This is an open letter to the President of the International Criminal Court, asking why his court has done exactly nothing about investigating war crimes that may have been committed by the heads of state of Australia and Britain, in Iraq. If you are concerned, please request similar action yourself.

To whom it may concern,
The Information Office,
ICC.

I would be most obliged if you could see that this gets to its intended main recipients, your court's president and your chief public prosecutor, and to whoever else ought to receive it, given it's contents. My thanks.

This is an open letter, which will be posted as widely as possible on the Internet. It it is in the public domain and may be quoted freely in whole or in part by anyone.


Phillipe Kirsch,
President,
International Criminal Court.


Sir,

Please accept that the criticisms below are ex officio and not personal. I am sure that each individual in your court is doing his or her best, in very trying circumstances.

I wrote, with some urgency, to your court, many months ago. I asked that, under the terms by which your court was constituted, your Public Prosecutor open investigations, with a view to bringing prosecutions for war crimes, if warranted, against three people, namely Elizabeth Windsor of London, England, Anthony Blair, also of London, and John Howard, of Sydney, Australia. The first is the monarch of Britain and Australia, the second is Britain's Prime Minister and the third is the Prime Minister of Australia. The war crimes I believe they may have committed relate to Iraq, a sovereign state which was both invaded and attacked by aerial bombardment by, inter alia, forces under the command of the governments of Britain and Australia, and hence formally under the command of those individuals. Since then, many thousands of people in Iraq have been killed or maimed by aerial bombs and missiles, by the invading ground troops, by gunfire from naval ships and from planes and from the bombs, bullets and rockets of the people opposing the invaders. Many people have been tortured. You may have noticed some of the details in the press. Yesterday the invaders, in this case mainly US forces, but part of the same military group, are reported to have killed, by their own account, a further 300 people.

I herewith repeat my earlier formal request, in case you have mislaid the details. I again request that your chief public prosecutor, Mr Luis Ocampo, as is his right and duty, and as a matter of urgency, immediately commence investigations as to whether the three individuals named, that is Elizabeth Windsor, Anthony Blair and John Howard, are or are not guilty of war crimes or other crimes against any of the citizens of Iraq. I hope that is clear enough for the eminent legal minds of your bench to grasp without confusion.

I believe there is no statute of limitations for war crimes, so I will repeat this request publicly and indefinitely, until something is done about it. If nothing is done, when I am no longer able to repeat it, I will get others to do so in turn.

I have had no evidence whatever of anything being done yet, by your court, in relation to this matter. Armed forces from both those countries are still in Iraq, and its citizens are still being killed, in some cases by those armed forces. Your court was set up, I believe, to try war crimes that have been committed around the world, without showing fear or favour to the powerful, the rich or the ostensibly respectable. If that is not how you intend to carry out your duties, you and the rest of your bench should resign and hand over to people with more determination. If you will do neither, then your court should be disbanded, as being an obstruction to international justice. Your court calls itself “international” and its formation raised the hopes of ordinary people all over the world, that at last the powerful and ruthless and self-satisfied people who wage wars of aggression, might be curbed and brought to book. So far you have failed miserably, as far as I can see. You appear to have not one single investigation even at the most preliminary stage, regarding Iraq. Who do you serve? Justice or the powerful?

I am very uneasy about your court's track record so far. Once, many months ago, you explained to the world in general, via your website, that not only had you no trials in progress after being in existence for more than a year, but that, even though you had had many people appeal to you to do something real to stop the carnage in Iraq, you did not intend to do anything at all about it. The reasons given were in part nonsense. Your website, which is your official mouthpiece and so cannot be blamed for mis-reporting you, claimed that nothing could be done because the USA has not signed the Rome Statute. So what?

I am perfectly aware that the USA has not signed the Rome Statute. This request has nothing to do with that, and it is high time your court stopped shielding and excusing its inaction behind that irrelevancy. The people named are the heads of state of countries that are signatories to the Rome Statute. Their own national courts have made no attempt whatever to try them, and will not do so. Hence your public prosecutor, in terms of your charter, is obliged to act. People are being killed and having their limbs blow off and their lives ruined in a multitude of ways while you fiddle about, doing exactly nothing effective. Your court is, I am afraid to have to tell you, in disgrace. If nothing is done, it will also go down in history as one.

I for one have asked you to investigate the conduct of three people who are not US citizens, and who may have been guilty of war crimes. Evidence has been in the public domain for many months that the aforementioned heads of state of Britain allowed the United States military to use British bases from which to attack Iraq with, among many other lesser military obscenities, cluster bombs. Those bombs are illegal. There are photos on the Internet, and hence seen around the world, of US bombers loading cluster bombs on British soil. That seems on the face of it to constitute a war crime, and is just the tip of the iceberg. Several thousand other incidents and killings also seem to constitute war crimes. There is no lack of openly available evidence as to what the armed forces of Britain and Australia have done in and to Iraq. Any competent public prosecutor should be able to establish quite readily what has been done in past months; it was not done in secret. It was done in the public spotlight, with the triumphalist and age-old arrogance of those who believe they are immune to international law.

Your court, since its formation, has done nothing whatever to challenge that sense of immunity. Your website, following its list of weak excuses for not tackling the war in Iraq, informed the world that instead of doing anything about that, you were going to prosecute people apparently responsible for war crimes in the Congo. If those people are responsible for war crimes, they must of course be prosecuted. I happen to have been born in Africa, and so would like to see African folk protected as much and prehaps more that any others, but it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that you are happy to tackle piranas but not sharks. Put quite simply, your court is suspected by many, including myself, of being either completely spineless, under the thumb of what likes to call itself the “Coalition of the Willing,” or in total disarray.

So here is an open and public request. Either start investigations into the possible commission of war crimes in Iraq by the countries which have attacked and invaded it, or resign and make way for someone, or another bench, or another court, with sufficient courage and ethical drive to do so with diligence. I am not an august and bewigged legal type, with an international track record of astounding merit, I am merely an ordinary person. But if you cannot, from the ranks of your entire profession worldwide, find someone to do the job of directing your court to do what it was set up to do, I will do it for you, if you like, and for free. I give you my word, that my first phone call will be to instruct your court's public prosecutor to either open investigations into this huge tragedy, with all the resources at his command, or resign forthwith. Then I will find a properly qualified president who will proceed in the matter of Iraq as with all the rest, with determination, and get out of the way.

You collectively occupy an impressive skyscraper and cost the world a lot of money. No doubt you all get paid handsomely for doing so very little. But far more seriously, you sit blocking the centre of your field and so you cost the poor and the assaulted of the world, their limbs and their loved ones and their lives, by your inaction. That is not excusable. Perform, or get out of the way.

Yours, etc.,

Peter Ravenscroft.