Palestinians Charge War Crimes
July 24 -- Israelis and Palestinians locked in a war of words over who's wrong in their long-running real war of attack and reprisal may now have somewhere to take their charges: to court.
It's a court that consists of eight people, all three weeks on the job, who are working out of a few small, sparse offices in The Hague, but it's the first permanent court aimed at resolving charges of international war crimes.
Called the International Criminal court, its first case could involve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, after Palestinian leaders on Tuesday accused Israel's generals of committing war crimes — a charge typically associated with genocide.
But the newly created court could let the Palestinians bring individual generals before a panel of international judges to be tried for acts more typical to the Mideast conflict — and vice versa, though Israel has yet to fully embrace the U.N.-sponsored agreement that created the body.
Starting July 1, every action taken during a war could — and, according to some experts, likely would — fall under the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court, which was four years in the making.
In the past, tribunals have dealt with ongoing abuses on a massive scale, said Diane Orentlicher, a professor of international law at American University, but the creation of the ICC could signal a shift.
"I would have been embarrassed to predict 10 years ago that such a court would exist today," Orentlicher said, explaining how farfetched an idea like the ICC used to seem.
International tribunals largely were dormant for 40 years after the Nuremberg trials. They came back into the vogue in the early 1990s with the conflict in Bosnia, and since then, have helped settled major conflicts in Rwanda, East Timor and Sierra Leone. The ICC is intended as a permanent fixture for what has been an ad-hoc process for the last decade.
Today the ICC is in its earliest stages and doesn't have the support of the United States, but it could be hearing cases as soon as a year from now and working toward its primary goal, which is to protect civilians during wartime.
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