The Rome Treaty and the International Criminal Court

It is absolutely true. A world without violence is possible, as soon as we limit our material ambitions and love the human being more.

1. Introduction

With civilized peoples and governments exhausted from the cruel conditions of men, women and children, in July 1998, in the city of Rome they signed and agreed to the Statute of the International Criminal Court with the defined, pristine and clear purpose of not leaving impunity for crimes against man and his essential rights, to ensure civilized punishment through a fair process to those who are accused of committing illegal acts of international disgust and that threaten humanity.

The signing countries are certain that in this century millions of human beings have been victims of insuperable, illegal and unacceptable atrocities for the thought and doctrines that recognize man as a subject of law and owner of an essentially delicate nature, the essence of which must be protected against genocidal violence.

The fundamental reason that inspires this international agreement is related to the conviction that the acts of injustice that devastate regions of the planet cause social, economic, cultural and political instability, breaking peace, security and destroying the possibilities of development of peoples. This has happened as a consequence of all wars, especially in those in which brother nations rise up against each other. The memory records the terrible events in Vietnam, Laos, Palestine, Africa, Bosnia, Armenia and, by the way, the most recent war conflicts in Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ethiopia. It moves the civilized world that in four years of unjust war against the people of Iraq, more than 600,000 people (600,000) have died, for no understandable reason.

This international agreement has manifested the decision of the signatory countries to end impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes while contributing to their prevention. This agreement is legitimate, therefore, it has occurred within the framework of international law and with respect to an ethical project of indisputable value: the prevention of crimes against humanity and, failing that, the sanction of the perpetrators of such crimes.

Among the latter are not only those who participate directly in illegal action, in crime, murder or destruction, but also those who promote, accept, and especially those who profit from these abominable acts.

This agreement lacks some signatures and recognition from some important countries, but, with or without them, it has been adopted by the vast majority of countries in the world. The United States of America, Israel and my beloved Chile, have not joined this magnificent purpose, reason why in the future the nascent generations will hold our rulers historically accountable for such a bitter and shameful omission.

2. Offenses under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court

Genocide.

Crimes against Humanity.

War crimes.

Crime of Aggression.

a) The crime of genocide;

a) Slaughter of group members;

b) Serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of the group members;

c) Intentional submission of the group to conditions of existence that must lead to its physical destruction, total or partial;

d) Measures aimed at preventing births within the group;

e) Forcibly transferring children from the group to another group.

b) Crimes against humanity;

a) Murder;

b) Extermination;

c) Slavery;

d) Deportation or forced transfer of population;

e) Imprisonment or other serious deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental norms of international law;

f) Torture;

g) Rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization or other sexual abuse of comparable severity;

h) Persecution of a group or collectivity with its own identity founded on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender reasons defined in paragraph 3, or other reasons universally recognized as unacceptable under international law, in connection with any act mentioned in this paragraph or with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;

i) Forced disappearance of people;

j) The crime of apartheid;

k) Other inhuman acts of a similar nature that intentionally cause great suffering or seriously undermine physical integrity or mental or physical health.

c) War crimes;

i) Intentionally killing;

ii) Subject to torture or other inhuman treatment, including biological experiments;

iii) Deliberately inflicting great suffering or seriously threatening physical integrity or health;

iv) Destroying assets and appropriating them in an unjustified manner due to military needs, on a large scale, unlawfully and arbitrarily;

v) Forcing a prisoner of war or another protected person to serve in the forces of an enemy Power;

(vi) Deliberately depriving a prisoner of war or another person of their rights to a fair and impartial trial;

vii) Submitting to illegal deportation, transfer or confinement;

viii) Take hostages;

Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflicts within the framework of international law, namely, any of the following acts:

i) Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against civilians who do not participate directly in hostilities;

ii) Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects that are not military objectives;

(iii) Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, facilities, equipment, units or vehicles participating in a peacekeeping or humanitarian assistance mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, provided that they are entitled to the protection accorded to civilians or objects civilians under international law of armed conflict;

iv) Intentionally launching an attack, knowing that it will cause loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or extensive, lasting and serious damage to the natural environment that is clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct general military advantage that is foreseen;

v) Attacking or bombing, by any means, cities, villages, towns or buildings that are not defended and that are not military objectives;

vi) Cause death or injury to an enemy who has laid down his arms or who, having no means to defend himself, has surrendered at his discretion;

vii) Misuse of the white flag, national flag or military insignia or uniform of the enemy or of the United Nations, as well as the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions, and thus cause death or serious injury;

viii) The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the occupying Power of part of its civilian population to the territory it occupies or the deportation or transfer of all or part of the population of the occupied territory, inside or outside that territory;

ix) Intentionally directed attacks against buildings dedicated to religious worship, the arts, the sciences or charities, monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are grouped, provided they are not military targets;

x) Subjecting persons in the possession of the perpetrator to physical mutilation or medical or scientific experiments of any kind that are not justified by reason of medical, dental or hospital treatment, nor are carried out in their interest, and that cause death or seriously endanger your health;

xi) Treacherously killing or wounding persons belonging to the enemy nation or army;

xii) Declare that no barracks will be given;

xiii) Destroying or confiscating enemy property, unless the necessities of war make it imperative;

xiv) Declare abolished, suspended or inadmissible in court the rights and actions of the nationals of the enemy party;

xv) Forcing the nationals of the enemy party to participate in war operations directed against their own country, even if they had been in their service before the start of the war;

xvi) Looting a city or a square, even when it is taken by assault;

xvii) Poison or poisoned weapons;

xviii) Choking, toxic or similar gases or any similar liquid, material or device;

xix) Bullets that easily open or crush on the human body, such as hard-jacketed bullets that do not completely cover the inside or have incisions;

xx) Employing weapons, projectiles, materials and methods of warfare which, by their very nature, cause superfluous damage or unnecessary suffering or have indiscriminate effects in violation of international humanitarian law of armed conflict, provided that those weapons or such projectiles, materials or methods of war, are subject to a complete ban and are included in an annex to this Statute by virtue of an amendment approved in accordance with the provisions that, in this regard, are contained in articles 121 and 123;

xxi) Committing outrages against the dignity of the person, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;

xxii) Committing acts of rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, defined in article 7, paragraph 2 (f), forced sterilization and any other form of sexual violence that constitutes a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions;

xxiii) Take advantage of the presence of civilians or other protected persons to render certain points, zones or military forces immune from military operations;

xxiv) Intentionally directing attacks against medical buildings, equipment, units and vehicles, and against personnel authorized to use the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions in accordance with international law;

xxv) Intentionally provoking starvation of the civilian population as a method of waging war, depriving it of the objects essential to its survival, including the act of intentionally hindering relief supplies in accordance with the Geneva Conventions;

xxvi) Recruit or enlist children under the age of 15 in the national armed forces or use them to actively participate in hostilities;

In the event of an armed conflict that is not of an international nature, serious violations of Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, namely, any of the following acts committed against persons who do not participate directly in hostilities., including members of the armed forces who have laid down their arms and those who have been knocked out due to illness, injury, arrest or any other cause:

i) Acts of violence against life and person, in particular homicide in all its forms, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

ii) Insults against personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;

iii) The taking of hostages;

iv) Convictions and executions carried out without a previous sentence pronounced by a regularly constituted court that has offered all the judicial guarantees generally recognized as indispensable.

d) Paragraph 2 c) of this article applies to armed conflicts that are not of an international nature, and therefore does not apply to situations of internal disturbances or tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence or other acts of a similar nature.

e) Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in armed conflicts that are not of an international nature, within the established framework of international law, namely, any of the following acts:

i) Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against civilians who do not participate directly in hostilities;

(ii) Intentionally directing attacks against medical buildings, equipment, units and vehicles and against personnel authorized to use the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions in accordance with international law;

iv) Intentionally directing attacks on buildings dedicated to religious worship, education, the arts, sciences or charity, monuments, hospitals and other places where the sick and wounded are grouped, provided they are not military targets;

v) Looting a city or square, even when it is taken by assault;

vi) Committing acts of rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, defined in article 7, paragraph 2 (f), forced sterilization or any other form of sexual violence that also constitutes a serious violation of article 3 common to four Geneva Conventions;

vii) Recruit or enlist children under the age of 15 in the armed forces or use them to actively participate in hostilities;

viii) Order the displacement of the civilian population for reasons related to the conflict, unless the security of the civilians in question or for imperative military reasons so requires;

ix) Treacherously killing or wounding an enemy combatant;

x) Declare that there will be no barracks;

xi) Subjecting persons who are in the power of another party to the conflict to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind that are not justified by reason of the medical, dental or hospital treatment of the person in question or take away carried out in their interest, and that cause death or seriously endanger their health;

xii) Destroying or confiscating enemy property, unless the necessities of war make it imperative;

f) Paragraph 2 e) of this article applies to armed conflicts that are not of an international nature, and therefore does not apply to situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence or other acts of a similar nature. It applies to armed conflicts that take place on the territory of a State when there is a prolonged armed conflict between government authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups.

d) The crime of aggression

2. The Court will exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression once a provision is approved pursuant to Articles 121 and 123 defining the crime and stating the conditions under which it will do so. That provision will be consistent with the relevant provisions of the Charter of the United Nations.

3. The world reality

Oil today is one of the greatest causes or foundations of war. Let's see: Sudan's civil war; in the Ivory Coast, the war over cocoa, where Coca-Cola has its best interests; the war for diamond mines promoted in Central Africa; the Chadian civil war that was sustained by France, given its interest in oil; the Angolan war against the kingdom of Cabinda, for the same reason; the permanent tension of war in North Korea, fueled by the interests of the Empire; the problem of the Spanish sale of arms to Africa for a sum greater than six billion euros. In a few words more than 70 warlike conflicts in the world fed by the greed of the merchants in arms or by the dominion of great wealth.

In Latin America we must suffer fear of the Colombian situation, whose geographical limits and the permanent harassment and participation of North American military elements make the peace of these peoples unstable. Busch's last visit has exposed interest in the Empire's policy of reestablishing its dominance over the governments and peoples of brown America.

4. The authors

Criminal Law distinguishes several types of authors. Those who organize, direct and finance from the shadows are the so-called Intellectual Authors. They do not do the dirty work. For this eagerness they have trained vicars in Virginia, Panama or in the jungles of Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador. They are called Material Authors.

There are other participants whose job is to establish the conditions for the illicit to be carried out. They prepare the operational field, propaganda, communications, that is, they act with direct complicity in the fact, hence they are called

Complicit authors.

Now then, we understand in the sense that the war against Iraq, just not to mention other aggressions and encompassing in the example all of them, is unjust, offensive to humanity for its expression of manifest cruelty, attack on the civilian population, uncivilized, with a content purely of appropriation of wealth, etc., and in general violation of the illicit clearly expressed by the Treaty of Rome of 1998, we must conclude that, there are at least objective factors of imputation, recognized worldwide and in which it can be determine, from now on, the following:

1. The coalition of countries that attacked Iraq acted on the construction of false evidence.

2. The aggressor coalition has violated the most elementary principles of international law and has confused and misled members of the United Nations, especially members of the Security Council.

3. That the material authors, intellectuals and accomplices, are perfectly determined.

4. The motive for the aggression has not been the restoration of democracy, but the predatory invasion of the wealth of the Iraqi nation, its monuments, its historical memory, destroyed in permanent looting.

5. The invasion has so far caused more than 600,000 deaths, most of them men, women and children who have no part in the war.

6. The coalition has taken prisoners, has imprisoned them, keeps them hidden, does not put them on trial, has tortured them, and has taken them from their territory, taking them to prisons and unknown places in Egypt and Guantanamo, among others.

7. The invasion war, then, has caused a serious offense to the norms of international law contained in the 1998 Treaty of Rome.

8. The foregoing concludes that there are serious presumptions to prosecute and punish the intellectual, material and complicit authors of this attack against humanity.

5. Conclusion

It is necessary to raise awareness among the most sensitive actors regarding the weakness of international peace and the violence exerted by the most powerful countries. International law, applied without discrimination, can be and is, the civilized way in which the least powerful, but most caring peoples, raise the banner of respect for dignity, the security of not being attacked for the seizure of their wealth and the maintenance of peace between nations.

However, for this to be possible, these same peoples cannot tolerate that private interests and bastards, alien to the development of nations and contrary to their own, violate the norms of international coexistence, so it is necessary to put into practice the International Criminal Law in order to give the sanction that the International Criminal Court, in due process, applies to those who have participated and continue to do so, in the sum of international criminal acts, with the purpose that criminals do not remain in impunity and prevent future crimes against peoples