The establishment of an International Criminal Court will be one of the most important developments in international law since the second World War, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, said yesterday.
He was launching the Government's campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum on the 23rd amendment to the Constitution, which would allow Ireland to ratify a UN statute setting up such a court.
Mr Cowen said a number of states had reported to the UN the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, but the possibility of bringing members of the government to trial was raised only after the death of Pol Pot.
Since then the world had again been horrified by outrages in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, he said, leading to the UN setting up tribunals to deal with them. However, they were established only on an ad-hoc basis and faced criticism that the Security Council had adopted a selective approach to the violations of human rights law, since it had refrained from setting up such tribunals in response to other such violations.
"There is a clear need for a permanent independent institution, empowered to investigate and punish the most serious international crimes, regardless of who perpetrates them, and the very existence of which serves to deter those who would commit such atrocities," he said.
Both individual states and the UN Security Council would have a role in referring such allegations to the prosecutor of the court, an independent person who would be appointed when the statute had been ratified by 60 states.
The court would be complementary to national legal systems, and would operate only where a state was unable or unwilling to investigate alleged crimes.