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UN SG and Jack Straw Mention ICC during Press Conference

01 Feb 2006

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan held a press conference in London on
31 January 2006 on UN reform. He was joined by British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw. During the press conference, both Mr. Annan
and Mr. Straw referred to the ICC, with Mr. Annan referring to
efforts to hold accountable those responsible of committing
atrocities in Uganda and Mr. Straw mentioning the parallel roles of
the ICC and the Security Council as depicted by the Security Council
referral of Darfur, Sudan to the Court.

A web-link to the full transcript is not yet available.

Warm Regards,
Esti Tambay, CICC

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"[...] QUESTION: The secretary general, in his speech, urged the
international community to act swiftly and decisively under the
responsibility to protect principle in respect to Darfur. Should
this principle be invoked in the cases of the Congo and Uganda?

ANNAN: Yes, you heard what I said about Darfur.

In Congo, we are already on the ground. We have about 17,000 troops
and we had hoped to get more, which the member states have not been
able to oblige us.

We are working out arrangements with the European Union where they
are setting up this rapid reaction force. And what we are doing is
to work out stand-by arrangements with them so that if we need
additional support, they will come in and support us, just as
Britain did in Sereli (ph) when the peacekeepers got into trouble.

Northern Uganda is now on the radar. For a long time, it was
ignored. There is a serious humanitarian situation there. And it
is also important to know that the head of the Lord's Resistance
Movement is one of those accused by the International Criminal
Court. So they are seeking to arrest him and put him on trial.

So even though we haven't sent in peacekeepers, we are taking
action, we are active on the humanitarian front, we are trying to
make those who committed these atrocities accountable.

And I hope, in time -- I will not exclude that in time the
organization may want to do more.

STRAW: Let me just say, just to what Kofi said, that the work of the
International Criminal Court runs in parallel to this very important
extension of the jurisprudence of the Security Council of the U.N.
that it should intervene where the responsibility to protect has
been broken by a sovereign member state.

So what you now have in place of the old, sort of, Westphalian idea
that what goes on inside a state has nothing to do with anybody else
provided it doesn't threaten any other state, is, first of all, this
concept of the state's responsibility to protect qualifying, as it
were, an absolute view of sovereignty; and, alongside that, an
individual responsibility, which is based on individuals inside
those governments and others, not to commit international crimes,
which would bring them before the International Criminal Court if
their own local courts prove ineffective.

STRAW: One of the other good things that happened last year was that
we actually made the ICC operational in respect to Sudan. Managed to
get through the Security Council, after a lot of negotiation, but
that's what it's there for, a mandate for the ICC or for the
investigator into crimes committed or alleged to have been committed
in the Sudan, to refer those who are regarded (ph) as indictees to
the International Criminal Court. [...]"

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