Cato Institute
Policy Analysis
<<  <  >  >>
Page 10
forcement Agency, especially if the ICC's investigators
unknowingly conduct competing investigations.  To avoid that
problem, the FBI and the DEA could inform the ICC of their
investigations, but letting an outside organization know
about their sensitive work would increase the security risk
that confidential information will be unintentionally leaked
and investigations compromised.  What is more, putting the
offense of "drug trafficking" under the court's jurisdiction
further entrenches the ill-conceived drug war and throws up
another obstacle to a long-overdue reconsideration of drug
prohibition and its alternatives.
Other proponents of the ICC want to go even further and
have the final ICC statute include "forced pregnancy" as an
international crime.25  Typically, "forced pregnancy" has
been understood to mean repeated rape for the purposes of
impregnation, like those incidents reported during the war
in Bosnia.  But Brigham Young University law professor
Richard Wilkins fears that the wording could be abused to
bring lawsuits against countries that do not have liberal-
ized abortion laws, noting that the lawyers opposing Utah's
abortion control laws argued that "requiring a woman to give
a reason for a termination of her pregnancy constituted what
they called a compelled or forced pregnancy."26
Some proponents of the ICC even want the final statute
to contain wording that would give the court jurisdiction
over a host of new "crimes," including "committing outrages
upon personal dignity"27 and causing "serious threats to the
environment . . . [such as] the Chernobyl and Bhopal disas-
ters."28  Given that the definitions of those "crimes" are
not settled as a matter of international law, they are not
likely to be included in the final ICC statute, but a review
clause will probably be included, allowing states to meet
periodically to expand the court's purview to include them.
Some advocates of the ICC clearly want to expand the court's
domain to include those and other crimes, but they recognize
that many states are wary of having their government offi-
cials and corporate leaders called before an international
court.  Accordingly, those groups have made a deliberate
decision not to push for adding noncore crimes to the court-
's purview until after a treaty is ratified.  Donald W.
Shriver Jr. of the Faith-Based Caucus for an International
Criminal Court, for example, explains that
we will never have an ICC or any other effective
world court if powerful nations . . . insist on