Bush’s Lonely Defense of America’s Sovereignty

July 3, 2002

by Mary Mostert, Analyst - Banner of Liberty

The International Criminal Court (ICC) came into existence on July 1st, with 60 nations signing onto it, and it will henceforth apply to the entire world, including the United States of America, which has not ratified the documents creating it. As of this writing, President Bush is standing alone among leaders of the world to stop the ICC from having any jurisdiction over American servicemen involved in peacekeeping operations in Bosnia. Unless the United Nations agrees to provide immunity to Americans in UN Peacekeeping missions, Bush has made it clear that Americans will be withdrawn from UN controlled Peacekeeping missions.

According to the Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind , created by the International Law Commission at the request of the General Assembly, the ICC “applies equally and without exception to any individual throughout the governmental hierarchy or military chain of command.”

In other words, anyone in the United States involved in the government of the country, from president to an army private can be accused and tried if indicted for a war crime. And, in reading the Draft Code of Crimes, we find that a vast number of “War Crimes,” such as genocide, have been included, defined and codified.

For example it states: “the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948 recognizes that the crime of genocide may be committed by constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.” It is under this definition that Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Yugoslavia, is in prison at the Hague for “genocide” even though the number of people he is supposedly responsible for killing, under the indictment, is something like 600 people that he never saw. They were killed while he was the president of Yugoslavia, so he is being tried for their “genocide.”

And, if you thought “genocide” meant the “deliberate and systematic extermination of a national or racial group” as it is defined in the dictionary and as took place when six million Jews were exterminated by Nazi Germany, you are way behind the times.

The ICC Code of Crimes states in Article 6 (b) for example that you can commit “Genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm, to one or more persons” and that person or persons “belonged to a particular national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

And, if that is not vague enough to concoct charges against one’s enemy in the International Criminal Court, you can revert to Article 6 (c) of the ICC Code of Crimes which states that “Genocide by deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.” That requires only that “certain conditions of life” are inflicted “upon one or more persons” and that person or persons “belonged to a particular national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

The nations that have ratified the ICC and brought it into being represent approximately 16% of the world’s population. The world’s most populous nations, China (1.2 billion people), India (1 billion people), the United States (272 million people) among others did not sign. This brand new body of law is being forced on the majority of the people of the world by a minority of the population of the world living in nations such as Albania (3 million), Andorra (65 thousand), Croatia (4.6 million), Dominican Republic (8 million), Iceland (272 thousand), Liechtenstein (32 thousand), Malta (381 thousand), Nauru (10 thousand), Panama (2.7 million), St. Lucia (154 thousand), Trinidad and Tobago (1 million), United Arab Emirates (2 million) and, of course, Zimbabwe (11 million) which has been confiscating farms from white people for several years.

In recent years Dr. Richard G. Wilkins, Professor of Law and Managing Director of the World Family Policy Center at J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University has attended and/or spoken at most of the United Nations meetings on the International Criminal Court. He notes in a paper entitled “Ramifications of the International Criminal Court for War, Peace and Social Change”: “Despite the best intentions of the Court founders, the Rome Statute transfers a vast amount of decision making authority from previously sovereign nations to an international court that will be remote (and unable to be controlled by or accountable to) the diverse peoples and cultures of the world. It does so by means of vague statutory language, capable of expansion to include conduct well beyond that which (at present) is considered to be within the customary reach of ‘genocide,’ ‘war crimes,’ and ‘crimes against humanity.’”

Wilkins predicts that the court will probably “only make it more difficult to negotiate a peaceful end to certain crises and existing social problems without reducing the necessity for the occasional use of force.”

He also points out that the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court says it is designed to be “complementary to national criminal jurisdictions” and only used when a nation is “unwilling or unable to act.”

While that sounds reassuring, what it actually means in a legal sense is “the Court’s laws govern” since “any time a nation departs from the Court’s laws, that nation could be found ‘unwilling’ or ‘unable’ to follow the Court’s laws, thereby triggering complementary jurisdiction.” (See page four of Wilkins paper.)

He also points out that Court advocates, such as the radical left wing Women’s Caucus, claim that “ratification of the treaty creating the Court will necessitate in many cases that national laws be in conformity with the ICC Statute.” The Women’s Caucus, which supports abortion on demand, the “right” of women to be prostitutes and same-sex marriage, sees the creation of the ICC as providing an opportunity for groups “all over the world to initiate and consolidate law reforms…” that agree with their agenda.

“State Parties,” the Women’s Caucus claims, “will be required to review their domestic criminal laws and fill in the gaps to ensure that the crimes enumerated in the ICC Statute are also prohibited domestically.”

According to Wilkins, “If the gender caucus is to be taken at its word, the Rome Statute can (and will) be used to re-engineer social policies throughout the world. I have been a lawyer (and a law professor) long enough to know that vague language can be used to achieve almost any goal if the lawyers (and judges) engaged in the task are infused with enthusiasm and ingenuity.”

Wilkins warns, “Judicial action that refashions social norms has become quite commonplace in the United States, Canada and the European Union. The impact of such judicial tinkering is now becoming clear in the decaying family and social structures in these parts of the world. The International Criminal Court could well become the mechanism by which the Western innovation of judicially (rather than legislatively) crafted social policy - and its accompanying consequences - are exported to the rest of the world. Of all revolutions through the centuries, this is the quietest. Of all the attempts made over the years to foist one group’s will on everyone else, this is the most subtle and simultaneously the most far-reaching - the world-wide constitutional convention no one knew about.”

What radicals failed to implement by lobbying in Washington they now believe they will accomplish via the International Criminal Court.

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Mary Mostert was writing professionally on political issues as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1940s. In the 1960s, she wrote a weekly column for the Rochester Times Union, a Gannett paper and was one of 52 American women who attended the 17 Nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland to ban testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. She was a licensed building contractor for 29 years, as she raised her six children. She served an 18 month mission as Public Affairs Director for the Africa Area for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1990-91. In the 1990s she wrote a book, Coming Home, Families Can Stop the Unraveling of America, edited the Reagan Monthly Monitor and talk show host Michael Reagan’s Information Interchange for seven years. She now operates the website, Banner of Liberty.

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