World>Terrorism & Security
posted June 24, 2004, updated 10:45 a.m.

US drops bid for war crimes immunity

Will defeat at UN lead US to veto peacekeeping missions?

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

In what The Associated Press describes as a " major retreat," the United States Wednesday dropped its attempts to win another one-year exemption to guarantee American soldiers immunity from the new International Criminal Court. Under that measure, immunity from ICC prosecution was granted to personnel in "UN-authorized operations whose home nations have not ratified the court's founding treaty."

The US withdrew a motion to that effect from the UN Security Council when it became apparent it would not win the nine votes needed for the resolution to pass.

Several council members cited the allegations of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (the negative effect of the widespread coverage of the incidents caught US diplomats off-guard, The New York Times reports), and the strong opposition of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to another extension, as the reasons behind their position.

The Arizona Republic's wire services report that the decision not to seek the exemption "marks the most concrete evidence of a diplomatic backlash against the abuses of US detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq."


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"I think it's a wise decision because clearly the council is divided on this important issue," said ambassador Wang Guangya of China. Echoing several other nations, he said the prison scandal in Iraq "certainly had an impact on council members." Ambassador Heraldo Munoz of Chile said it was important to avoid a sharp split on the council so soon after it had reached a unanimous consensus on the resolution this month authorising the June 30 transfer of power in Baghdad. "This is better than voting on such an important issue and (appearing) divided," Munoz said.

The BBC reports that Mr. Annan welcomed the US move, saying that it would help to maintain unity on the council at a difficult time.

The Independent notes that the US decision came less than 24 hours after it released " secret internal documents" on the handling of enemy prisoners. The documents were designed to show that the Bush administration had not condoned torture techniques at Abu Gharaib, but seem to have only raised as many questions about the US administration's tactics as it answered.

Even without the Security Council resolution, the US is unlikely to find any of its soldiers facing prosecution in the International Criminal Court, The New York Times reports. First the US has signed ICC exemptions with 90 nations for its soldiers – and since Iraq has not signed the ICC treaty, US soldiers could not be tried for any of their actions that took place there. While Afghanistan is a signature of the ICC treaty, The Washington Times reports, it had already signed an exemption agreement with the US.

The 94 countries that have ratified the treaty say there are enough safeguards built into the agreement – the ICC, for instance, could only be used as a "court of last resort" if a country was unwilling or unable to dispense justice itself, a highly unlikely situation for the US – to keep it from being abused.

But the Financial Times reports the US believes the ICC's powers could be used for politically motivated prosecutions of its soldiers.

CNN notes that the loss at the UN was more of a " political loss," than one that would endanger US forces abroad. Many experts feel that the greatest danger of the outcome is that the US will veto future UN peacekeeping missions. In 2002 it threatened to veto a UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia if it did not get the exemption.

"We will have to examine each of these missions case by case," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington. "We will have to look at it in terms of staffing, providing Americans to participate in peacekeeping missions, what the risk might be of prosecution by a court to which we're not party."

Reuters reports, however, that the US will have trouble saying no to UN peacekeeping missions at a time it is seeking more troops from UN nations to help in Iraq, and is also interested in UN peacekeeping operations in "Liberia, Haiti, and a future venture in Sudan."

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that the US will unilaterally grant immunity from Iraqi law to its soldiers and private contractors beyond the June 30th transfer of power date. The Post also reports that Iraqi officials do not support the US move, and that the issue of US immunity has become an extremely contentious one in the region, with an already long history in the matter.

A similar grant of immunity to US troops in Iran during the Johnson administration in the 1960s led to the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the issue to charge that the shah had sold out the Iranian people. 'Our honor has been trampled underfoot; the dignity of Iran has been destroyed,' Khomeini said in a famous 1964 speech that led to his detention and then expulsion from Iran."