WASHINGTON, August 26 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The U.S. administration is using its role in the NATO to pressure European countries to grant immunity to American citizens from being called upon by the International Criminal Court (ICC), a U.S. newspaper reported Monday, August 26.

E.U. foreign ministers are scheduled to meet at the end of the week in Copenhagen, where they will discuss whether or not to grant the U.S. the exemption, the New York Times reported.

The paper said that on August 16, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell wrote letters to individual European governments, asking them to ignore the European Union’s request to wait and make a united stand on the issue.

He urged them instead to sign separate agreements with the United States “as soon as possible” under Article 98 of the treaty that created the court, which the United States says allows nations to negotiate for immunity for their forces on a bilateral basis, said the Times.

In a confidential document written by the European Commission, the European Union's executive body, the commission’s initial legal assessment is against the United States’ request, according to European diplomats who have read the document, the paper added.

According to Pierre-Richard Prosper, the American ambassador for war crimes issues, who was speaking to Danish news media last week, if the answer is no, the status quo between the United States and NATO “will obviously not exist, and we will have to see how we can work through this.”

He also said that if countries that are candidates to become members of NATO did not sign such an agreement, “it will be an issue that we will have to discuss in the NATO context,” according to a State Department transcript of the interview, the paper said.

“The Europeans know our concerns about peacekeeping and NATO,” Mr. Reeker said. “We are not prepared to speculate on what alternative strategies we might pursue if our current policy falls short of our goal.”

The United States has written to all governments that have ratified the ICC treaty asking them to sign bilateral agreements guaranteeing immunity for U.S. nationals, notably those involved in peacekeeping operations.

It has also threatened to cut off military aid to any country supporting the ICC unless it agreed never to surrender U.S. nationals to its jurisdiction.

This move has been dubbed as an “empty threat” by New York based Human Rights Watch (HRW) director Kenneth Roth who said: “At a time when it is fighting a global war on terrorism, the administration is unlikely to jeopardize its military relationships around the world because of the remote possibility that a U.S. national will be unfairly prosecuted.” 

HRW urged recipients of U.S. military aid last Tuesday to resist what it called U.S. “blackmail” over cooperating with the ICC.

“Governments should resist the Bush administration’s latest blackmail,” Roth said in a statement published on the organization’s website, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Roth accused the Bush administration of “stunning hypocrisy” in bringing pressure to bear on Yugoslavia, in particular.

It was rightly pressing Belgrade to turn over indicted war criminals to the U.N.’s special Yugoslav war crimes court in The Hague, he said. But on the other hand, it was trying to prevent Belgrade from surrendering any future U.S. suspect wanted by the Hague-based ICC.

“This stunning hypocrisy sends a signal that the rule of law is only for other people, not for U.S. nationals,” said Roth.

“It cannot be in America’s long-term interest to undermine the rule of law in this way.”

Canada, Norway, Slovakia, Switzerland and Yugoslavia have already announced that they will not be rushed into immunizing U.S. nationals without first consulting other governments, said HRW on their website adding that the E.U. agreed that no member state should begin negotiating an exemption for U.S. nationals until a common European approach is discussed.

The European Commission criticized Romania, a candidate to join the E.U., for agreeing to such an exemption.

The ICC’s jurisdiction began July 1. On September 3, the court’s historic first Assembly of States Parties will convene at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Made up of states that have ratified the ICC treaty, the assembly is the ICC’s governing body.

Seventy-seven states have ratified the treaty, including, most recently, Colombia - a country, along with the Democratic Republic of Congo, that is a likely candidate for the court’s first case.

More states are expected to ratify the treaty soon in order to participate in the election of judges and the prosecutor early next year. The court’s “Advance Team” is already at work in The Hague creating the technical and administrative infrastructure that the court will need to open in 2003.

Earlier this month, Israel and the United on Sunday signed an accord not to extradite any of the other’s citizens to the ICC without mutual consent.

Under the pact, signed by visiting U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, no extradition to the court in The Hague can go ahead without the agreement of the concerned individual’s government, U.S. and Israeli officials said.

The agreement was made under section 98 of the ICC charter which restricts extradition of suspects when states have signed such agreements, Israeli officials said.