The headquarters of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, site of the ongoing five-week conference to negotiate an International Criminal Court (ICC), is only a stone's throw from the ancient Circus Maximus in Rome. The conference, as it turns out, is a bit of a circus itself. On June 15, Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy journeyed to Rome to declare Canada's undying support for the ICC initiative. He won acclaim from the legion of feminists and liberals gathered at the conference, but his stance is evoking a different response elsewhere. Conservatives fear that an ICC would ravage families and communities around the globe, while the U.S. Congress is hinting at trade retribution over Canada's latest round of America-baiting.

If they ever think about it at all, most Canadians probably assume—with plenty of encouragement from the press—that the ICC would bring to justice people like Cambodia's Pol Pot, the Communist leader who died this spring without facing trial for the liquidation of an estimated 1.5 million Cambodians. In fact, it is unlikely that an ICC could have delivered so much as a wrist slap to the Khmer Rouge boss. However, according to legal analysts, such a court would facilitate the advancement of the radical feminist and homosexual agendas in Canada and abroad, undermining family rights and national sovereignty in the process.

Canada has long been a leading supporter of the "global governance" style of internationalism that informs the ICC initiative. But under Mr. Axworthy's "soft power" philosophy, that enthusiasm is more pronounced than ever. And while imperiling Canadian sovereignty, Mr. Axworthy's policy tilt also risks a nasty backlash from the U.S. government. Last month, the Clinton White House pointedly excluded Canada from a Euro-American deal to mitigate the effects of the Helms-Burton Act that punishes non-American companies trading with Cuba. Now word has filtered out of Washington that the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee will kill U.S. ratification of any ICC treaty, and that Canada can expect continued marginalization if Mr. Axworthy sticks to his radical policy stance.

The ICC talks, which run from June 15 to July 17, are regarded by friend and foe alike as one of the critical international negotiations of the post-war era. The notion of a permanent court to try war criminals has been advanced since the Nuremberg tribunal tried Nazi officials after the Second World War, but the idea never advanced beyond theorizing until the early 1990s. Then, prompted by ethnic atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda (both conflicts have generated ad hoc war-crimes tribunals), national representatives began to discuss seriously the formation of an international criminal court four years ago.

But while the ICC was conceived as an institution whereby war crimes might be investigated and prosecuted, an array of interest groups quickly mobilized to advance their respective agendas. Feminist lobbyists have been particularly aggressive. Along with genocide and other universally recognized crimes, the ICC draft statute specifies controversial notions like "enforced pregnancy" as transgressions that fall within the ICC's jurisdiction. When the "enforced pregnancy" term was incorporated into Article 5 of the ICC text last December at the insistence of lobbyists representing the feminist Women's Caucus, most delegates believed it merely criminalized repeated acts of rape intended to impregnate a forcibly confined woman.

In reality, the term is a subterfuge for criminalizing denial of access to abortion. As interpreted by feminists, "forced pregnancy" and "enforced pregnancy" refer to the condition of any woman denied permission to abort an unborn child. At a private meeting this April during the annual United Nations Commission on Human Rights session in Geneva, Women's Caucus lobbyists explained that they intended to use "enforced pregnancy" or "forced pregnancy" in place of abortion in future international negotiations. The reason for the deception: to overcome the resistance among Christian and Muslim nations to international agreements that could override national laws against abortion.

The "enforced pregnancy" inclusion is only one example of the ICC statute's extensive politicization. The 173-page draft text is replete with references to such "gender" crimes as "gender persecution." In the UN context, "gender" is not consistently interpreted as being synonymous with "sex"; the phrase is also employed as a euphemism for homosexuality and other sexual orientations. Consequently, an ICC criminalization of "gender persecution" may subsequently be interpreted by the court's judges and prosecutors as prohibiting national laws against sodomy or homosexual marriage.

As well, the draft treaty would mandate a permanent feminization of the court's composition and processes. Article 37 calls for "gender balance" among ICC judges, as well as "expertise on issues related to sexual and gender violence." Women's Caucus lobbyists are also pressing for the institution of a "gender legal advisor" in the ICC prosecutor's office, to ensure an appropriate ideological perspective there, and the institution of similar feminist officials within every other "organ" of the court.

The Women's Caucus is also embroiled in the most contentious ICC-related debate of all. Many countries are hostile to the idea of an autonomous ideological court that would transcend national sovereignty. The most prominent member of this camp is the U.S., which insists that all ICC investigations and prosecutions should require prior authorization by the UN Security Council. That, in turn, would grant the U.S., Russia, China, France and Britain a veto over any court proceedings, owing to their permanent Security Council membership.

However, this check on the reach of the ICC is opposed by most of the international lobbies involved in the negotiations. They demand an independent court with "inherent jurisdiction" to consider complaints from any source, and to investigate and prosecute whomever it chooses. Even greater inroads on national sovereignty will occur if the ICC negotiators accede to another Women's Caucus demand—that the court have jurisdiction over "crimes" that occur internally in a country and that involve "repression" rather than actual violent conflict. Potentially, that could leave government officials open to prosecution for refusing to implement elements of the feminist agenda, or for other actions deemed repressive by ideologically motivated investigators.

Canadian negotiators have placed themselves firmly in the activist camp. Indeed, Canada is serving as convenor of the so-called "like-minded nations," a 40-member group of the staunchest supporters of a powerful, feminized ICC. And in a series of recent speeches, culminating in his official address to the ICC delegates on June 15, Mr. Axworthy has consistently backed every key demand of the UN liberals.

The ICC, he told his FAO audience, should have broad "inherent jurisdiction" free from Security Council oversight; should be able to receive complaints from anyone and initiate prosecutions against any defendants it chooses; should have jurisdiction within countries as well as in external conflicts; and "should be sensitive to gender issues" by integrating "a gender perspective" into the court's operations and by including undefined "gender crimes" alongside more commonly recognized offences like rape. Declared Mr. Axworthy: "The time has come for us to build new institutions that respond to new needs."

Pro-family activists were startled by Mr. Axworthy's stridency. "Canada's statement of its goals was amazing," commented one Rome lobbyist. "It was like a summary of everything that is dangerous about the court."

Another Canadian advocate for a powerful ICC is Louise Arbour, the feminist Ontario Court of Appeal judge who is currently on leave to serve as chief prosecutor for the war-crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She is best known in Canada for her report on the 1994 riot at the Kingston Prison for Women, which concluded that the female perpetrators of millions of dollars in damage had been "victimized" because they were strip-searched by male policemen during the riot.

In a March speech, Madam Justice Arbour urged Canada to press even more vigorously for a powerful and independent ICC, instead of the "weak and impotent" model advocated by the U.S. "The only cure is to give it more powers," she maintained. "So we have to set it right at the outset."

Last Thursday, veteran New Democrat politician Stephen Lewis joined the pro-ICC, pro-feminism chorus. Speaking to the ICC delegates as the deputy executive director of UNICEF, Mr. Lewis declared that an "effective and fair" ICC is an international necessity. His statement also cited "forced pregnancy" as a "form of sexual assault."

To augment the propaganda campaign led by luminaries like Mr. Axworthy, Mr. Lewis and Madam Justice Arbour, Foreign Affairs bureaucrats have met regularly with feminist lobbyists in Ottawa and elsewhere to orchestrate a coordinated ICC strategy. At the final ICC preparatory conference, held in March in New York, the Canadian delegation sent a member out of the closed nation-to-nation deliberations to huddle with Women's Caucus lobbyists whenever a new proposal was introduced. And the next month in Geneva, Canada helped lay the feminist groundwork for Rome by introducing a reference to "forced pregnancy" in the sessional documents of the annual UN Committee on Human Rights meeting.

That reference is already being cited by Women's Caucus lobbyists as evidence that an international "consensus" exists about the concept's inclusion in the accepted definition of "war crimes." However, their efforts in this regard suffered a setback on the first day of the ICC conference. Replying to a reporter who asked if the inclusion of "enforced pregnancy" in the ICC text might be undermining international support for the court, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan replied that the enforced-pregnancy issue "is one of those that haven't been settled."

Canada's efforts have not stopped there. Through the Canadian International Development Agency, Ottawa is financing the attendance of six pro-ICC organizations from poorer countries at the Rome talks. And in perhaps the most striking evidence of Ottawa's determination to advance the feminist agenda, senior Women's Caucus lobbyist Valerie Oosterveld was a last-minute addition to the official Canadian delegation. This favoured status accords her unimpeded access to the ICC's private nation-to-nation deliberations.

Mr. Axworthy strove to cement his activist ties still more firmly during his Rome jaunt. While at the ICC site, he visited the office of the NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court (CICC), an alliance dominated by groups like the Women's Caucus and the World Federalist Movement. (Another prominent ICC backer is the Transnational Radical Party, which is broadcasting the entire negotiations over its Radio Radicale 2 station in Rome). After applauding Mr. Axworthy's work on their behalf, CICC leaders exchanged tips with the Canadian minister on how best to achieve their mutual goals.

Canada's unremitting efforts to advance liberal agendas within the ICC setting have not gone unnoticed. "Lloyd Axworthy basically is willing to give away all notions of sovereignty," comments Richard Wilkins, an expert in international law at Utah's Brigham Young University. "The Canadian delegation is arguing for a court that has vaguely defined and therefore essentially unlimited powers, with a prosecutor who will act not at the behest of sovereign states, but at the behest of the most extreme political groups around the world. The net result will clearly be a form of tyranny—Canada wants to create a judiciary that will control all people in virtually all areas of their lives."

Prof. Wilkins explains that an international agreement like the planned ICC or the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Canada successfully championed in the late 1980s, can override national law in two primary ways. First, if a treaty is ratified by a national government, a country is automatically bound to its contents. But even if a government refrains from formally ratifying a document, the simple fact of its existence makes it a part of international "customary law," which is also held to have legal force at the national level.

The activists who dominate UN negotiations are bent on manufacturing a body of "instant" customary law, based on the untried "international norms" now fashionable among contemporary liberals. For instance, Prof. Wilkins says, the Convention on the Rights of the Child has provoked a "remarkable transformation" in family relations by formally inserting the state between parents and children as the guarantor of the "autonomous" rights of minors. "A lot of these new 'norms' are not like anything we've ever seen before," says Prof. Wilkins. "This is just social engineering run amok."

Medicine Hat lawyer Dallas Miller, QC, senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defence Association, explains that the Convention on the Rights of the Child is already starting to influence Canadian law. Even though then-justice minister Allan Rock assured concerned family groups in 1995 that the convention would not undermine Section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada, which permits corporal punishment, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child—the body charged with monitoring compliance with the convention—subsequently ruled that it prohibits all corporal punishment. "So I can imagine in the near future [Justice Minister Anne McLellan] saying that she has to remove Section 43 because the international community wants to criminalize spanking," predicts Mr. Miller.

Such pressure is already being exerted on Australia. That country was one of eight to be subjected to periodic review by the Committee on the Rights of the Child last year. Committee members attacked Australian law, which permits corporal punishment within families and at private schools. Australian representatives replied that the relevant articles of the convention did not specifically ban corporal punishment, and that the authors and signers of the convention never intended to prohibit "moderate and reasonable" physical punishments.

The committee summarily dismissed Australia's objections, insisting that the convention must be interpreted "holistically, taking into account not only its specific provisions, but also the general principles which inspired it." In keeping with its "holistic" interpretation, the UN committee officially recommended that Australia "take all appropriate measures, including that of a legislative nature, to prohibit corporal punishment in private schools and at home." Canada is due to face a similar grilling in 1999.

And because the ICC, like the Convention on the Rights of the Child, would be based on an international treaty, it would be a uniquely authoritative legal body. "An International Criminal Court would be looked to by domestic courts for guidance, without doubt," Mr. Miller says. Prof. Wilkins concurs. "We should be very worried by this," he says. "We are creating binding laws not over the course of centuries as in the past, but rather over a few days or a few years. And with the ICC, these new 'norms' are going to be enforced by a powerful new international tribunal."

Americans have some degree of protection from the arbitrary imposition of a new ICC. That is because the U.S. constitution requires that any international treaty be ratified by the U.S. Senate before it can come into force. Canada, in contrast, has no formal process of legislative ratification. "Provincial and federal legislators have to wake up to the fact that we are losing sovereignty because of what cabinet ministers and bureaucrats are doing in secrecy," Mr. Miller says. "It's kind of a backhanded way of bringing these concepts into national law."

Mr. Axworthy seems untroubled by such complaints. On April 2, Calgary MP Eric Lowther, the chairman of the Reform Party's family caucus, wrote the cabinet minister requesting information on the composition of Canada's ICC delegation to Rome and an elaboration of Canadian objectives there, particularly with respect to family issues. The opposition MP also asked for clarification of a report that Foreign Affairs had funneled $40,000 through the UN to purchase the support of impoverished countries at the ICC.

Almost two months later, Mr. Axworthy provided a distinctly uninformative reply. No names of Canadian delegates were included in the return letter, nor did it contain a single mention of Canadian positions on family-related concerns. However, Mr. Axworthy did confirm that the $40,000 payment had taken place, claiming that it was made through the UN "to ensure that this contribution was transparent." He later disclosed in his Rome speech that Foreign Affairs has, in fact, channelled a total of $125,000 through the UN to finance developing-country NGO involvement in the creation of the court.

Ironically, while its critics believe that the ICC would imperil national sovereignty and would serve as an open invitation to judicial activism, the court's ability to perform its more highly advertised role—bringing despots like Pol Pot or Iraq's Saddam Hussein to justice—may be virtually non-existent. That is because mobilizing to capture such individuals will remain a political decision, not a legal one. And as in the past, the determination about whom to pursue would reside with those who hold political power and military might, not with the ICC's judges and prosecutors.

"Anything that the ICC tries to do will have political implications," argues Alfred Rubin, a professor of international law at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and the author of Ethics and Authority in International Law. For example, Prof. Rubin queries, in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who should the ICC place on trial: Israel's Ariel Sharon, or Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat? After all, one man's "freedom fighter" is another man's "terrorist."

Prof. Rubin also suggests the ICC's North American proponents are deluding themselves if they believe the court would necessarily apply their own legal principles, and their own standards of right and wrong, to its operations. He regards the activists' efforts to hijack the ICC as inevitable, since by its very nature the court would always be primarily a political institution, not a legal one. "Does that surprise anybody?" he asks. "To expect them not to act this way is silly. I don't understand why anyone would ever expect an International Criminal Court to be free of that."

Given the ICC's inherent flaws, Prof. Rubin says the only sensible solution is to discard the whole idea. "I think there are much better alternatives consistent with the structure of the international world today."

Mr. Axworthy counters such criticism with his pet doctrine of "soft power." The "soft power" phrase, coined by American political scientist Joseph Nye, refers to an alleged shift of international authority away from nations like the U.S., which possess military might, to those like Canada, which have supposedly gained influence through their moral authority, their skillful diplomacy, and their use of the media.

In a letter published in the Ottawa Citizen in late April, Mr. Axworthy defended his "soft power" approach against critics who deride it as meaningless feel-good rhetoric. Mr. Axworthy asserted that entities like the ICC constitute the iron fist inside Canada's soft-power glove. "Far from being wimps, we are in fact very robust in our defence of Canadian interests, and in the re-shaping of international norms and interests." According to the foreign minister, notable recent Canadian successes on the soft-power front include the ICC talks, last year's international treaty banning land mines, and Canadian efforts in "countering American extra-territorial laws such as Helms-Burton."

One common thread running through that trio of initiatives, and through the entire fabric of Mr. Axworthy's foreign policy, is conflict with the U.S. Congress. While the Clinton Administration last month reluctantly endorsed the land-mines treaty (unveiled with great fanfare in Ottawa late last fall by Mr. Axworthy), it announced that formal American signing would come no sooner than 2006. The delay is ostensibly to allow the U.S. time to find alternatives to land mines in volatile settings like the border between North and South Korea, where American commanders insist they remain necessary to deter North Korea's Communist regime from invading. In reality, President Bill Clinton's Democratic strategists know the land-mines treaty has little chance of ever winning approval from the Republican Congress, so the eight-year delay is more a political expedient than a military one.

As for the ICC, Sen. Helms sent a letter to the White House in March warning that any treaty that does not place the court under UN Security Council control will be a complete non-starter. And even if such a veto is granted, sources in Washington reported in May, every Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee has privately vowed to scuttle U.S. ratification of the ICC treaty, no matter what the specifics of the final document negotiated in Rome.

"Our concern is this—that no American citizen is ever going to be judged by this court," explains Mr. Thiessen, Sen. Helms' chief spokesman. He speculates that if the ICC was accorded unchecked powers to pursue whomever it chose, it is entirely conceivable that prosecutions could be brought against every American—ranging from the U.S. president down to the pilots flying bombing missions—who participated in a future strike against Iraq, if such a military action had not obtained explicit prior UN authorization.

Other countries could be at similar risk, Mr. Thiessen stresses. "Canadians ought to be concerned as well, particularly as Canada is one of the most activist peacekeepers around the world. The ICC will seriously put in jeopardy any soldiers who participate in peacekeeping operations. You are submitting them to the authority of a court whose members will be chosen by a vote among UN members. There is no guarantee the judges will come from countries where there is a democracy, or there is even a standard of the rule of law."

Mr. Thiessen chuckles when reminded that Mr. Axworthy has taken a stance on the ICC that, once again, is completely opposed to the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress. Canadian foreign policy seems almost "reflexively" anti-American these days, he remarks. The official is asked if Mr. Axworthy's confrontational posture contributed to Canada's unexplained omission from the Clinton administration's plan to excuse European Union nations from some of the more onerous Helms-Burton sanctions. "Is Mr. Axworthy so blinded by his hatred of the United States that he has potentially been left out of an agreement that could have benefitted Canada?" Mr. Thiessen responds. "Yeah, the answer is 'Sure.'"

And if Mr. Axworthy persists in advancing leftist policies that are antagonistic to Canada's biggest trading partner, Mr. Thiessen warns that setbacks could occur on other sensitive issues, like the West Coast salmon dispute or Canadian exports of softwood lumber. "All this undermines Axworthy's credibility. He's just not taken as a credible person here any more—and certainly that's going to undermine your effectiveness and have consequences on your ability to negotiate things."

—Tom McFeely

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