By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, July 2, 2002 -- U.S. troops will continue
performing U.N. peacekeeping missions in Bosnia despite
senior DoD officials' concerns about the lack of legal
protections for American troops under the recently
established International Criminal Court.

Established July 1, the ICC was formed to prosecute war
criminals and dictators alleged to have committed genocide,
war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some 138 countries
signed on to create the organization, which is to be based
in The Hague, the Netherlands.

However, the U.S. government won't ratify or join the ICC,
senior DoD officials said today at a Pentagon briefing.
They cited misgivings that the ICC doesn't contain
sufficient legal protections for American service members,
while implying its reach could also be improperly employed
as a political weapon against America. The ICC currently
has 74 member-countries.

"Our principal objections to the ICC treaty are that it
subjects U.S. nationals - and in particular the risk is
great for our armed forces - to prosecution by prosecutors
in a court that are not accountable to any kind of
authority that we could hold accountable as a country,"
said a senior DoD official at the briefing.

"The ICC treaty creates a situation where our people could
be prosecuted for crimes that are defined by the parties to
the treaty," he continued, "and nobody in our Congress
would have a voice in the definition of those crimes.

"And yet Americans could be prosecuted criminally for
violating these purported crimes."

Americans prosecuted under the ICC "would not be entitled
to all of the protections that our Constitution affords" in
criminal trials, the official pointed out.

The ICC could prosecute a U.S. service member for a crime,
even if a U.S. military court martial has acquitted the
service member for the same crime, the official noted.

The ICC treaty, the official said, claims to apply even to
countries that aren't parties.

"This is really a radical - I would say an astonishing -
innovation in international law, and a very unwelcome
development, that a number of countries would arrogate to
themselves the right to adopt a treaty and impose it on
states that haven't signed on, that haven't become parties
of the treaty," he said.

Such a legal concept "is a deviation from hundreds of years
of international legal practice … an innovation that
violates the principles of sovereignty that have been basic
to relations among states for centuries," the official
said.

The U.S. Defense and State departments would seek to work
through the U.N., and agreements with other countries, to
mitigate any possible adverse effects of ICC policy to
American troops, the senior official said.

At an earlier Pentagon briefing, Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld said the existence of the ICC "is a threat to
civilian, military individuals from the United States of
America, regardless of whether they're doing peacekeeping
or war fighting."

Rumsfeld noted that the U.S. State Department is already
working "with countries to enter into bilateral
arrangements so that our forces in their countries" could
not be extradited by the ICC.

"We have to begin to find ways - multilaterally and
bilaterally - to get arranged so that our people are not
subject to that court," Rumsfeld explained. "We know in
Afghanistan people have lied and charged the Americans with
killing innocent civilians when it did not happen.

"And, we know it was weeks before we got people on the
ground and could verify that."

ICC prosecutors "have the potential for politicizing the
process," Rumsfeld said. Asking countries "to extradite
American men and women in uniform to the International
Criminal Court for trial" could be seen by some as a method
to deter the United States from deploying troops. That
scenario "would be unhelpful to the world," he said.

"We are vulnerable during this period, starting yesterday,
because we do not have those (immunity) arrangements in
place," Rumsfeld continued. "It will take some time to do
that.

"The language is being crafted now so that the Department
of State and the appropriate people can work with other
countries to see if we can find the appropriate ways to
provide that sort of immunity for our forces," the defense
secretary added.

However, "it would be inaccurate," Rumsfeld noted, to
imagine that "the United States would necessarily withdraw
from every engagement we have in the world between now and
the time that that immunity is provided … we have no plans
to do that.

"We have forces in countries all over the globe; we have no
intention of pulling back," Rumsfeld said.

The senior DoD official said he was confident that
something could be worked out. Through diplomacy, he noted,
"we can make people understand our position."

___________________