Bush Admin's Irrational Hatred of the ICC

[housewolf]

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The Bush administration can't be seen as being "against" prosecuting those responsible for genocide, so it has fielded two seperate ideas for bringing the guilty to justice to counter the ICC referral. First they’ve recommended that an independent, ad hoc tribunal be set up somewhere in the region; second, they’ve toyed with the idea of referring the cases to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.

Considering that the ICC is competent to try these kinds of crimes and is already open for business, setting up an ad hoc tribunal for Sudan would be unnecessarily costly and time consuming. Because the duplicative process would be entirely at the United States' urging, we would have to pick up most, if not all, of the tab. On the other hand, referring the Darfur war crimes charges to Rwanda would set the genocide trials up for failure. Unlike its sister court for the former Yugoslavia, the Rwanda tribunal hasn’t been much of a success. Referring certain cases to national courts and training local judges should remain the Rwandan tribunal’s top priority.

Hawks in the Bush administration fear that allowing crimes in Darfur to be tried at the ICC might confer some sort of American legitimacy over the court. This fear displays a level of irrationality towards the court to which, sadly, I’ve grown accustomed. Here we have an operating court with some of the world’s best trained investigators, prosecutors, and judges. Not only that, European countries would basically foot the bill for the whole show. Yet the Bush administration still won't go along. They are being handed a win-win situation for dealing with the genocide in Darfur, yet they are seemingly too blinded by their own ideological opposition to the very idea of an international criminal court that they can’t fathom that the court, in practical terms, might actually serve U.S. interests.


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http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/01/index.html#005336