Rights activists criticize international court

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The International Criminal Court, set up to handle the world's most heinous crimes, risks failure if suspects in Sudan and Uganda are allowed to evade justice, rights activists said on Thursday.

Richard Dicker, an attorney with Human Rights Watch, challenged the 105 states that have signed up to the five-year-old court to prove their commitment at an assembly of its governing body opening on Friday in New York.

"This court will fail without the backup of its assembly and the concerted efforts of its 105 state parties and the United Nations and the African Union and the European Union and others," Dicker told a news conference at U.N. headquarters.

"Cooperation is a matter of political will and we are looking to states and the United Nations to raise up their level of political will in support of this institution."

The United States, Russia and China are not members of the court based in The Hague.

The prosecutor for the court, which aims to try crimes that national governments cannot or will not, has issued only seven arrest warrants: four in Uganda, one in Democratic Republic of Congo and two in Sudan over events in Darfur.

Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga, accused of using child soldiers in his country's 1998-2003 war, will be the first person to face trial at the court early next year.

But the Ugandan and Sudanese suspects remain at large with little prospect of arrest any time soon. Their cases are complicated by efforts to reach peace deals, and in Sudan by the government's refusal to cooperate.

In Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army rebel leaders under indictment have insisted the cases be dropped in return for peace after two decades of war.

In Sudan, prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo issued arrest warrants in February for Ahmad Haroun, a former state minister of interior, and Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed militia leader, for mass executions, rapes and forcible evictions.

Sudan has refused to hand them over and appointed Haroun to a committee to investigate human rights abuses in Darfur.

Osman Hummaida, a Sudanese activist, said the ICC indictments had been seen in Darfur as a "glimmer of hope for accountability of justice." Now that was replaced by frustration and disappointment, he said.

In Uganda, the LRA has argued that its leader Joseph Kony and three others indicted by the ICC should be subject to Uganda's national laws. Kony is accused of killing civilians, hacking body parts off victims and kidnapping children.

Dicker said both cases showed the challenge of balancing the need to make compromises for peace with not allowing those guilty of the worst atrocities to go free.