The Inetrnational Criminal Court and "the wall of silence".

In a recent post Mr. George Friedman writing for the Startfor Global Intelligence illustrates the dilemma between bringing Justice to the international arena utilizing the ICC and avoiding human casualties. The present arrest warrant for Qaddafi officially issued by the ICC "for crimes against humanity" as like Slobotan Milosevic' in the past renders any kind of peaceful resolution rather highly impossible living little room for negotiated settlements. "Having seen an older dictator at The Hague earlier negotiate his own exit, and see that negotiation fall through, why would a new dictator negotiate a deal? How can Gadhafi contemplate a negotiation that would leave him without power in Libya, when the Milosevic case clearly illuminates his potential fate at the hands of a rebel-led Libya? Judicial absolutism assumes that the moral absolute is the due process of law. A more humane moral absolute is to remove the tyrant and give power to the nation with the fewest deaths possible in the process" asserts Mr. Friedman.
I will ask then how far  is the ICC independent?

Carla Ponte the first celebrity prosecutor of the ad hoc created ICCY wrote her memoir along with New York Times journalist Chuck Sudetic who subsequently worked for the Soros' Open Society Institute where Ponte became a senior writer after taking a prise  from the Soros' founded Central European University (as did Kofi Annan) during the University's graduation ceremonies where last year the price were awarded for the thirteen subsequent year by the hand of the president of the International Crises Group which is also being supported by Soros. But ICC itself is also a Soros beneficiary as stated in this 2006 newletter: "The Prosecutors of the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Luis Moreno-Ocampo and Carla Del Ponte, co-hosted the Third Prosecutors' Colloquium on the sixth and seventh of October 2006 in The Hague. The organizers are grateful to the Open Society Institute (OSI) for financial support in making the Colloquium possible." But as Carla is not the only person from the ICCY associated with the OSI since Patricia Wald a former judge of the tribune is listed in the Board of

Directors of the institute and James Goldston a senior trial attorney in the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC is the founding executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, Soros is not alone on this project:  "The Tribunal has received substantial funds from individual States, private foundations and corporations in violation of Article 32 of its Charter. Much of its money has come from the U.S. government directly in cash and donations of computer equipment. In the last year for which public figures are available, 1994/95, the United States provided $700,000 in cash and $2,300,000 worth of equipment. That same year the Open Society Institute, a foundation established by George Soros, the American billionaire financier, to bring "openness" to the former east bloc countries contributed $150,000 and the Rockefeller family, through the Rockefeller Foundation, contributed $50,000 and there have been donations from corporations such as Time-Warner, and Discovery Products, both US corporations. It also important to know that Mr. Soros' foundation not only funds the Tribunal it also funds the main KLA newspaper in Pristina, an obvious conflict of interest that has not been mentioned once in the western press. The Tribunal also receives money from the United States Institute for Peace for its Outreach project, a public relations arm of the Tribunal set up to overcome opposition in the former Yugoslav republics to its work and the constant criticisms of selective prosecution and the application of double standards; objections which have obvious merit and which are never answered by anyone at the Tribunal or by any of its sponsors. The Institute for Peace is stated to be " an independent, non-partisan federal institution created and funded by Congress to strengthen the nation's capacity to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflict.". Established in 1984 under Ronald Reagan, its Board of Directors is appointed by the President of the United States. The Tribunal also receives support from the Coalition For International Justice whose purpose is also to enhance public opinion of the Tribunal. The CIJ was founded and is funded by, again, George Soros' Open Society Institute and something called CEELI, the Central and East European Law Institute, created by the American Bar Association and lawyers close to the U.S. government to promote the replacement of socialist legal systems with free market ones." Carla Ponte is now serving as ambassador to Argentina from where the present prosecutor of the ICC Luis Moreno - Ocampo comes from. Being president of the Transparency International of Latin America and the Caribbean which is a NGO partner of OSI he was one of the key participants at the Soros sponsored New York round-table on "Restoring the American Leadreship - The International Criminal Court" back in 2005 .

But even all these facts are dismissed as cheap conspiracy theory that really tells nothing about the objectiveness of the ICC one can easily turn to Carla's own memoir book or Peter Erlinder, Lead Defence Counsel at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Military-1 Trial and President of Association des Avocats de la Defence (ADAD), the ICTR Defence Lawyers Association and his paper titled "PREVENTING THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY: An Unintended Consequence of ICTR Disclosure Requirements" concluding: "And, “human rights” activists who fail to comprehend the international political power realties underlying all international bodies, and who fail to demand equal application of the ”rule of law” to the powerful, as well as the weak, are actually complicit in the misuse of the entire “international justice” project. Un-critical political analysis of the power-relationships under lying international tribunals will ensure politically motivated “international revenge” visited on the disfavored and less-powerful, as Ms. Del Ponte’s book makes clear. But, despite these limitations that are built in to the system of international tribunals, the Military-1 case use of disclosure principles to tell “the untold story of the Rwanda War” demonstrates that legal rules, when taken seriously and aggressively pursued, make it possible for the “vanquished” to prevent the wholesale “falsification of history” by victors….perhaps, for the first time in history."

The pressure by the "powerful" nations on the ICC is illustrated in the rules requiring the mandatory disclosure of exculpatory evidence to the defendant a key factor to even out the "equality of arms" between defendants and prosecutors. Laura Moranchek in an essay titled "Protecting National Security Evidence While Prosecuting War Crimes. Problems and Lessons for the International Justice from the ICTY" demonstrates how USA that "... devoted particular energy to securing procedural rules that would shield confidential information from not just the public, but also the accused" finally managed to do so: "Ultimately, in 2003, the Tribunal codified the substance of this ruling in to the rules of the procedure.... This creeping erosion of defendant's rights to discovery, first through judicial decisions unsupported by the rules and then through changes to the rules themselves, demonstrates that international tribunals had a hard time holding the defendant's rights in the face of state demands for secrecy guarantees".

Lastly, Qaddafi who in his letter to the ICC prompted Luis Moreno - Ocampo to take under consideration "that worse offenses have been committed by those who have issued a complaint against the Libyan regime and must also be investigated." is not the only one accused for crimes against humanity. At ten p.m. Tripoli time on 6/28 the Libyan Ministry of Health released the report "Current Statistics of NATO bombardments On Libya" claiming that during the fisrt 100 days of war the blueprint of the civilians' victims is 668 man dead and 3093 injured, 260 women dead and 1318 injured and 141 children killed and 641 injured. Libya's prosecutor general Mohammed Zikri al-Mahjoubi said that he will charge NATO’s chief in a Libyan court with genocide over the air campaign. He outlined 10 charges against Anders Fogh Rasmussen, including killing and wounding civilians, destroying public buildings and attempted murder of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi. Going backwards, on 29/5 two notoriously non - conformist French lawyers Jacques Verges and former foreign minister Ronald Dumas while being in Tripoli announced that they intend to file a complaint  against President Nicolas Sarcozy for "crimes against humanity" backed  by at least 30 families of the bombing victims. "We are going to break the wall of silence" Dumas said.