Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-25-Speech-3-161"
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"en.20020925.6.3-161"2
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"Madam President, I should like to thank Parliament for its very strong interest in safeguarding and preserving the ICC. It is also the Council of Ministers’ view that the ICC should be protected and its integrity preserved and that the ICC should begin operating. That is also the Danish Presidency’s attitude, moreover. Our view is that, on 30 September, we should see to it that the EU countries work together and are also able to arrive at the same result. The EU countries should also ideally offer the same response to the United States. It should be borne in mind that the task of offering the United States a response is a bilateral one. It is not for the Commission to respond to the United States’ representations. We are concerned here with bilateral approaches, and we can therefore only put forward a recommended response. That is all we can do, but I also assume that the recommendation will be followed.
As Mr Oostlander mentioned, we have had, and are continuing to have, dialogues with the candidate countries on this issue. I agree completely with Mr Lund that we must not have a cosmetic and phoney compromise. It was certainly something along those lines that Mr Lund said, for it is true enough that, when the rain comes, the façade will crumble and it may mean that everything collapses. We are of the view that we must have a global court which will have an effective deterrent effect upon those war crimes described in the statutes of the court.
With regard to the United States, the fact must be faced that it is not participating in the court, but we shall go on trying to get it involved. We have discussed the matter on several occasions with the United States, but to no avail. It is a brute fact, and the choice is between not caring either way or trying to obtain an arrangement whereby the United States is part of an international legal system. With this in view, the bilateral approaches can be used to devise an agreement along the lines that I mentioned and that are not at all different from those mentioned by Commissioner Patten. There is no difference at all between the Commission and the Council on this issue. If wordings can be devised whereby the United States becomes part of the international legal system without being a member of the ICC, that is nonetheless to be preferred to a situation in which the United States is excluded from, and does not have, any such legal system. That, moreover, is what our efforts are designed to achieve.
I should like to point out that the United States does not want to see exemption from prosecution, either. Nowhere in Mr Powell’s communication does it state that it wants to see exemption from prosecution. That has never been the desire on the part of the United States. It is a case of it wanting to bring prosecutions themselves, not of it wanting war crimes to go unpunished. It is a question of it wanting to do the punishing itself. It must be appreciated, moreover, that what is most important is that war criminals should be punished, whether or not we can get them prosecuted in The Hague.
This is apparent from the letter written by Mr Powell to the individual countries, and also from the remarks he made to the European Union at our ministerial meeting with him. In this connection, the principle of subsidiarity, which applies to all of us who are members of the ICC, must be borne in mind. There is a principle of subsidiarity. The idea, of course, is that the court should only prosecute if the country concerned does not do so itself. That is of course the principle. It means, moreover, that it might be valuable if the United States were to give a guarantee that it would behave like the rest of us and bring prosecutions itself. I also assume that Denmark itself would bring prosecutions, meaning that I do not anticipate any Dane’s ending up in The Hague. I anticipate our prosecuting war criminals ourselves, if we have any. It must, then, be the task of the actual country concerned to say that a particular matter is so serious as to be something that we ourselves should no doubt deal with. The court must only be involved if the country concerned is unwilling or unable to deal with the matter.
Against that background, I therefore cherish a reasonably justified hope that we can grope our way towards a solution whereby the ICC remains unaffected and with its integrity preserved, while still more countries undertake to prosecute war criminals than is the case at present. That is of course the crucial point. There will be no compromise whereby the court is weakened and the crimes concerned go unpunished. That will not happen."@en1
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