09 Jul And Then There Were 110
09.07.09
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5 Comments
The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, has signed the act of Parliament ratifying the Rome Statute, thus completing the Czech Republic’s accession to the ICC. All of the members of the EU have now joined the Court.
Congrats, Czech Republic!
Is ICC membership now a de facto Copenhagen criterion, like ECHR membership? And if not, should it be?
great news, on time to finish their EU presidency without joining….but well accession not completed until they deposit at the UN…hopefully by the end of this month!
That would seem like overreach, Martin, wouldn’t it? It is basically irrelevant to ‘the EU’, so would run a great risk of appearing to be a meaningless condition imposed for ideological reasons.
@Patrick: Well, that depends. One might argue that ICC membership is closely connected to “the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law” (art. 6(1) TEU) in the same way that ECHR membership is. And even if it is not, the ICC is sufficienty close to many members’ hearts that it seems difficult to imagine getting 27 ratifications for a state that refuses to ratify the Statute of Rome. (That’s why I wrote “de facto”.) Anyway, it doesn’t look like this question will come up any time soon, since all candidate states are parties to the ICC, except Turkey. About Turkey, wiki writes: Turkey is currently a candidate country to join the European Union, which has required progress on human rights issues in order to continue with accession talks. Part of this has included pressure, but not a requirement, on Turkey to join the court which is supported under the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated in October 2004 that Turkey would “soon” ratify the court, and the Turkish constitution was amended in 2004 to explicitly allow nationals to be surrendered to the court. However, in… Read more »
Response…Actually, it is not a de facto criteria but there is one EU foreign common position on the ICC, and as you well know there is not one for all the issue on the agenda. As a token concerning accession, see this https://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/ICC40EN.pdf
The common position reaches also into trade agreements with standard clauses (google EU and Nicaragua trade agreement for an interesting one)…
And the ICC common position has reached as well the development regime between the EU and the ACP ( the binding and recently Revised Cotonou Agreement) with a clause on non impunity art. 11.
This is why the Czech Republic’s ratification was so awaited!