THE HAGUE: Nobel Peace Prize winner Navi Pillay urged the USA on Tuesday (Oct 13) to return to its conventional position of defender of human rights and liberator for the remainder of the world amid a US campaign to undermine the Worldwide Felony Courtroom.
“My message is: ‘You need to get again to taking part in your critical position as a frontrunner, taking part in a liberatory position for the remainder of the world’,” Pillay, 85, instructed Reuters in The Hague, the place she is at present a choose on the United Nations’ highest authorized physique, the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice.
Hours after Pillay was introduced because the winner of the Peace Prize on Friday, the USA introduced sweeping sanctions aimed toward her former employer, the Worldwide Felony Courtroom.
She stated the timing of the sanctions, an unprecedented assault on an establishment based by worldwide treaty, proper after her Nobel Prize win couldn’t be coincidental.
“I feel it is very unlucky. Nevertheless, the plans of focusing on worldwide prison justice by way of the ICC had been brewing on a regular basis,” Pillay stated.
“That is why the very first thing I did once I returned from Nuremberg to The Hague is to go to the workers of the ICC to point out solidarity for his or her work in selling worldwide prison justice and to guard those that’ve already been sanctioned.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday known as the ICC a “rogue court docket” that might by no means be allowed to prosecute Individuals. The brand new sanctions had been suspended for six months, and included another exemptions for transactions for telecoms, software program, fee of pensions and transactions associated to detainees.
The US has lengthy been hostile to the court docket, and particularly the ICC statute that claims it has jurisdiction not solely over nationals of member states but in addition over others alleged to have dedicated atrocity crimes on the territory of member states.
