Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military is pulling small numbers of troops out of two U.N. peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Africa because they are no longer exempt from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, the Pentagon said on Thursday. A seven-member team will be removed from a U.N. mission assigned to keep peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia and two liaison officers will be removed from the world body's mission in Kosovo, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told reporters. "In these two particular cases it was determined ... that the risk was not appropriate to our forces. And so they...

<p>THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Locked away in the walk-in vault of the first permanent war crimes court are thick files filled with tales of rape, plunder and devastation from around the world.</p> <p>One such folio is heavy with witness accounts of sexually abused children, looted homes and the expulsion of thousands of poor villagers from the Central African Republic.</p>

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Defusing a trans-Atlantic spat, the European Union agreed Monday to spare American citizens the fate of standing trial on war crimes charges in the newly created International Criminal Court. The EU foreign ministers reached a deal among themselves effectively preventing them from extraditing U.S. soldiers or government officials to the ICC as long as Washington guarantees any Americans suspected of war crimes will be tried in the United States. The Bush administration has asked for such a blanket exemption, fearing Americans would face cavalier, politically motivated trials stemming from peacekeeping or other military operations in areas...

Annan urges States to ratify war crimes court's statute, as preparatory panel ends session19 April- As the preparatory body laying the groundwork for the world's first permanent war crimes court wrapped up its latest session today, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan praised the speedy ratifications of the Rome Statute and expressed hope that the tribunal would be functioning by mid-2003. "Now with the unusually rapid entry of the Statute into force, we are witnessing a great victory for justice, and for world order - a turn away from the rule of brute force, and towards the rule of law," the...