Jordan Times
Friday, October 8, 2004
Security Council told war
crimes tribunals cheaper than wars
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Jordan's ambassador told the UN Security Council that it
should stop complaining about the high cost of war crimes tribunals, considering
the higher costs of war.
Prince Zeid Ben Raad urged nations Wednesday to put money into promoting justice
in countries emerging from conflict instead of weapons.
“With an international community prepared to spend almost one trillion US
dollars a year on weapons — that historic companion of war — how can we say that
anything we have spent thus far on justice, the surest companion of peace, is
too expensive?” he asked.
The prince, who is also president of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome
Statute which created the International Criminal Court, was among nearly 50
speakers at a daylong debate in the council Wednesday on ways to administer
justice and rebuild the rule of law in societies divided by conflict.
He criticised the council for repeatedly complaining about the high cost of the
tribunals, saying the $175 million spent annually to prosecute those responsible
for war crimes in former Yugoslavia “is less than one-twentieth” of what the
United Nations paid annually during the war for the UN peacekeeping operation.
“If the alternative to justice and accountability is a likely return to a
condition of general warfare, with all its familiar consequences, can the
amounts already spent on the (Yugoslav tribunal) be construed as too great?”
Prince Zeid asked.
Sierra Leone's UN Ambassador Joe Robert Pemagbi told the council his country's
10-year civil war “clearly demonstrates that the absence of the rule of law
creates an atmosphere in which egregious crimes under international law can be
perpetrated with impunity.”
He said restoring law and justice “is very expensive” and appealed for
contributions, especially for the country's UN-backed war crimes court.
“Respect for the rule of law cannot be separated from the problem of the
availability of resources,” Pemagbi said.
Police, magistrates and other law enforcement officers must not only be trained
and given proper equipment, he said, but they also need “decent salaries, at
least as a weapon for eliminating corruption, that cancer in the body politic of
many nations in the world today.”
Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the UN Development Programme, told the
council that “too often international assistance on the rule of law has focused
on transferring technical know-how to state institutions and modernising the
courts and police.
“Rule of law assistance is too important to be left to lawyers,” he said,
stressing that after conflicts “a policeman in the neighborhood often matters
much more than a computer.”
Malloch Brown, who has made the rule of law the centerpiece of UNDP's far-flung
activities, told the council: Don't smother countries with advice.
He cited Guatemala, where 22 donors wrote 50 reports on what to do with the
nation's judicial system.
He said laws in nations coming out of turmoil must also have local legitimacy,
adding that a lack thereof in Haiti contributed to the country's institutional
crisis, especially with the police.
Jose de Venecia, Jr., speaker of the House of Representatives in the
Philippines, said “well-meaning outsiders often assign the highest priority to
demobilising irregular militias and organising new security forces to rebuild
the peace and punish the guilty.”
“Historical experience suggests that raising the issue of past crimes
prematurely may only induce warlords and gang bosses to resist with force being
called to account for their past actions — thus breaking the fragile and
tentative peace,” he said.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is focusing on the rule of law for the
remainder of his tenure, said the United Nations has learned in peace-building
that “one size does not fit all” — a point echoed by the Security Council in a
statement at the end of the meeting.
The council stressed the urgency of restoring justice and the rule of law in
post-conflict societies, “not only to come to terms with past abuses, but also
to promote national reconciliation and to help prevent a return to conflict in
the future.”
But Romania's UN Ambassador Mihnea Motoc said the council must look beyond
dealing with conventional actors to rogue politicians who declare regions
independent.
“We do not seem to know ... what to do in regard to self-styled republics, to
territories where there is no recognised authority to be held accountable by the
global opinion,” he warned. “There are plenty of such `black holes' in the
international legality of nowadays.”