Mr. Chairman Distinguished Delegates

May I, first of all, join all the other speakers who have stood here before me in congratulating you, Mr. Chairman, on your election to this important position. On behalf of the organization, which I am representing here, the Organization of African Unity, I wish you great success in your stewardship of this historic conference. Furthermore, I wish to place on record my delegation's gratitude for the wonderful hospitality, which our hosts, the Italian Government and people, have accorded us in this great city of Rome.

The OAU Secretary General, H.E. Salim Ahmed Salim, has asked me to express his appreciation to the UN Legal Counsel and his colleagues for the invitation to this conference and for giving my delegation an opportunity to make this brief statement.

The OAU has followed, with keen interest, the work of the preparatory committee on the establishment of an international criminal court, which has culminated in the convening of this conference. More specifically, the OAU has followed with even greater interest the individual and collective efforts of its members and strongly urged them to contribute actively and constructively to this project.

In this regard, the OAU salutes the co-ordinated approaches which OAU Member States have adopted on the various aspects of the draft statute of the proposed court. Distinguished delegates have already listened to the statement by the South African Minister of Justice on behalf of the countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and that by the Minister of Justice of Senegal regarding the Dakar Declaration. The respective declarations adopted by both groups raise a number of critical issues which this conference needs to address very carefully and frankly: the issue of the independence of the court, the position and powers of the prosecutor, the relationship between the UN Security Council and the proposed court, and so on. The OAU wishes to add its collective voice to those of the various African States on these and other matters which have already been expressed here. We support fully the positions adopted by these countries and trust that they provide a basis for arriving at an acceptable international consensus on the various issues relating to the proposed court.

More particularly, I wish to recall here that at its meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in February, 1998 the OAU Council of Ministers took note of the Dakar Declaration and appealed to all OAU Member States to support the creation of this court. This ministerial resolution was more recently adopted by the OAU summit of Heads of State and Government in Burkina Faso, only a week ago.

In endorsing the proposed court, the OAU is only too aware that Africa has a particular interest in the establishment of this court. African peoples have been victims of massive violations of human rights over the centuries: slavery, wars of colonial conquest and continued acts of war and violence even in the post-colonial era. The recent genocide in Rwanda is a tragic reminder that such gross atrocities are not yet behind us. This, if nothing else, has strengthened the OAU's determination and commitment to the creation of a permanent, impartial, effective and independent judicial mechanism to try and punish the perpetrators of the kind of odious crimes witnessed in the Rwanda massacres.

Mr. Chairman,

I think it is proper for me to remind the Distinguished Delegates here that only two weeks ago, at the OAU summit in Burkina Faso, the Secretary General of the OAU announced the establishment of an International Panel of Eminent Persons on Rwanda. The mandate of this panel - under the Chairmanship of the former President of Botswana and consisting of seven eminent personalities from within and outside Africa - is to investigate the events leading up to the genocide in Rwanda and the response/or lack of response of the international community to those events. This panel is not a court, and it does not seek to replicate the work of the Rwanda Tribunal. However, the panel is intended to go beyond the limitations of the judicial process and try and seek to find answers to the type of questions that a tribunal may not be in a position to establish: How was it possible, at the close of the twentieth century, for the Rwanda genocide to take place at the time it did, and what lessons can Africa and the international community at large learn from this tragedy? The establishment of this panel demonstrates the OAU's resolve to act in concert with the international community to ensure that such crimes should never again be committed with impunity and yet escape punishment.

From my delegation's point of view, the adoption of the statute establishing the international criminal court should not delayed a day longer than necessary.

Let me conclude by reiterating the OM's belief that the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration provides us with an opportunity to strengthen the current international human rights system more vigorously, as we stand at the threshold of the new millennium. It is in this regard that I wish to end this statement by informing the distinguished delegates gathered here that, again, two weeks ago in Burkina Faso, Africa joined Europe and the Americas in adopting a protocol for the establishment of an international human rights court. The Protocol on the Establishment of an African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights was adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government on the 9th of June, and was immediately signed by 30 member States. We hope the same sense of urgency will be accorded to the statute which will be elaborated at this conference.

I thank you.