Hopes are high for the new International Criminal Court despite UShostility, writes Chris Stephen in The Hague
The International Criminal Court will be inaugurated next week at a ceremony in The Hague, but a shadow hangs over its future as it faces continuing opposition from the United States.
Delegates from the 89 ICC member nations will gather on Tuesday for a ceremony presided over by UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.
The court's 18 judges, including Ireland's Maureen Clark, will be sworn in and the court - the world's first permanent war crimes court - will be formally open for business on Tuesday.
But a second ceremony, on the nearby Dutch coast, will remind delegates of the huge hurdle the court still has to cross - opposition from America.
Peace protesters from the member states will gather at a series of bunkers in the sand at Hogerland across one kilometre of beach which they have dug in symbolic defiance of the United States.
Washington's opposition to the new court has seen it pass the American Servicemen's Protection Act - giving the US president the power to use armed force to free any American arrested by the ICC.
Hence the bunkers - a symbolic defence against any force arriving to attack the court building.
While nobody expects US marines to appear off the Dutch coast any time soon, the activists say they want to highlight the dangers posed by Washington's opposition.
"It's not a protest, it's more a call on the Americans to join," said a spokesman for the group, named Dutch Hogerland. "It is a deep problem for all of us if the United States does not join the ICC." America is opposed to the ICC because, unlike the existing United Nations war crimes court in The Hague, this new tribunal is outside the control of the Security Council.
Instead, the ICC can override individual governments to bring prosecutions for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Although America is not an ICC member, its citizens can be arrested if they are accused of war crimes on the territory of any of the member states.
This has led to Washington not merely staying out of the ICC organisation, but actively opposing it.
US diplomats have fanned out across the world, trying to persuade ICC members to sign deals giving Americans immunity from ICC prosecution.
But the European Union, in a rare show of defiance of US wishes, has ruled that such deals would fatally undermine the court's credibility.
This has not stopped Washington's efforts, although to date only one ICC member nation, Romania, has signed such an immunity deal.
And, while ICC officials say the US is unlikely to win an opt-out promise, the lack of American involvement in the court is already being felt.
Without US funding, the new court has a budget of just €24 million - less than a quarter of the funds available to the UN Hague court.
This will severely limit its operations, as will America's refusal to use its intelligence assets to gather evidence for cases.
And unlike the UN Hague court, the ICC is opposed not just by America, but also by China, Russia and Israel.
A second problem the ICC faces is that few states likely to commit war crimes have signed up to it.
Most members, in fact, have joined to show their "clean hands" and there is a real fear among staff that the court will wind up with few cases to prosecute.
Just three of the 89 members have ongoing conflicts - Afghanistan, Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite this, officials here are optimistic. "We've got a court, the train has left the station," says Mr Sam Muller, ICC's deputy director of common services.
His optimism is based, in part, on the fact that war crimes law has mushroomed in recent years: aside from the UN courts for the former Yugoslavia and also Rwanda, more and more states, such as Belgium, have ruled they can hold their own war crimes prosecutions.
In such an atmosphere, officials here say that the door may be slowly closing on that most sacred of international conventions - the idea that a government can do as it pleases within its own borders.