International Student Badminton Tournament

Limerick Post

The sound of shuttlecocks being whacked over nets echoed around the Arena and old Sports Building last weekend, as UL hosted the fourth annual Irish International Student Badminton Tournament. 230 players, from novices to internationals, spent all of Saturday and Sunday trying to serve, smash and sneakily drop shot their way to victory in the Badminton Ireland event.

In total, roughly 300 matches were played altogether, according to tournament administrator, John Donovan. Players competed in four different sections according to their ability across five disciplines – men’s and ladies’ singles, men’s and ladies’ doubles and mixed doubles.

In order to promote socialising across team and country borders, partners for the doubles events are selected randomly. The scoring was calculated using the Swiss Ladder System, which means that all players play the same amount of matches in a league. It also meant that every single rally counted towards the overall rankings. After the first round of matches, the top two players play each other, as do the third and fourth ones, and so on. This format meant that people were always playing against people of similar ability, and it lead to some close-fought matches.

The overall team award for winning the most amount of games by their players across all disciplines went to the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, who emerged out of the 24 colleges represented to take the top prize. The past winners of the event are NUI Galway, UCC and Karlsruhe from Germany.

Some of the top players used last weekend’s event as a warm-up for the European University Championships that are taking place this week in St. Petersburg. Gary O’Sullivan, holder of a badminton sports scholarship at UCC who is representing the Cork team in Russia this week, spoke highly of the standard of play on show at UL this weekend. ‘You couldn’t ask for a better preparation,’ he said.

Both the participants and organisers heaped praise on the quality of the venue. The fact that Badminton Ireland chose to host the event in UL for the fourth year running is a testament to the fantastic facilities on offer there, according to Ivor Guiney, club captain of the UL Badminton Club. He also remarked that there has been speculation that the Malaysian Olympic badminton team are looking into using the Arena as a training venue for the 2012 London Games.

Student badminton puts Limerick on map

Limerick Independent, Limerick Leader

Up to 250 student badminton players from all over Ireland, the UK and Europe converged on the University of Limerick Sports Arena last weekend for the fourth annual Irish International Students Badminton Tournament.

The Irish ISBT is organised by students, for students. Badminton-playing students, alumni and members of universities competed in four skills sections, ranging social players to top national league standard.

Similar tournaments take place all over Europe. The first ISBT was hosted in the Netherlands 21 years ago by the DIOK Badminton Club of the Universiteit Twente in Enschede, in a bid to promote the sport of badminton and its social aspects of.

Last weekend’s tournament, said Mary Browne Director of Development & Coach Education with Badminton Ireland, could not have gone ahead without the help of a string of volunteers, spearheaded by Emma Lindqvist, Youth Leadership Development Officer with BI.

They have been working on the organisation since spring. The tournament format reached Ireland in 2004, and since then it has been held in Limerick.

Ivor Guiney, club captain of the UL Badminton club, said: “It was a privilege to have one of the main international student tournaments in UL for the fourth year running. The fact that it was booked out shows the enormous level of interest from all around Europe in coming to Limerick to play in the fantastic facilities we have here.”

Indeed, according to Ivor, there are rumours afoot that the Malaysian team is considering UL as a pre-Olympic acclimatizing camp before the London games in 2012.

Badminton is thriving locally with 11 clubs active in both Limerick city and county.

Ivor explained: “We’ve got 192 members on the books off and on, playing from Division 2-6 in Limerick. We are also entering a team in the Intervarsities and attending ISBTs in Cologne and Oslo. Anyone is welcome to join—the more members we have the better!”

Adults go back to school in increasing numbers

Limerick Independent

While the back to school rush is a recent memory for many schoolchildren, they are not the only ones returning to education. Adults form a large number of those who stocked their shopping trolleys with pens, refill pads and highlighters last August. According to Aontas, the Irish National Association of Adult Education, 150,000 adults participate in evening courses annually.

According to a survey by Learning Ireland, an educational publisher, Irish people see the importance of continuing their education throughout their working lives. More than 4 out of 5 of respondents to the Lifelong Learning Index 2006 say they have taken an adult education course, while 77% plan to enrol in a course in the next twelve months.

The national situation is replicated in Limerick, with many educational centres around the city, from secondary schools to third level institutions, buzzing with activity every evening, as adult learners flock to classes in diverse subjects.

Pat Maunsell is a busy man. As the Director of Adult Education at Limerick Senior College, one of the biggest providers of evening courses in the Midwest Region, he oversees an operation that gives courses to some 3,000 learners per annum. He explained some of the reasons motivating adults to return to education.

He noted that while certain learners seek to gain extra qualifications in order to progress in their careers, this is not the only reason why evening courses are so popular today. Others may treat a course as a hobby, while some enjoy the social aspect. He said that there is an increasing emphasis on the idea of work-life balance: ‘People know you have to unwind and de-stress as well as being ambitious and gaining qualifications.’

Mr Maunsell admitted that while for some learners the return to the classroom environment can be intimidating, he said: ‘We give them information at the beginning of the course, and try to present them with an adult friendly environment.’

Although most courses, especially year-long ones, follow the traditional academic pattern of beginning in September, there are many others that start in January. The City of Limerick Vocational Education Committee have published a free guidebook providing detailed information on adult learning opportunities offered by all providers in Limerick City. It is available in many bookshops and educational centres, should you wish to make an education-based New Year’s Resolution next January. A complete listing of courses can also be found on the VEC's website.

Letter to Kieran O'Donnell TD regarding a Shannon-Limerick Rail Link

Dear Mr O'Donnell,

I was glad to hear of the question you put to Minister Dempsey about the prospect of a rail link between Shannon Airport and Limerick city. I read about it in both The Irish Times and the Limerick Post.

The Irish Times report said the following:

"The feasibility study by MVA Consultants has put a cost of €700 million on constructing the rail link. However, this has been disputed by the locally-based Shannon Rail Partnership which claims that the rail link will cost €240 million."

In your follow-up questions on the matter, would it be possible for you to get MVA to explain why the discrepancy between the two estimates?

My second point is with regard to what Mr Jim Gallivan, Business development manager with Iarnród Éireann, said: "Milan has three airports and no rail link with a population of eight to 10 million and the greater Limerick-Shannon area has a population of 150,000 and the current population densities do not justify the project at the moment.

"The figures don't stack up and maybe in 15 to 20 years' time, the population density might be there," he added.

I would like to alert Mr Gallivan to the existence of the Malpensa Express, which I used this summer.

Unfortunately I only used the train on the return leg of my journey my way back out to the airport - when I went into the city on arrival I took the bus, which took about 2 and half hours due to a traffic accident and terminally clogged dual carriageway, compared with the 35 or so minutes the train took.

That said, I don't think there is any point in comparing the needs of the Limerick-Shannon area with those of a metropolis like Milan. In any event, the Italian Institute of Statistics put the population of the Milan metropolitan area at 7.4 million, which is a bit less than the 8 to 10 figure given by Mr Gallivan. Anyway, just because Milan didn't invest in proper rail links to its airports does not mean that Limerick should copy its mistakes. There are plenty of examples around Europe of towns and cities of similar size to either Limerick or its catchment area which manage to install rail links between the airport and city, a quick glance at the Ryanair website and other websites of other airlines brings up the following:

• Friedrichshafen, Germany. Population: 58,068
  
• Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Population: 259,536
• Blackpool, UK. Population: 142,700
• Trondheim, Norway. Population: 161,730
• Pisa, Italy. Population: 90,482
• Douglas, Isle of Man, UK. Population: 26,218
• Southampton, UK. Population: 228,600

What all these cities have in common, apart from similarly sized populations to the Limerick-Shannon area (in the case of Southampton and Newcastle-upon-Tyne it is not inconceivable that the population of the Midwest would reach that figure within the next 15 years) but also the fact that they all boast airport-city centre rail links.

Mr Gallivan even admitted that in 10 to 15 years time the population of the region might be large enough to warrant a rail link.

I believe a line must be reserved for a future rail link to prevent houses being built there in the future, and to avoid the development of this rail link becoming as wasteful as other Fianna Fáil infrastructure projects.

With regard to the Shannon-Limerick rail link, has the idea of developers contributing towards the capital cost of the project being looked into, like what happened with the Sandyford Luas line?

Please continue your hard work campaigning on this issue, as it is an important one in terms of the sustainable development of the region.

Best regards,

James Gaffney,
Limerick.

Photo: kikiprinci

O’Carroll-Kelly creator has UL audience in hysterics

Limerick Independent

The audience was left in hysterics last Wednesday evening when Paul Howard, author of the infamous Ross O’Carroll Kelly series of books and columns, rolled into town to read extracts from his latest bestselling novel, ‘This Champagne Mojito is the Last Thing I Own’.

The UL Jean Monnet Lecture Theatre’s austere surroundings were transformed by colourful promotional posters stating, ‘The Ego Has Landed,’ and, ‘This poster is basically, like, morkeshing my new column, roysh’. And the writer’s ‘lecture’ generated more laughter than would be heard in that venue in a week of college classes.

For the uninitiated, the character of Ross is a satirical depiction of a wealthy, self-obsessed, South Dublin-dwelling rugby player. The stories, written in diary form, mock the “materialistic nonsense” that people in Ross’s social circles place so much importance on. He described one of the main events that influenced the creation of the series ten years ago. In a previous incarnation, Howard had worked as a freelance sports journalist. He went to cover a Leinster schools rugby match, and witnessed a father giving out to his son for not playing that well that day. The son’s response was to tell his dad to shut up and open his wallet. It was witnessing this scene, of children treating their parents like walking ATM machines, said Howard, that prompted him to parody the lifestyles of Ireland’s affluent classes.

Some readers observed that his latest offering is a somewhat darker, comparing its mood with the last in the Harry Potter series. Howard admitted this, noting that in some ways the ups and downs of Ross’ life could be seen as mirroring the path of the Irish economy. However, in an ‘interview’ Ross gave on his website, all comparisons with the bespectacled wizard end there: “I’m five books in and I’ve scored more birds than Enrique Iglesias and his old man put together. And they call Harry Potter a wizard?”

Human Rights and Criminal Justice Conference

Irish Human Rights Commission and Law Society of Ireland

5th Annual Conference

Human Rights and Criminal Justice

13 October 2007

The Criminal Justice Act 2007 came under heavy criticism from numerous parties yesterday at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Irish Human Rights Commission and the Law Society of Ireland. At the conference, entitled Human Rights and Criminal Justice, the Act was criticised for both the manner in which it was passed by the Oireachtas and in terms of the provisions that it contained.

James MacGuill, Senior Vice President of the Law Society, described the Act as a, ‘draconian and obscene element of legislation’, and vowed that his organisation would continue to highlight attacks on civil liberties posed by the Act.

While the delegates acknowledged that violent, gangland drug-related crime is a serious cause for concern in this country, they argued for a calm, focussed approach in countering the crime problem, rather than, ‘soundbite solutions’, in the words of Dr Maurice Manning, President of the Human Rights Commission.

Dr Manning criticised the manner in which the Criminal Justice Bill of this year was made an act. He stated that in this case the Oireachtas was dominated by the executive branch. There was inadequate use of the Committees System – a system, he said, that is in place to prevent legislation from being rushed through without due consideration to all its implications. He bemoaned the, ‘arrogance of ministers’, in rushing through this piece of legislation, regretting that they did not exercise fully their right and duty of parliamentary scrutiny.

In a further denouncement of the way in which the 2007 Act became incorporated into Irish law, Michael O’Higgins SC, Chairman of the Irish Criminal Bar Association, contrasted the parliamentary process it went through with the considerably more rigorous debate that surrounded the enactment of the Criminal Justice Act 1984. He observed that the 1984 Act was debated by the Oireachtas for 18 months, including 13 days in which it was examined at the Committee Stage. In stark contrast, in O’Higgins’ opinion, the 2007 Bill was passed without any effective debate. He accused the Opposition of wasting the opportunity they had, at the Report Stage, of debating the Bill section by section, by instead deciding to engage in, ‘electoral muscle-flexing’, by proposing additional sections to it.

The process came in for further criticism from him because in his opinion, there was no meaningful debate on the infringement posed by the Act to the right to silence.

According to O’Higgins, the Act was passed in such a hasty manner for a number of reasons, notably a lack of public engagement with government. In his view, the electorate voted for the current government for the same reasons shareholders elect a CEO – government today is more about economic management than it was in the 1980s. He described this paradigm shift in Irish society when he said that the Oireachtas of 1984 governed over people, while that of 2007 governs a nation of individuals.

He acknowledged that there has been an increase in violent crime since the 1980s, saying that as, ‘property prices have soared, the price of life has plummeted.’ He concluded that as long as the diminution of rights is seen by society as only the diminution of certain people in society’s rights – those of suspected criminals – we as a whole will be poorer.

James MacGuill in turn credited the media for calling for a delay in the enactment of the Bill. However, he was scathing with his words for the then Tánaiste, Michael McDowell, saying that one, ‘can’t blame the media for the madness of the Tánaiste’, in relation to the Act.

The conference heard from Des Hogan, Acting Chief Executive of the Irish Human Rights Commission about certain aspects of criminal justice policy and their effect on human rights. He called for caution when deciding to change the criminal law, reflecting that:

‘On the one hand the desire to change the law to meet perceived new threats of crime and on the other, the imperative of approaching any law reform proposals carefully when long-established rights are at issue.’

With regard to the expansion of police detention powers that the 2007 Act allows, he commented that:

‘No empirical evidence supports the contention that prolonged detention benefits investigation or increases the possibility of a successful conviction, and indeed no one has yet been detained for the full 168-hour period under the 1996 Act.’

While concluding that there is an increasing perception that decreasing the rights of the suspect by definition increases the safety and protects the interests of victims and wider society, he warned against balancing and rebalancing human rights principles depending on short-term political motivations.

This view was shared by other speakers at the conference, including Sir Geoffrey Bindman, Chairman of the British Institute of Human Rights, who spoke of the need to counter the myth that human rights are a way of helping guilty parties escape justice or of enabling wrongdoers to delay and add to the cost of the legal process.

Senator Ivana Bacik, who chaired the opening session, spoke of the need to review and challenge the idea that there can be a trade-off between civil liberties and civil security.

Past conferences have dealt with issues such as Human Rights in Committed Relationships, Migrant Workers and Human Rights Law, and Achieving Rights Based Child Law. However, in the words of Dr Manning, yesterday’s theme of Human Rights and Criminal Justice, was more controversial and certainly most timely in the light of the current problems, on the one hand of increased violent criminality, and on the other of criminal justice legislation being rushed through the Dáil.

Photos from Hjem and Simon McGarr

Thousands of second-level students flock to careers event at Limerick Racecourse

Limerick Independent

At least 4,000 secondary school students attended a careers fair held at Limerick Racecourse yesterday. The event was organised by the local branch of the Irish Guidance Councillors, and is now in its fifth year running. There were information stalls from over 50 institutions, who informed students about potential educational and employment opportunities available for when they leave school.

Mary Kearney, chairperson of the organising committee, told this reporter that the popularity of this event has been increasing with each year. The event attracts students from all over the Mid-West region. Outlining one advantage of this careers fair, Ms Kearney noted that in the past, local school-leavers would have to travel to Dublin to attend the careers exhibition at the RDS, as there was no similar event in this part of the country.

She spoke of the merits of the Greenmount venue. She was very praiseworthy of the staff and management of Limerick Racecourse, while also noting that from a teacher’s perspective the day is more manageable because rather than managing a group of students for a four-hour each leg return journey to Dublin they can be in and out of the Patrickswell venue within an hour and a half. She also said that there is less potential for discipline problems at her group’s venue, because the Careers Exhibition is the only thing happening on the day at the racecourse, there is much less chance of students becoming distracted or wandering off – their focus remains on career options.

Among the third-level institutions represented at the fair, UL, UCC and LIT seemed to be the popular choices among students. The guards, army and teacher training courses offered at Mary Immaculate College also proved to be popular draws. Institutions offering Post Leaving Certificate courses were kept busy with inquiries, with many students seeking to go onto further education using this route. Three talks were also given throughout the day by UCAS, the body responsible for handling applications to full-time degree programmes in Britain. These were attended in great numbers.

The organisers noted that as has been the case each year they have run the exhibition, popularity of the courses on offer varied according to gender, with nursing and language courses tending to be more popular with girls while boys tended to gravitate in greater numbers towards more technical programmes. One possible reason given for this trend by Ms Kearney is the fact that often girls’ schools simply do not offer technical subjects to Leaving Cert students so they would not be exposed to the skills needed to go onto further study in that area.

Regarding the issue of gender imbalances in certain employment sectors, Lieutenant Nessa Maloney of the Irish Naval Service, a male-dominated institution which only began offering cadetships to women in 1994, said that her organisation actively seek female recruits by attending girls’ schools to give demonstrations about working in the naval service. Anne-Marie Hannon, of the admissions division of Mary Immaculate College, which offers a number of primary teacher training courses, noted that although primary school teaching is one area where females vastly outnumber males, her institution does not specifically target male students when promoting their B.Ed course in the same way the navy does to females. However, they may do so in the future.

Photo: Kman999

"Shell to Sea" Meeting in Ennis

The ‘Shell to Sea’ campaign is still very much a national issue, not just a local one, was the message heard at a public information evening hosted on Wednesday by the Clare Shell to Sea group. Countering allegations that their campaign is a case of NIMBYism, the group emphasised that if the Corrib Gas Project is allowed to go ahead in its current form, it will set a precedent for similar projects to be undertaken in other parts of the country. Stating that while the legal campaign against the project is ongoing, but alluding to the sometimes slow workings of the legal process, one campaigner said that the protests must continue on the Erris Peninsula, in order to delay the project enough so ‘justice can catch up.’

Introducing the meeting, Fiona Wheeler, chairing the event, told a packed auditorium at the Glór Theatre in Ennis, Co. Clare that the Shell campaign shared a lot of common ground with the ‘Save Tara’ movement to have the M3 rerouted from its route through the Tara-Skryne Valley. According to Bob Wilson of the Clare group, included among the issues uniting the campaigns are: the fact that both involve the laying down of infrastructure, a pipeline in Mayo and motorway in Meath, along contentious routes; that the approval of these routes was fast-tracked; and there were alternatives to both but these weren’t pursued with any great vigour.

The assembled members of the public were shown a short documentary which followed the recent experiences of Willie Corduff, one of the five members of the Rossport Five, jailed in 2005 for refusing to obey a temporary court injunction forbidding them to interfere with work being undertaken by on their land, who was this year awarded The Goldman Environmental Prize. According to Corduff, it was public pressure that caused Shell to ask their lawyers for the injunction which the men were in breach of to be lifted, which led to their release, in September 2005. He believes that sustained public pressure can eventually lead to the alteration of the Corrib Gas line’s project, if not its cancellation altogether.

Having taken the opportunity to note the presence of a plainclothes Garda among the audience, and announcing that this was a ‘grave insult’ to the campaign group, making them feel they were being treated as ‘a subversive group’, the chairperson then introduced the main speaker of the evening, John Monaghan, an engineer neighbour of Mr Corduff and active campaigner against the project.

Mr Monaghan outlined what the campaign group are doing at the moment; why they are doing it; and the possible future courses of action for the group. He mentioned similarities between their movement and that of Tara, observing that in both instances more direct and less destructive alternative routes were never properly considered by those in charge of the respective projects. Airing his belief that ‘oil companies feel they can simply stroll through’ local communities, he surmised that his group’s main objection to the project was that it is unique and experimental from engineering, societal and legal points of view.

Outlining the engineering processes at work in the pumping of the gas onshore, Mr Monaghan noted that in the Environmental Impact Statement for the project stated that inland gas refining ‘goes against international standard practice.’ He said that one of his group’s main objections to the project was with its health and safety aspect, in particular with regard to the high pressures that the gas will be pumped inland, and the unacceptable risks of death or serious injury this high-pressure posed to the public. He noted that the proposed pressure of untreated gas in the Corrib pipeline is 144 bar, contrasting this with the maximum pressure Bord Gáis are allowed to pump their treated gas, which is 88 bar. He recalled that while Shell had attempted to ease concerns about the high pressure by highlighting the extra thickness of their piping, he drew attention to a report in which it was concluded that this extra thickness adds greater weight to the pipe structure which in turn leads to a greater chance of subsidence, which in turn leads to an increased risk of cracks and explosions. As well as mentioning health and environmental concerns arising from the toxic chemicals added to the gas during the refining process, such as possible contamination of the local water supply, Mr Monaghan also accused Shell of not following industry best practice which states that gas pumped at high pressures must be routed at certain minimum distances away from dwellings.

A charge was levelled at the government by the group of neglecting the rights of the local community around Bellanaboy – behaviour that would be acceptable of a private oil company, but totally lacking on the part of the government, whose duty it is to protect its citizens. The group called it ‘perverse’ that the Department of Marine is advertising for exploration off other parts of the west of Ireland. They fear that such exploration projects, while not only, in their eyes, giving away Ireland’s natural resources to private interests, could lead other communities to become at risk to some of the dangers outlined by Mr Monaghan.

Summing up the reasons for their opposition, the protesters feel that the decision to process the gas inland, with the attendant higher risk to the local population, was taken purely on the grounds of economics. They have no intention of stopping their campaign to delay the project. They believe that the Corrib Gas project has already set itself as a unique one in the manner in which Compulsory Purchase Orders were granted, from a health and safety perspective, and the fact that the Irish people, through the government, have no stake in the ownership of the project. While the aim of the group is to halt the project in its current form, they would accept the project if the gas was treated of shore. With regard to the influx of jobs to the sparsely populated region, the group estimate, from plans seen by them that the onshore refinery will only provide 27 permanent jobs, to people who will not necessarily be from the area.

Mr Monaghan commented that, ‘If this was in Nigeria, they’d shoot us.’ While the campaigners can be safe in the knowledge that such tactics won’t be adopted by those opposed to their cause in this country, they have vowed to continue their campaign in Mayo and elsewhere irrespective of the obstacles they encounter.

Third World Debt

Deforestation. Cocaine flooding the industrialised world’s shores. (Ask the people of Dunlough Bay!) Unemployment. Agriculture no longer a viable way to make a living for many. Immigration, both legal and illegal, on the up. Conflict and war.

All of these calamities regularly make the headlines, and indeed, give many people many causes for worry. What they also have in common, claimed political scientist Susan George in her 1992 work, The Debt Boomerang, is that they are all directly linked to the Third World Debt crisis. Find a solution to the debt crisis, and we will be one step closer to solving those problems mentioned above. Or will we?

If the debt crisis really is the cause of such misery, it might be a good idea at this point to explain its origins. In the 1970s, the price of oil skyrocketed, making the oil-producing countries (OPEC) very rich. They deposited their profits in Western commercial banks in order to earn interest.

In order to pay this interest, banks had to make money. They did this by lending money to developing countries at very low interest rates. Unfortunately for the developing countries, the first oil-price shock lead to anti-inflationary fiscal and monetary policies in major industrial countries, and a major international recession came about in the mid-1970s. The resulting slackening of world-market demand forced the price of developing countries’ exports down, already placing them at a disadvantage when it came to repaying their debts. When the recession worsened in the 1980s, the lending banks raised their interest rates, making the debts even harder to repay, bearing in mind that the developing countries were taking in less money for their exports than at the time when they took the loans.

Some NGOs, such as CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) claim that money that could, and indeed should, be used for the health care and education of the debtors’ citizens, is instead used to service debts. However, this ignores the fact that the money acquired through the original borrowing wasn’t always invested in sensible projects like health and education; as Robert Guest, The Economist’s Africa editor has pointed out, much of it was squandered on prestige projects, such as dams, conference halls, steel mills many miles from the nearest port, often over budget, and so on. By undertaking projects that would never produce a return, or even worse, lining their own pockets (as Zaire’s Mobutu did) or by financing wars (as Ethiopia did), leaders of the developing world ensured that they would be unable to service their loans, let alone repay them.

That’s all well and good, but why should the ordinary citizens of Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere have to suffer because of their former leaders’ macroeconomic mismanagement? Some would say they shouldn’t. There is a concept in International Law known as Odious debt, which states debt incurred by undemocratic countries and used for purposes that do not serve the interests of the state should be unenforceable. The argument goes that present citizens of countries once ruled by tyrants shouldn’t have to pay for their past rulers’ misdeeds.

The counterargument to the Odious debt principle, which may explain why debts incurred by the Apartheid government of South Africa and the Mobutu dictatorship of Zaire have not been recognised by creditors as “odious”, is that governments are constantly changing in democracies, but states, as opposed to governments, are the ones that are expected to honour their debts. Indeed, it is an oft-repeated phenomenon in history, that one generation must clean up the mess left behind by the previous one.

Slogans such as “Drop the Debt” and “Make Poverty History” are useful, in that they increase public awareness of the issues, but in reality they just simplify a very complex subject. Who is to say that once a heavily indebted country receives debt relief, they will use the money freed up towards poverty reduction, rather than, say, wage war on one of its smaller neighbours, which is what Ethiopia did just a few months ago?

While I agree that while debt may be analogous to a tax on growth in indebted countries, I can’t accept the view that “calling it quits” alone is the answer. John O’Shea of GOAL has described this blind faith in the dropping of the debt as a naïve world view, in which there are no corrupt rulers, no corrupt governments and no nasty armies. Instead, these indebted governments would only be delighted to invest in education and health, if only the funds were freed up.

Unfortunately, the recent history of the Horn of Africa makes it clear, as if we needed proof, that there are still plenty of corrupt leaders and nasty armies going around. If we are serious about the combat against debt-induced poverty and its attendant problems as listed by Susan George, the question is not a simple yes or no one about whether seriously indebted countries should have their debts cancelled. Rather, it should be whether the debtor countries have the will and the ability to put in place structures to ensure that moneys freed will be channelled in the direction of alleviating poverty and not towards the armament factories or Swiss bank accounts. If the answer to the latter question is “yes”, then by all means make poverty history.

Letter to Frank McDonald following his feature on Dubai

Letter on the subject of the exploitation of migrant workers in the Arabian Gulf to Frank McDonald, Environment Editor Irish Times following his feature piece on Dubai, Bling City.

Dear Frank,

I thoroughly enjoyed your recent article on Dubai, as I did too yourself and James Nix's Chaos at the Crossroads, which I winced my way through some months back. Whatever about the subjective merits of Dubai's aesthetic qualities, you are to be congratulated for highlighting, to your readers in Ireland, the miserly wages handed out to the expatriate labourers who put its buildings in place. While the average salary figures of 150-200 Euro a month you give are obviously quite low, those at the lower end of the scale are obviously earning quite a bit less.

I get the impression that the plight of the legions of underpaid workers in the petroleum-rich Gulf States is a sorry state of affairs that goes unreported in the Western media. This, I reckon, is for a number of reasons: the lack of civil institutions in the GCC countries who compile statistics on the expatriate workers; the apparent unwillingness of the Gulf countries themselves to divulge the conditions of said workers; the fact that there are so many other horrors in the Middle Eastern region at large that merit journalistic attention, be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the Levant, that the difficulties of workers lucky enough to have a job pales in comparison to the lot of people an hour and a half flight to the north who are subject to the horrors of increasingly brutal armed conflict (not to speak of the jobless multitudes the army of expat workers leave behind in the Subcontinent and South-East Asia); and finally but not in isolation from the third reason speculated, the fact that the six GCC countries are key allies in the US's War on Terror, that the Western media is unwilling to rock those particular diplomatic relations boats lest they upset a few airbase aplenty Sheikhs. I accept I might be being too cynical in my last reason given.

Evidence abounds, both hearsay and documented, of foreign labour abuse and exploitation. A Sri Lankan taxi-driver told a colleague of mine (I have been working as a teacher in Qatar since last August) about one such incident of degradation. The driver's previous employment had been as a labourer with a construction firm. One day at work, after an eight-hour stretch on the job, himself and a co-worker went on their lunch break. Unluckily for them, their hard-earned break coincided with a site visit from an Egyptian engineer of the Qatari construction business. Apparently, such construction firms like their projects to finish way ahead of schedule, and the engineer was eager to do his employer's bidding. He confronted the two Sri Lankans about their slackness, and when they protested that they had been working since 4.00am, daring to suggest perhaps that even blue-overalled Gulf-based South Asians should be entitled to a lunch break, what did our Egyptian do, but hock back and spit in the lunches of the two men. Naturally enough, in my view anyway, the provoked labourer reacted by grabbing the nearest rod of metal and striking his overseer across the shoulder with it. Following this incident, the engineer went to his Qatari sponsor, claiming that he had been the victim of an unprovoked attack by one of the workers. The Sri Lankan had the initiative to approach the same sponsor off his own back before they came for him and gave his own version of events. Fortunately for him, the sponsor was horrified when he heard of his mistreatment, and had him transferred to work for another construction company. No compensation was forthcoming, and I didn't hear if the Egyptian got to keep his job or not.

The local newspapers do sometimes shed light on the injustices heaped upon the foreign guest workers. A few weeks ago I read in the Gulf Times of an Indian construction worker who had arrived in Doha about five months' ago, where he has been working in heights of 30 metres, in temperatures about as hot as the hob of hell you encountered in Dubai a few days ago, constructing one of the many glass towers that are sprouting up in the West Bay area of the city. I can't remember the details of his case, nor how he had made his way into the paper, but one detail I can remember was that one of his complaints against his employers was that in his five months' work he had only been paid 150 Qatari Riyals, in other words, about 30 Euro! When I arrived here last autumn I read the case of a group of Nepali nationals, who were protesting outside their embassy, because they had been promised jobs, by an unscrupulous employment agency, in a multinational supermarket here in Doha, only to be brought on their first day of work to a building site instead, where they would earn a fraction of what they had been promised as shelf-stackers.

Globalization and the Gulf, by John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah and Mohammed al-Mutawa, contains an insightful chapter on labour rights problems in the Gulf states by John Willoughby, in which he explains an all too frequent feature of migrant workers being "cheated" by agents in their home countries, often with the connivance of or a blind eye being turned by a Gulf citizen who must act as a sponsor for any expatriate labour under the region's inflexible labour laws. On a side note, the same book also contains an interesting essay on an area a good deal closer to your own area of expertise, entitled "The evolution of the Gulf city type, oil, and globalization" by Sulayman Khalaf.

Another source of the injustices suffered by the army of Third World workers in my own country of residence is the website Qatar Sucks. Don't be put off by its disingenuous name though. It is a forum where people copy and paste media stories of mistreatment of employees here in Qatar, and contains some fairly shocking, usually saddening, cases. Incidentally, when I tried to comment on one of the stories posted, a message from QTel, Qatar's state-run telecoms monopoly, blocked me from doing so. One more information source of foreign worker hardship, and the local governments' inaction in combating it, is Human Rights Watch's report on the subject, focusing on the UAE, entitled " Building Towers, Cheating Workers."

Finally, and I think you alluded to this in your own article, something must be said about the cities of the region's apparent 'fakeness' for want of a better word, a land where image is absolutely everything, substance nothing. While Dubai opts for architectural behemoths, skiing in the desert and highly luxurious if a bit gimmicky and a tad environmentally-damaging island resorts, Qatar seems to style itself as the sporting capital of the region, a Limerick of the Arabian Gulf you might say. It hosted the Asian Games last year, a regional Olympic-like tournament; its soccer league attracts big name ageing superstars – Batistuta, Romario and Jay-Jay Okocha have all graced its fine, near-empty stadiums; while top-class golf, tennis and motorsport events come here on an annual basis. Due to the fact that many of these events come to Qatar not because of the Qataris insatiable appetite for live sports but rather as a means of marketing the name "Qatar" to the outside world, tickets are often very cheap, if they carry any price at all. In keeping with its identity as the sporting hub of the region, Doha hosted a top-class athletics meeting last Friday night, which I attended. Attending alongside me were scores of blue-collared labourers bussed in from their corrugated-iron-roofed labour camps on the outskirts of the city for a night off. A benevolent gesture on their employers' behalf perhaps? Or, more likely it seems, a stunt pulled by the authorities for fear that international television audiences may witness an almost empty stadium. Image is everything in this corner of the Gulf it would seem.

Again I would like to applaud you for your mention of the immigrant labour hardship you encountered on your Dubai visit. Hopefully with more and more media attention, Western media attention in particular, something can be done to improve the conditions of the Gulf's toiling masses. Perhaps you could have a word with a colleague of yours who writes about labour/human rights issues to maybe do a more in-depth piece on this issue.

Yours sincerely,

James Gaffney,

Old Airport Road,

Doha,

Qatar (via Limerick).

Photos: Richard Messenger (workers), Ahmad Almansoor (skyline)

Time will tell

Let's see if I ever use this thing.

Complaining about Complaining

An Focal

James Gaffney rallies against the ingrained culture of complaining in UL by, eh,

complaining about it.

In a recent issue of An Focal, a number of students were surveyed to see if they thought there is a good atmosphere here on the UL Campus. Most of the respondents agreed to greater or lesser degrees that there was. While I would generally share their sentiments, none of them mentioned an issue that I feel greatly deteriorates from the feel-good ambiance that permeates the very air we breathe out here in Plassey – none of them mentioned the level of complaining that one encounters here.

Moaning, bitching, sulking, generally giving out – call it what you like, this is a phenomenon that is firmly entrenched among students of UL. It manifests itself when people make derogatory statements about a situation, but aren’t prepared to alleviate the problem themselves. I think the gentleman who in the survey who replied ‘No, it’s crap’ did far better than I could to illustrate this negative viewpoint. I feel it would have been far more beneficial to all concerned if he had offered reasons why he thought the atmosphere was crap, so then these reasons could be addressed.

Sure everyone complains, don’t they? The weather’s too hot, the weather’s too cold, they’re bored, then they’re too busy, the government are a crowd of chancers, the electorate are shower of chancers – it’s just part of human nature, right? Just because everyone does it, doesn’t make it a good thing, and in actual fact, it can be fairly disheartening for those around the complainer.

I am a UL student. These days what this amounts to is that every morning I’m blessed with waking up to about 7 million of those unwanted ‘EVERYSTUDENT@ul.ie’ forwarded emails in my inbox. While most people grumble about this nuisance and simply delete the offending messages, some take practical steps to end this scourge by asking ITD if they can address the problem. Others feel they have to let the whole college know their anger, so they curse the forwarder in messages laden with bile – but offer no solutions to stopping the problem. For me, anyway, this latest plague our mailboxes has been ravaged by has had at least one silver lining in the form of the actions of one recipient of an e-petition, who instead of simply binning the email and whining about it later on, he replied to all and directed everyone to read a well-argued internet article addressing the question of why signing and circulating online petitions is a useless way of remedying important issues. The same article introduced me to a new term – ‘slacktivism.’ According to the author, e-petitions are the latest manifestation of slacktivism, in other words the search for the ultimate feel-good that derives from having come to society's rescue without having had to actually get one's hands dirty or open one's wallet. For me, constant complaining without offering concrete solutions is the second-cousin once removed of this mongrel term.

In my opinion nearly every everyday complaint you here from Mr/Ms ULStudent has a simple practical solution. Prices too high for you in the restaurant? Get a few friends together and get a sandwich-drive going, whereby you make your sandwiches at home and eat them in the canteen instead of paying through the nose for lunch. Feeling too tired? Go to bed earlier. Hungover? Shoulda thought of that of that when you were buying your dirty cans of Dutch early yesterday evening. Study workload getting on top of you? You’re joking! Well guess what, sunshine, you’re in college, you’re here to get a degree, so to get around that particular hurdle, why not try to stop complaining, and start studying!

Acting to resolve your problems rather than moaning about them unleashes some fantastic benefits. For instance, if you feel you’re being ripped off, I know it is clichéd to the death, but simply shop around. Do a bit of research on the product or service’s competitors, you might be lucky. I did the same recently with my mobile phone provider and not only are my new network cheaper, they also send me a nice thank you message whenever I top up. Ah, the simple pleasures. I’d never be getting messages like that if I had spent all my time cribbing.

Not only can complaining rather than taking positive measures damage your pocket, it can also damage you’re health. If you’re constantly giving out about not feeling well, it is highly advisable that you seek medical advice – there are times when complaining and complaining alone can prove detrimental to the health of the complainer, and in the worst cases fatal.

In addition to the numerous benefits that cutting down on the bitching can have, a 2000 study by the Mayo Clinic found that optimists live, on average, 19% longer than pessimists. Although, on the other hand, if you always viewed the glass as half-empty you might not really care about foregoing the extra 19%, but that’s an argument for another day.

You may point out that it is quite ironic that the writer of an article is expressing his gripe with people complaining too much by complaining about people complaining. I would say to you that, yes, you’re spot-on, it is incredibly ironic – not quite like rain on your wedding day, but the other ironic. As I’ve made clear, I am of the view that complaining can serve useful purposes – but only if the complaint in question is coupled with suggested practical solutions to the complaint in question. If you’ve got any complaints about that, or anything at all raised in this article, such as the overuse of one particular verb, well, at least by now you should know what not to do.

Can the International Criminal Court be an effective forum in promoting international justice?

On the 18^th of July 1998, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court was signed. The conference at Rome completed the creation of a court with jurisdiction over the most heinous crimes; namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression.[1] The purpose of this essay is firstly to analyse the workings of this novel institution, and secondly determine whether it can be an effective forum in promoting international justice. Some of the obstacles that might prevent the Court achieving this goal will be scrutinized, as will some of its advantages in achieving such a praiseworthy objective. In analysing the workings of the Court, particular regard will be given to examining whether its use as a deterrent and the Statute’s feature of complementarity can act as means of promoting international justice.

The establishment of an International Criminal Court to deal with gross violators of human rights can be seen as part of the trend that the historian Eric Hobsbawm identified as ‘the Imperialism of Human Rights.’ It has been suggested that the ICC is evidence of a spreading consensus that extreme human rights violations are a matter for the international community as a whole to take punitive measures on the perpetrators of the violations. Chris Brown makes the case that the international human rights regime has grown up in the decades following from the horrors of the Shoah[2] - it is almost as if a great shadow was cast over the world with the ascendancy of totalitarian regimes in Europe, and the international community later sought to prevent the world from regressing into comparable darkness through the promotion of an international human rights regime in the form of various institutions and documents such as the United Nations, or the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. While the aims of these associations may be laudable, it is apparent that they have rarely been achieved – a cursory glance through the bloodstained history of the latter half of the 20^th Century from the time when Auschwitz, Birkenau and Dachau shut their gates right through to our own era with its own atrocities such as the terrible crimes of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda[3] or civilians being deliberately targeted during the conflict in Chechnya, will show that international justice has often remained an elusive goal of such bodies. It is to be hoped that the ICC, through its pursuit and punishment of wrongdoers, can curtail these sorts of injustices.

In a 1997 article in which he called for the setting up of an international criminal court, M. Cherif Bassiouni (who in 1998 served as the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Diplomatic Conference on the establishment of an International Criminal Court) observed that with the absence of such a court, not only have many atrocities gone unpunished, but each of the ad hoc tribunals and investigations that have been created has suffered from the competing interests of politics or the influence of a changed geopolitical situation.[4] Of course until we see the results of some of the cases brought before the ICC any assessment of whether or not atrocities will still go unpunished or whether it will be subject to political and geopolitical influences is purely speculative.

An international criminal court was repeatedly proposed throughout the 20^th Century but calls for its founding came to nothing thanks to the bipolar world order of the era. With the ending of the Cold War stalemate there also came about the ending of the systematic usage of the veto by either of the superpowers in the UN Security Council. The way was now open for the establishment of such a court.[5]

The first time in the modern era that individuals were held to be responsible for crimes committed in the name of the state was before the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. The world had to wait until almost fifty years for the same legal principle to be resurrected again, with the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 827 (1993) which applied Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which created the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which is based at The Hague in The Netherlands. This tribunal was created to judge precise facts and appeals, and is transient in nature, scheduled to disappear at the end of its mission. It has material competences to judge on crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. A similar tribunal was established by the Security Council Resolution 995 (1994) to try those responsible for the same categories of crimes committed in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, which sits at Arusha in Tanzania.

Undoubtedly the workings of the two ad hoc tribunals influenced the Statute of Rome. The International Criminal Court has competences for the same crimes as the ad hoc courts, which are defined in Articles 6 to 8 of the Statute, while it may also try individuals for the crime of aggression, but only once the States party to the Statute have reached an agreement on its definition. Its structures are broadly similar to the ICTY and the ICTR. In accordance with the legal principle of non-retroactivity[6], the Court can only judge on crimes committed after the 1^st of July 2002 when it came into force thanks to the ratification of it by at least 60 States Parties. Cases are initiated by the Security Council, Prosecutor or a State Party, while there are also limits on who can actually stand accused before the court – firstly, the court can only judge natural persons – it cannot judge legal persons such as corporations. Secondly, the accused must either have the nationality of, or the crimes must have been perpetrated in, a State Party to the Statute of Rome.[7] One point worth noting about this feature of the Court is that it means that certain crimes, which may be of equal magnitude to those that come before it, can totally escape the legal competences of the Court.

One criticism of the workings of the Court focuses on the role of the prosecutor – it is claimed that the ICC will lead to political prosecution. It is this fear of selective prosecution that has led the United States’ government to be so steadfastly opposed to it. This fear is justified, its proponents say, because any State has the power to refer an issue for investigation to the Prosecutor and also the Prosecutor has the power to commence an investigation ex proprio motu. They also lament the lack of a UN Security Council veto over the discretion of the Prosecutor.[8] Said in another way, due to the fact that the ICC is an instrument that Washington can’t control sufficiently to keep it from prosecuting American government and military officials, this is the reason for their aversion to the new court.[9]

In a 2001 article in which he argues against the universal jurisdiction, Henry Kissinger raises the concern about politically motivated prosecutions in claiming that when discretion on what crimes are subject to universal jurisdiction and whom to prosecute is left to national prosecutors, the scope for arbitrariness is wide indeed. He gloomily notes, in reference to the 1998 British detention of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet as the result of an extradition request by a Spanish judge seeking to try Pinochet for crimes committed against Spaniards on Chilean soil, that while

“So far, universal jurisdiction has involved the prosecution of one fashionably reviled man of the right while scores of East European communist leaders - not to speak of Caribbean, Middle Eastern, or African leaders who inflicted their own full measures of torture and suffering -- have not had to face similar prosecutions.”[10]

While Kissinger and others of the same view feel that politically-motivated prosecutions would hinder the goal of international justice, there is another strand of opinion that holds that there are enough safeguards in the Statute of Rome to prevent such political prosecutions. As Vesselin Popovski writes,[11]

“The experience of the ad hoc tribunals indicates that states are reluctant to exercise political influence over the court. There is no evidence to suggest that the ICC will be more vulnerable to political pressure than the ICTY or domestic courts; on the contrary, the mere fact that the ICC prosecution office and judges will consist of lawyers from dozens of different countries is an additional guarantee of independence. The risk that any malign political interference

will be exposed will be much higher when the prosecutors and judges are highly professional and independent representatives from all over the world.”

Antonio Cassese writes ‘the Prosecutor may bar any initiative of states which may prove politically motivated and contrary to the interests of justice’.[12] To further combat the risk of politically-motivated prosecutions, the Statute provides that the approval of three judges sitting in a pre-trial chamber be obtained before an arrest warrant can be issued or proceedings initiated.[13]

Evidently there are enough safeguards in place to prevent political prosecutions taking place. Thus far the presence of such safeguards has not been enough to convince the Court’s detractors (who include China, Russia, Israel and India – not just the United States) to ratify the Statute – perhaps if they see that the protections are effective in the future workings of the Court they may be convinced to sign up to the Statute, thereby giving the court more universal acceptance and thus more legitimacy.

One of the main arguments in favour of establishing the Court was that it could deter the commission of war crimes or genocide.[14] However, there is a counterview that the decision to commit those crimes punishable by the ICC is not a rational one to begin with, so the existence of a Court will do nothing to prevent the actions of irrational actors. On the other hand, the commission of genocide does involve mass government planning, so there is some degree of rationality involved however odious that rationality may be. Former Justice of the South African Constitutional Court, Justice Richard Goldstone believes that the Court would without doubt act as a deterrent to would-be perpetrators:

“If some would-be war criminals believe that they are likely to be arrested and brought

before the ICC they might well think twice before becoming outlaws. Already it has

become more difficult for war criminals to travel abroad. International arrest warrants

await them at some international airports. I cannot believe that, at least in some cases,

this does not act as a deterrent.”[15]

While Cassesse believes that some of the elements of the substantive law of the Rome Statute are retrograde (i.e. the maintaining of a distinction between crimes committed in external and internal conflicts and also no prohibitions on modern weapons that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering or are inherently indiscriminate), he believes its triumphs lie in the advances it has made in procedural international law, most notably by adopting the principle of ‘complementarity,’ whereby the ICC won’t intervene unless the national courts have showed that they are either unwilling or unable to prosecute. He praises this for three reasons: firstly, national courts are often the ones best suited to trying issues in the places where both the evidence and the culprit can be found. Secondly, national courts will often have a duty under international law to prosecute these crimes anyway thanks to their convention obligations. Thirdly, were the principle of complementarity to be absent, there would be a danger that the ICC would be flooded with a barrage of minor criminal cases which would create backlogs and halt its work on the more serious crimes.[16] Having the feature of complementarity also shields the Court somewhat from accusations that it is a further encroachment on state sovereignty – by its nature, it will only encroach sovereignty should the sovereign nation show that it cannot or will not fulfil its international law obligations.

It is to be hoped that the ICC will be able to prevent future atrocities and thereby spread international justice more effectively than other institutions that have gone before it. Its permanent nature gives it an obvious advantage over the Nuremberg, Tokyo and ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, in that it has a far wider jurisdiction. Thanks to its universal jurisdiction, it doesn’t stand to be accused of meting out “victor’s justice” as was the case at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Writing in The Irish Times about what is in his opinion the woeful record of the United Nations has in preventing atrocities, David Adams writes:

“Having two of the principal signatories of the UN Charter as China and the Soviet Union seems perverse now - it was a bit like inviting Dr Harold Shipman to help draw up a code of practice for care of the elderly.”[17]

At least the International Criminal Court Statute doesn’t face the same legitimacy problems as the UN might, in that it was established in a context of widespread consensus, with 120 States voting to adopt the Rome Statute on 17^th July 1998 in a display of “profound and in some ways mysterious enthusiasm”[18] for a Court sharing the philosophy of the international human rights movement.

In his appeal for the establishment of a permanent international criminal court, M. Cherif Bassiouni noted that

“The weak processes of international criminal justice following World War I not only failed to deter the military leaders who initiated World War II, but enhanced their cynicism. During a 1939 speech, Hitler reportedly stated in connection with his plans to "cleanse" (his early euphemism for exterminate) Jews, Gypsies, and others from the Third Reich: "Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?"”[19]

Bassiouni opined that Hitler’s words reflect a view that is still held by many today – that in international relations, the rule of might overshadows the rule of law. He goes on to paraphrase the dictator, when he asks

“Who now remembers Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, Burundi, Liberia, and other genocides and mass murder?”[20]

A true measure of the ICC’s success would be if such a viewpoint could be reversed – in other words if it becomes clear to all potential perpetrators of crimes within the ICC’s remit that the rule of law overshadows the rule of might, that their crimes will not be forgotten – rather they are liable to answer for them and be punished if necessary.

---

[1] Weakes, R. (2005) International Debate Education Association - International Criminal Court http://www.idebate.org/debatabase/topic_details.php?topic ID=146 [accessed 29 Nov 2005]

[2] Chris Brown (2001) ‘Human Rights’ in Baylis J. and Smith S, eds., The Globalization of World Politics, 2^nd ed, Oxford: OUP, 599.

[3] The Economist newspaper reports that the Ugandan Civil War provides a test case for the International Criminal Court.

(2005) ‘Hunting Uganda’s child-killers’, The Economist, 7 May 2005, Vol. 375, Issue 8425

[4]Cherif Bassiouni, M. (1997) ‘From Versailles to Rwanda in Seventy-Five Years: The Need to Establish a Permanent International Criminal Court’, Harvard Human Rights Journal [online], 10(11). Available: http://web.lexis-nexis.com/professional/ [accessed 29 Nov 2005]

[5] Roche, C. (2003) L’essentiel du Droit International Public et du Droit des Relations Internationales, 2^nd ed. Paris: Gualino Editeur. 114.

[6] There is a presumption that statutes are not intended to penalize conduct that was lawful when it occurred, that legislation should only operate on matters taking place after its enactment.

Oxford Dictionary of Law (2002), 5^th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[7] Roche, 82.

[8] Weakes, ibid.

[9] Blum, W. (2002) Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, 2^nd ed., London: Zed Books. 77.

[10] Kissinger, H. (2001) ‘The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction: Risking Judicial Tyranny’, Foreign Affairs [online], July / August 2001. Available: http:www.icai-online.org [accessed 27 Nov 2005] 5.

[11] Popovski, V. (2000) International Criminal Court: A necessary step towards global justice, Security Dialogue [online edition] 31, 4, 411 Available: http://www.swetwise.com [accessed: 25 Nov 2005]

[12] Cassese, A. ‘Statute of the International Criminal Court: Some Preliminary Reflections’,

European Journal of International Law, vol. 10, no. 1, 1999, pp. 144–171, on

p. 162.

[13] Weakes, R. (2005)

[14] See, for instance, Letter from The Association of The Bar of the City of New York to President George W. Bush calling for an end to US Opposition to the ICC, available: http://www.iccnow.org/documents/statements/others/NYCBarLetterofsprt10Apr02.pdf

[15] Goldstone, R. lecture was delivered in Abuja, Nigeria on February 14, 2005 and jointly sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Justice, and Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission. Available: http://www.iccnow.org/documents/statements/others/GoldstoneAbuja_14Feb05.pdf [accessed: 30 Nov 2005]

[16] Ibid, Cassesse, A. (1999)

[17] Adams, D. (2005) ‘Woeful record of the UN’, The Irish Times [online], 10 June 2005, available: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/opinion/2005/0610/3429860429OP10ADAMS.html [accessed: 29 Nov 2005].

[18] Schabas, W.A. (2004) An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, 2^nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. X.

[19] Cherif Bassiouni, M. (1997) ‘From Versailles to Rwanda in Seventy-Five Years: The Need to Establish a Permanent International Criminal Court’, Harvard Human Rights Journal [online], 10(11). Available: http://web.lexis-nexis.com/professional/ [accessed 29 Nov 2005]

[20] Ibid, Cherif Bassiouni, M. (1997).

Photo: Akbar Simonse
Map: Narek781