ICC. This is why the U.S. decision to abstain from the vote and thus enable the passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution to send war crime suspects in Sudan's Darfur region to the ICC bears the strong scent of double standards. Sudan, like the U.S. and India, is not party to the Rome Statute. Written into the treaty is a provision that the Security Council can approve ICC prosecution of nationals from countries that are not signatories to it. But the real icing on the duplicity was the guarantee that the Bush administration managed to get in return for its co-operation that no U.S. government or military personnel (or their counterparts from any other non-signatory country) serving in Sudan would ever be brought before the court.

The wheeling-dealing by which the U.S. has managed to retain its exceptionalism to the ICC while assisting "to end the climate of impunity in Sudan" makes a complete mockery of the ideals that informed the setting up of a permanent international criminal court to try perpetrators of the gravest of crimes against humanity. The Bush administration opposes the ICC on the ground that it is an "unaccountable" court that could be used to settle political grudges against the U.S. It took two months of trans-Atlantic diplomatic effort to forge a compromise between American reluctance to legitimise the court and its desire for strong action in Darfur against what it has characterised as genocide. Regrettably, champions of human rights such as Amnesty International have criticised the resultant precedent-setting resolution of the Security Council only feebly; this reflects a belief that without this compromise, action against suspected war criminals in Darfur would not be possible. In a sense, the absurdity of the situation seems only to justify India's refusal to sign the Rome Statute: a basic objection was that granting powers to the Security Council to refer cases to the ICC, or to block them, was unacceptable especially if its members were not all signatories to the treaty; and that it provided escape routes for those accused of serious crimes but with clout in the U.N. body. India also argued that giving the Security Council power to refer cases from a non-signatory country to the ICC was against the Law of the Treaties under which no country can be bound by the provisions of a treaty it has not signed.

This is not to say that Darfur is not a fit case for the international court. In spite of tremendous world pressure, the janjaweed Arab militias backed by the Khartoum regime continue to attack the non-Arab inhabitants of the region. According to the U.N., the conflict has created 2.4 million refugees and 180,000 people have died of starvation and disease alone. Action by the ICC against those behind this conflict can prove exemplary and help in preventing similar situations in the future, but only if all people, irrespective of nationality, are seen as equal before the court. It is unfortunate that the Security Council, with its expedient resolution, should have put paid to that prospect.

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