International Criminal Court Quotes

Why is it that we go to immense lengths getting the Serbs who were responsible for the massacre of 7,000 at Srbrenica-that's slightly more than the total figure for New York 9/11-and we take them to a tribunal in The Hague, and one after another, we arraign them, try them, convict them, and punish them in front of the world, but no plans have been brought forward to get Osama bin Laden and his friends and put them on trial.

Saddam Hussein is a serial offender -- major crimes against humanity - it's calculated that he's killed about a million people in the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait; gassed tens of thousands of his own Kurdish Iraqi citizens because they happen to disagree with him. Everyone knows that the case against Saddam Hussein is utterly proven. He should be on trial in the international court for crimes against humanity.

There is a movement to get an international criminal court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states-but with the noticeable absence of the United States of America.

Our nation has invested millions of dollars in building safe, humane and, I may say, air-conditioned facilities to detain and prosecute the detainees at Guantanamo.

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

Going to Cambodia to cover the genocide trials, I did read a lot about the Khmer Rouge; I read a lot about the country and its history.

Milosevic did not die in The Hague - he was killed in The Hague. But, he had managed to defend the national and state interests of Serbia and the Serb people, and everybody should be grateful to him for that.

By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails, and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.

I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes. And the way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command.

Unfortunately in this Century crime has ceased to be largely local in origin and effect. Crime is now established on an international scale and the criminal law must face this new reality. Their lordships can find nothing in precedent, comity or good sense that should inhibit the common law from regarding as justiciable in England inchoate crimes committed abroad which are intended to result in the commission of criminal offences in England.

In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers, but not against the United States.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.

There can be no deal, no amnesty for war crimes.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.

The biggest road block to action on genocide and other human rights crimes is ignorance. Most people just don't know that such things are happening, and often, if they have a vague idea they are happening, there is a feeling that there is nothing that can be done to stop these crimes.

The United States normally punishes war crimes as such only if their committed by enemy nationals.

Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.

We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.

Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.

I can tell you categorically that any mal-treatment of any detainees by U.S. forces or coalition forces is totally unacceptable - that our orders have and will continue to be that we will treat everyone in our charge with - humanely and with respect.

The thing that's most uppermost in my mind and will continue to be until I hit a brick wall is that I am dead serious, dead serious about going after George Bush, trying to get him into an American courtroom and prosecute him for what happened in Iraq.

The concept of war crimes is an American invention.

In light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, critics are arguing that abuses of Iraqi prisoners are being produced by a climate of disregard for the laws of war.

Prisoners, according to the law, who are non-U.S. citizens and are detained outside the U.S. - including in Guantanamo Bay - are denied 'habeas corpus.' They are also denied the right to claim the Geneva Conventions confer certain rights on them.