Why China Will Not Join The New "International Criminal Court"

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a permanent court that has the power to investigate and bring to justice individuals who commit the most serious violations of international humanitarian law, namely war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Unlike the International Court of Justice in The Hague (a.k.a., the World Court), in which only states can bring suits against one another, the ICC will have the capacity to try individuals. The ICC was created on the basis of the Rome Statute, a treaty adopted in Rome on July 17, 1998 at the United Nations diplomatic conference.

On July 1, 2002, the ICC came into existence and officially separated from the United Nations. This date marked the beginning of the Court's jurisdiction over individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, or other crimes against humanity.

China actively participates in the Preparatory Commission meetings, but China has not signed the Rome Statute. In a statement at the Security Council on July 10, 2002, a representative of China remarked, "Although China is not yet a state party to the International Criminal Court, we support the independence, impartiality, and competence of the ICC that enjoys universality. We have continued to actively participate in the establishment of the ICC and will continue to follow closely its operation."

Why does China not want to ratify the Rome Statue and become a state party to the International Criminal Court? The reason is very simple. If one compares the definition for the crimes against humanity with what Jiang Zemin has done to Falun Gong practitioners over the past three years, it is easy to find that Jiang Zemin should be the first person to be tried in the ICC. We can predict that China will not ratify the Rome Statue as long as Jiang Zemin is still in control of the power.

Rome Statue is the "Law" according to which ICC conducts its trial. The Rome Statue can be found on the Internet at http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/icc/statute/languages.htm in several languages. For the ease of readers, Article 6: Genocide and Article 7: Crimes Against Humanity are attached at the end of this article.

The crimes Jiang Zemin has committed in his effort to "eradicate" Falun Gong, include:

1. murder (There are more than 460 practitioners deaths due to the persecution that have been documented),
2. enslavement (tens of thousands Falun Gong practitioners have been sent into labor camps and forced to do slave labor),
3. imprisonment (practitioners have been jailed, sent to slave labor camps, or been locked up in mental hospitals without legal procedure),
4. torture (wide spread physical torture in brainwashing classes, in detention centers, and in labor camps),
5. rape (several reports have documented the rape of female practitioners by inmates who were encouraged by guards in the labor camps), and
6. other types of inhumane acts such as brainwashing.

All of these are classified as Crimes Against Humanity in the Rome Statue. The fact that Jiang Zemin uses torture and killing to eradicate Falun Gong indicates he is committing acts of genocide.

Article 6: Genocide
For the purpose of this Statute, "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article 7: Crimes against humanity
1. For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(a) Murder;
(b) Extermination;
(c) Enslavement;
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(f) Torture;
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;
(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
(j) The crime of apartheid;
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:
(a) "Attack directed against any civilian population" means a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack;
(b) "Extermination" includes the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population;
(c) "Enslavement" means the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in persons, in particular women and children;
(d) "Deportation or forcible transfer of population" means forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law;
(e) "Torture" means the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, upon a person in the custody or under the control of the accused; except that torture shall not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions;
(f) "Forced pregnancy" means the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law. This definition shall not in any way be interpreted as affecting national laws relating to pregnancy;
(g) "Persecution" means the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity;
(h) "The crime of apartheid" means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;
(i) "Enforced disappearance of persons" means the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time.
3. For the purpose of this Statute, it is understood that the term "gender" refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society. The term "gender" does not indicate any meaning different from the above.