The International Criminal Court -- The Star Chamber for Gobal Governance

In July 1998, the United Nations spawned one of the most insidious threats to our national sovereignty and individual freedoms that has ever been conceived. It is the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has been given power to enforce wide-ranging international law over virtually unbounded geographical jurisdiction. All with no accountability to any government, let alone the people of the world.

Under the guise of having the ability of arresting international terrorists, the treaty has the power to arrest and prosecute any person on earth with no protection from their own national legal system. Writing in the June 21, 1999, issue of Nation Magazine, leftist Alexander Cockburn points out that the ICC "tribunal was designed to function as a star chamber for the New World Order."

The new ICC will prosecute crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. The door is also being left wide open for further additions of other categories. Mikhail Gorbachev and other globalists, for instance, have already voiced their desire to see the ICC expanded to include crimes against the earth.

The U.S. was only one of seven nations who did not sign the ICC treaty in Rome during the July 1998 signing ceremony.

These crimes have been left suspiciously vague, creating fertile ground for arbitrary and capricious interpretation and application of the treaty. That such corruption will occur is evidenced by the current U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, an archetype of the ICC. This court has refused to prosecute Croatia’s dictator, Franjo Tudjman. Tudjman, with NATO’s help, drove 500,000 Serbs from their homes in the Krajina Province in 1995, bombarding and murdering them as they fled. Tudjman’s atrocities are every bit as murderous as Slobodan Milosevic, yet remains untouched because he has helped NATO.

Within the ICC star chamber, an accused person is first arrested and charged by the Office of the Prosecutor. The person then faces what amounts to an arraignment in a Pre-trial Chamber that consists of not less than six judges. Since the pretrial is considered to be just a formality, the accused then goes to trial in the Trial Chamber, which again has not less than six judges. Once found guilty, the person can go to the Appeals Chamber, consisting of four judges and the Presidency. The Presidency consists of a president and two vice presidents elected by the judges. Because it is self-contained and answerable to no one, the ICC acts as judge, jury and executioner with impunity.

Most, if not all, of the judges will come from communist or fundamentalist Islamic nations. These judges will operate on the inquisitorial principle, where a trial is merely a formality to render penalties rather than a forum to weigh facts and reach a just verdict.

During a 1993 Senate hearing on the ICC, Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) asked Professor Cherif Bassiouni, a leading academic proponent of the tribunal, if the judges could come from Communist China, Iran, Syria, or the Palestine Liberation Organization, and whether they could judge the actions of the U.S. government or its citizens. His reply was, "There is no guarantee against the election of an individual from any state by the [UN’s] General Assembly."

Unlike the ICC, the U.S. legal system is founded upon, and driven by, an adversarial process based in Common Law. Built on generations of cases and precedent, the adversarial process arduously defends the rights of the accused.

Past and present UN Tribunals have already proven that a thug mentality will prevail within the ICC. Under the Yugoslavian UN Tribunal, defendants do not have the right "to be confronted with the witnesses" against them, as prescribed in the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Instead, the Court has adopted a provision known as Rule 75 which can "allow some witnesses to remain anonymous, even to defendants and their lawyers." The Sixth Amendment also refers to the right of the accused "to be informed of the nature and the cause of the accusation" against them. However, the Yugoslavian tribunal has issued secret or "non-public" indictments. "Due Process" doesn’t seem to be part of the protocol at the ICC.

Nikola Kostich, a defense attorney from Milwaukee who has participated as legal counsel before the Court, notes in an interview in the April, 1998, issue of the New American, that the tribunal "is dedicated to the creation of precedents in international law, and in pursuing those precedents it is literally making up the law as it goes along."

Using the guise of prosecuting international terrorists, the ICC is a blatant move to further blur national sovereignty by making international law and court superior to national legal systems. No citizen of any nation is protected from abuse by the ICC. Anyone who opposes or steps out of line with the emerging world government can be arrested, prosecuted and found guilty of trumped-up charges of crimes against humanity.

The ICC perverts the very foundation of Biblical justice and will undermine and destroy the American legal system if it is ever ratified by the Senate. The good news is that the bad press surrounding the ICC has kept President Clinton from signing the treaty. The U.S. is only one of seven nations that did not signed it.

Although Americans are not yet under its jurisdiction, we are reminded of Psalm 11:2-3, "For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart. If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (KJV) The answer, of course, is to oppose the ICC while we can, and put our trust in the Lord, who is the ultimate judge of all men. V ks