Originally published on the CGS blog on June 7, 2010.
By: Ariela Blätter
Over the following two days (Monday and Tuesday) I would characterize the tenor of the meetings at Kampala as formal, and rife with pomp, circumstance and diplomacy. This was diplomacy in terms of the usual statements by delegations (Click here to read general statements from States Parties, Observer States, NGO’s, International Organizations, etc.) on the floor that spend at least the first five minutes dripping with overwhelming praise for the chair (in fairness, the chairs do deserve it) of the Conference, Chairman Wenaweser, and Prince Zeid of the working group on aggression. In my experience these statements are always, dare I say it, BORING. These statements constitute the most formal, formulaic, and least revealing interventions by countries based on directions they receive from their governments before they ever arrive at the proceedings. Those kind of instructions never see the light of day for prying NGO eyes like mine, but I always imagine it would say something like this “you are instructed to say as little as possible in the longest way possible.” Well, there was one exception- the President of Uganda- whose remarks bordered on bizarre, when he departed from his prepared remarks and pontificated on the benefits of protecting the “freedom fighter” and spoke of the use of what some would see as ‘unjust’ force as just, so long as the means of doing so were not illegal. After the excitement of having Uganda join the court and refer a situation to the Court which led to an arrest warrant for Kony, the positive sentiment around Uganda was taken down a notch when Museveni demonstrated that he had never read the Rome Statute.
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