UN Council deadlocked over court for Darfur trials

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 17 (Reuters) – The U.N. Security Council is 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.

Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations Wang Guangya speaks after his country abstained during the U.N. Security Council vote, at the United Nations in New York, September 18, 2004. The Security Council adopted a resolution on Saturday that threatens oil sanctions against Sudan if Khartoum does not stop atrocities in the Darfur region. The vote was 11-0, with four abstentions, on the U.S.-drafted resolution that also calls for an expanded African Union monitoring force and a probe into human rights abuses including genocide. China, Russia, Algeria and Pakistan abstained. (AP).

For the first time, 12 of the 15 Security Council members decided that perpetrators of atrocities should go before the new International Criminal Court in The Hague, which the Bush administration opposes.

Opposition during consultations late on Wednesday also came from China and Algeria, which agreed with Sudan that Khartoum should use its own courts and want no referral to either the ICC or to a U.S.-proposed new ad hoc court in Tanzania.

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 it has lobbied for a new court for Sudan be convened in Arusha, Tanzania, using facilities of the 1994 Rwanda genocide tribunal.

“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 on Monday that would impose an arms embargo, an 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.

“HOPE FOR PEACE”

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 and 2 million 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,” Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights told the council on Wednesday in formally introducing 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, Tanzania and Benin backed the ICC but said there was a need for council unity. Britain strongly backed the ICC but emphasized the entire council had to decide.

The meeting came after Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy representative, told Reuters the EU might fail in its bid to refer the Darfur crisis to the ICC because of Washington’s opposition and may have to settle for the Tanzanian 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.

It is also uncertain how China, which has veto power, would vote. All council members except China and the United States have signed or ratified the treaty establishing the ICC, the world’s first permanent global criminal court to try individuals for genocide and war crimes.