international criminal court

international criminal court Sec. 599E. (a) The Congress finds that— (1) the international community has defined as criminal con-duct in various international conventions, certain acts such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, piracy and crimes on board commercial vessels, aircraft hijacking and sabotage of aircraft, crimes against diplomats and other inter-nationally protected persons, hostage-taking, and illicit drug cultivation and trafficking; (2) in spite of these international conventions, the effective prosecution of those who commit criminal acts has been seriously obstructed in certain cases because of problems of extradition and differences between the legal and judicial systems of individual nations; (3) the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice ex-tends only to cases involving governments, and not to individual criminal cases; (4) the concept of an international criminal court has been under consideration in the United Nations and other inter-national fora for many years, including proposals and reviews undertaken in 1990 by the United Nations General Assembly, the International Law Commission, and the Eighth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders; (5) the international military tribunals established in Nuremburg, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan, following World War II also establish a precedent for international criminal tribunals; and (6) there is growing movement among nations of the world to formulate their economic, political and legal systems on a multi-lateral basis. (b) It is the sense of Congress that— (1) the United States should explore the need for the establishment of an International Criminal Court on a universal or regional basis to assist the international community in dealing more effectively with criminal acts defined in inter-national conventions; and (2) the establishment of such a court or courts for the more effective prosecution of international criminals should not dero-104 STAT. 2067gate from established standards of due process, the rights of the accused to a fair trial and the sovereignty of individual nations. (c) The President shall report to the Congress by October 1, 1991, the results of his efforts in regard to the establishment of an International Criminal Court to deal with criminal acts defined in international conventions. (d) The Judicial Conference of the United States shall report to the Congress by October 1, 1991, on the feasibility of, and the relationship to, the Federal judiciary of an International Criminal Court.