French courts, international crimes

Le Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris (left), the criminal court in France's capital, soon may adjudicate charges of international offenses.
In a joint op-ed appearing in Le Monde, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Justice Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie (below right) announced that in the 2010 courts bill the legislature will be asked to give to the Paris court competence to hear cases involving allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity. As quoted by Agence France-Presse, the 2 ministers wrote, in a reference to the complementarity principle at the heart of the International Criminal Court structure:

'Il ne s'agit pas de mettre en place la compétence universelle mais de faire valoir les principes du droit international au sein de juridictions nationales dans le respect du traité de Rome de 1998.'

That is:

'It's not a matter of establishing universal jurisdiction but rather of giving force to the international law principles applicable to national court systems by dint of the 1998 Rome Statute.'

(courtroom photo credit; Alliot-Marie photo credit)

On August 18

On this day in ...
... 1587, days after her family had arrived with other colonists at Roanoke Island on the mid-Atlantic coast (now North Carolina), Virginia Dare, the 1st child of English descent, was born in what is now the United States of America. The Roanoke Colony vanished, however, and Virginia along with it, under conditions unknown to this day. (credit for 1937 stamp commemorating Dare's birth)
... 1992, during an international inspection of 2 detention sites, the leader of the delegation, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, then France's Humanitarian Affairs Minister (today, its Foreign Minister), called the Serbian detention camps "'hell on earth.'" by the man leading a delegation to inspect them. The visit came a week after TV crews at the Trnopolje camp broadcast "[i]mages of severely emaciated internees behind barbed wire fences" that led "to comparisons with the horrors of Nazi concentration camps." Abuse at camps would be the subject of numerous cases at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, established the following year by the U.N. Security Council.

(Prior August 18 posts are here and here.)

French diplomacy in Iraq?

"It's time to stop lecturing the Americans about their errors and start contributing to a solution," declares a LeMonde editorial in approval of the new interest in Iraq displayed by new French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.
France’s intervention will definitely not be military. But playing on the 30-year relationship between Kouchner and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who has close ties to Kurdish and Shiite leaders, may help speed a political solution. France’s involvement in Iraq since 2003 has been limited to writing off about $5.5 billion in debt and pushing for greater UN role. British and German leaders welcome the move as much as the United States does. But the “prevailing view” in the French diplomatic corps is that negotiating is futile; “the civil war needs to run its course”. Some also fear that getting involved will ruin France’s diplomatic standing in the rest of the Arab world and open it up to more terrorist attacks. But both conservative and left newspapers agree that it’s time to stop gloating about being right and get back to playing on the international scene. Does this mean we can get back to eating "French" fries?