QUITO, Jul 29 (IPS) - The United States is using the carrot of free trade agreements to pressure countries in Latin America not to ratify the statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC), complained human rights activists and an indigenous legislator at the first Social Forum of the Americas, taking place this week in the Ecuadorian capital.
The principles on which the ICC statute is based have made huge strides in the fight against the impunity surrounding human rights abuses and ''repressive crimes'' in Latin America, said panellists in one of the seminars forming part of the Sunday through Friday regional gathering.
''There is an encouraging outlook, with legal action taken against perpetrators of human rights crimes in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Argentina,'' said Peruvian activist Francisco Soberón, with the Coalition for the ICC (CICC), a global network of over 2,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which organised Wednesday's seminar.
Soberón added that ''Colombia is the most painful situation in the region,'' as the scene of an armed conflict where abominable war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide -- precisely the crimes that fall under ICC jurisdiction -- are committed.
On Jul. 17, 1998, the Rome Statute (the ICC founding document) was signed by a majority of United Nations member states, and on Jun. 1, 2002 the Court officially began to operate in The Hague, after 60 countries ratified the treaty.
Unlike other international courts, the ICC does not prosecute states but individuals. Its jurisdiction is not retroactive, and it can only try cases involving crimes committed since it began to operate.
So far the Rome Statute has been ratified by 94 countries. Those that have failed to do so include the United States, China and Russia -- three of the permanent members on the U.N. Security Council -- as well as Israel and 16 nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The countries in the region that have not yet ratified the ICC founding treaty are the Bahamas, Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Surinam, said Mariana Rodríguez, CICC information services coordinator in Spanish.
Ecuadorian parliamentary Deputy Ricardo Ulcuango, who represents the Cayambe people and is president of the Indigenous Parliament of the Americas, pointed out that on May 6, 2002 U.S. President George W. Bush nullified his predecessor Bill Clinton's signature of the Rome Statute.
The Bush administration is also pressing countries that have ratified the ICC treaty to sign bilateral immunity agreements in which they pledge not to prosecute U.S. government officials, or members of the U.S. military taking part in U.N. peacekeeping missions or ''preemptive wars'' like the one launched against Iraq by the United States and Britain in March 2003, and not to surrender U.S. citizens to the ICC, Ulcuango complained.
''The United States is sabotaging the ICC and wants to impose double standards in the area of justice: immunity for U.S. citizens and penal responsibility for citizens of other nations,'' said the lawmaker.
Ulcuango and Soberón both warned that Washington could pressure Latin American governments to sign the bilateral immunity agreements in negotiations of bilateral or regional free trade treaties.
The U.S. government has been putting a priority on bilateral free trade deals due to the discrepancies that emerged in the talks on the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which is to link 34 countries in the hemisphere -- all except Cuba -- as of late 2005. The participating countries have only been able to reach agreement on a watered-down framework, dubbed ''FTAA lite''.
The United States has already signed bilateral trade agreements with Mexico and Chile and with the five countries of the Central American Common Market -- Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. It is also negotiating an accord with Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and plans to do the same with Bolivia.
''As part of a frontal campaign against the ICC, the U.S. government will try to convince the countries of Latin America that if they want to benefit from free trade accords they have to sign these immunity -- or 'impunity' -- agreements,'' said Soberón.
Ulcuango reported that a group of lawmakers in Ecuador is pushing for a resolution by the Ecuadorian Congress that would prohibit President Lucio Gutiérrez from signing bilateral immunity accords with the U.S. government.
The Indigenous Parliament of the Americas, created in 1987, is carrying out a similar campaign to get countries to ratify the Rome Statute and to demand the full application of the ICC in nations that have already ratified the treaty, the legislator added.
But Ulcuango and Soberón agreed that pressure by lawmakers will be insufficient if civil society does not actively mobilise against the bilateral immunity agreements that the Bush administration is seeking to impose.
Panellists in the seminar noted that when Colombia ratified the Rome Statute in August 2002, it invoked a clause that would allow perpetrators of war crimes to remain outside the jurisdiction of the ICC for seven years -- although that measure was interpreted more as a move designed to facilitate the peace talks that the government was then engaged in with the main rebel group.
Ecuadorian activist Ana Lucía Herrera, with the ICC Women's Caucus for Gender Justice, meanwhile, highlighted the struggle by women's groups in Colombia to denounce and draw attention to crimes of sexual violence committed by all parties to the civil war: the military, right-wing paramilitary militias and leftist insurgents.
The activist also stressed that the original draft of the Rome Statute did not specifically include gender-based violence within ICC jurisdiction, but that such crimes were incorporated due to pressure from the women's movement and activists like Alda Fazio from Costa Rica.
''The ICC statute is one of the most advanced in terms of gender justice, within the scope of international humanitarian law,'' said Herrera.
Violence against women in armed conflicts includes rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy and abortion, sexual mutilation and other crimes, often carried out in the context of ''ethnic cleansing'' operations.
In the 1994 conflict in the east-central African country of Rwanda, an estimated 500,000 women were raped. Rape was also a widely practised crime in the wars of the ex-Yugoslavia.
''However, gender violence remained invisible, silenced, even in the Geneva Conventions, while thanks to the ICC it is receiving attention today,'' said Herrera.
In its 1991 report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Chile, for example, failed to highlight crimes against women committed under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), the activist pointed out.
And while the Truth Commission in Guatemala reported in 2000 that thousands of mainly indigenous women were raped before they were killed, as part of the military repression in that country's 1960-1996 civil war, it did not make recommendations for bringing the perpetrators to justice in those cases.
But Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which documented human rights crimes committed by state security forces as well as the insurgents from 1980 to 2000, did mention crimes of sexual violence in its final report -- ''something that was made possible thanks to the advances made by the ICC statute,'' said Herrera.
Related links:
Coalition for the ICC
Questions about the ICC - Human Rights Watch
Social Forum of the Americas
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