The European Union said on Saturday it regretted a new bilateral accord between Washington and Romania granting US troops in a foreign nation immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
A representative of the European Commission — executive body of the EU — said: ”It’s a bad political signal. We regret Romania’s decision.”
Apart from Romania, only Israel has so far signed such a bilateral accord with Washington.
Diplomatic sources said here however that the new agreement with Bucharest need not have any effect on negotiations on Romania’s future membership of the European Union.
The United States is vehemently opposed to the new International Criminal Court, which it fears will be turned into a political instrument with malicious war crimes accusations against its soldiers abroad, particularly in UN peacekeeping operations.
The ICC is the first permanent tribunal set up to try genocide and war crimes. It was created on July 1 in The Hague.
The New York Times meanwhile reported that the US government had warned that countries which were not members of Nato and which had signed up to the ICC would lose all US military aid if they did not undertake never to extradite US citizens for trial before the ICC.
Some observers have argued that the United States has been targeting states who are keen to join Nato, including Romania, to convince them to sign Article 98 agreements.
Article 98 of the treaty that created the tribunal limits the court’s ability to ask a country to surrender suspects if to do so would clash with another international agreement.
Washington appeared poised to threaten UN peacekeeping until a compromise was reached July 12 in the UN Security Council that permits a yearly review of the court’s jurisdiction over US peacekeepers and a review of accusations on a case-by-case basis by the council. – Sapa-AFP