International Criminal Court (Remand Time) Order 2008

We fully support every action taken by the Government to comply with the needs of the International Criminal Court, as we did with the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the rules for which this order follows. We approve of the steps that are being taken to bring to justice those who commit crimes specified in the Rome statute: crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression. Not only do we have no objection to the order, but we warmly approve of it and take this opportunity only to ask for some clarification of how criminals who spill into our jurisdiction will be apprehended and handed over to the International Criminal Court. What action is being taken to establish a tracking unit in the office of the International Criminal Court to check on the movement of people who are wanted by the court and who may travel clandestinely from one country to another to avoid arrest? That may be particularly important in the case of sealed indictments, where the accused person might conceivably get through our immigration controls as an ordinary tourist without the immigration authorities being aware that he was wanted by the court. In the case of previous sealed indictments, the ICC notified certain countries to which it was considered likely that a person might flee. Jean-Pierre Bemba was wanted for offences in the Central African Republic and arrested in Belgium the day after the pre-trial chamber found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that he bore individual criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Central African Republic. In that case, it was known that he was in Belgium—I believe that he had property there—but the whereabouts of a wanted person may not always be as clear as it was in that case. Tracking units were established for both the ICTY and the ICTR, and it would be logical to extend the concept of the ICC as it has been advocated by Human Rights Watch and others. What would the mechanism be for implementing the proposal, and does it have the Government's support? I understand that there are no sealed indictments at the moment in respect of any of the states where offences have been committed under the Rome statute—the DRC, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Sudan—but what would happen where an alleged criminal wanted by the ICC comes here as an ordinary tourist, say, without it being suspected by the immigration authorities that he is wanted? By what procedures might such a person be apprehended if we did not know that the ICC was after him?