NewsMax.com
Friday, March 23, 2001

Bush has already had to correct positions stated by Secretary of State Colin Powell on American foreign-policy toward Iraq, North Korea and an independent military force for the European Union.

The new secretary is known to have favored abolishing the war-crimes bureau in his State Department.

The bureau had been a pet project of Powell's predecessor, Madeleine Albright, who worked to create two war-crimes tribunals – for Yugoslavia and Rwanda – and created the office to ensure attention was paid to war-crimes issues.

Only recently, Powell abolished around half of the department's special envoys, such as this, having told Congress the Clinton-Gore administration had too many running around the world.

Bush's choice for the special ambassadorship is Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a graduate of Boston College and Pepperdine School of Law and the son of Haitian doctors living in upstate New York.

Currently a special counsel in the war-crimes office in the State Department, Prosper, 37, will be in a position as the new war-crimes ambassador to advise Bush on what to do about a treaty creating an international criminal court, opposed by many conservative Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

According to the Boston Globe:

Nina Bang-Jensen of the Coalition for International Justice in Washington, D.C., a watchdog group on issues of international justice, hailed the decision, announced by the White House rather than the State Department, as "a very positive signal from the new administration. It's terrific.''

Prosper's nomination comes at a crucial time for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Serbia has until March 31 to hand over its former leader, Slobodan Milosevic, to the war-crimes tribunal in the Hague or face losing American aid.

While Prosper was at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, he headed up the prosecution of Jean-Paul Akayesu, the first official ever to be convicted for genocide.

Focusing on the killings and rapes in a Rwandan village, that case made international legal history by determining that rape was a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.

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