Tuesday February 12, 2002
POPE COULD FACE CHARGES UNDER INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT
UNITED NATIONS, February 12, 2002 (LSN.ca) – With the International Criminal Court (ICC) only months away from entering into force according to the ICC Convenor William Pace, LifeSite spoke with Dr. Richard G. Wilkins, Professor of Law at Brigham Young University. Professor Wilkins, Managing Director of The World Family Policy Center, is a leading authority on the ICC, and regularly acts as legal counsel for pro-family NGOs (non-governmental organizations) at the United Nations.
Professor Wilkins, former Assistant to the US Solicitor General, told LifeSite that the ICC could eventually be used to try “the Pope or other religious leaders” since issues such as abortion and homosexuality would inevitably fall within the ICC’s jurisdiction. Wilkins suggests that the possibility of the ICC’s being abused in this fashion is the result of the ICC’s troublesome regulations. “It currently is without sufficient checks and balances. It has the most powerful prosecutor ever with the vaguest criminal statute passed anywhere. The ICC leaves open to total discretion of the prosecutor and the court the determining of what the ‘crimes’ mean.”
While the ICC claims to consider only “genocide,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity,” the definitions of those terms has been left so vague as to be open to virtually any interpretation. Dr. Wilkins gave LifeSite permission to publish his latest just-completed paper on the ICC wherein he warns, “Despite the best intentions of the Court founders, the Rome Statute transfers a vast amount of decision making authority from previously sovereign nations to an international court that will be remote (and unable to be controlled by or accountable) to the diverse peoples and cultures of the world.”
“Under the Court’s universal and complementary jurisdiction, the Court can and probably will attempt to change social norms in sometimes troublesome areas not admitting of a single, world-wide solution,” writes Dr. Wilkins. “The International Criminal Court could well become the mechanism by which the Western innovation of judicially (rather than legislatively) crafted social policy – and its accompanying consequences – are exported to the rest of the world. Of all revolutions through the centuries, this is the quietest. Of all the attempts made over the years to foist one group’s will on everyone else, this is the most subtle and simultaneously the most far-reaching – the world-wide constitutional convention no one knew about,” he concludes.
See Professor Wilkins’ paper in today’s LifeSite Special Report:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/feb/020212a.html
See related LifeSite coverage:
INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT IS 8 RATIFICATIONS AWAY FROM ENTERING INTO FORCE
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/feb/0202072 .html
See also
FINAL COURT OF APPEAL?
https://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=264…
EXPERIMENTS WITH ARTIFICIAL WOMBS USING LIVE HUMAN EMBRYOS
NEW YORK, February 12, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Scientists at Cornell University’s Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility have used live human embryos in experiments on artificial wombs created from replicated cells removed from the lining of the womb. Dr Hung-Ching Liu and her team revealed to the media that human embryos successfully attached to the walls of laboratory wombs and began to grow, but the embryos were destroyed after six days.
Liu reveals that in later experiments she intends to allow the embryos to develop to the legal limit of 14 days before they are destroyed. “We will then see if the embryos put down roots and veins into our artificial wombs’ walls, and see if their cells differentiate into primitive organs and develop a primitive placenta,” she said.
Liu, who says that for her experiments she “took embryos left over from IVF programmes,” told media she would experiment first with animals on later developed embryos. “The next stage will involve experiments with mice or dogs. If that works, we shall ask to take our work beyond the 14-day limit now imposed on such research,” she said.
See the coverage in the Observer at:
https://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,648024,…
UK STUDY SHOWS DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES OF UNDERMINING MARRIAGE
LONDON, February 12, 2002 (LSN.ca) – A report issued yesterday by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in the UK uses government and charity statistics to present evidence on the cost to society of undermining marriage. After presenting her evidence, Jill Kirby, author of “BROKEN HEARTS Family decline and the consequences for society” challenges legislators saying, “Unless we are prepared to recognise that the family is under siege and that marriage is under threat, we can have no hope of reversing the trend and improving the lives of the children who are afflicted.”
The study found that while over 50% of cohabiting couples break up within five years of having a child, only 8 per cent of married couples split after a child. The research revealed that children from single parent families are more than twice as likely as those from two parent families to experience mental disorder. Children of both lone and cohabiting parents are more likely to suffer physical abuse than the children of married couples; to turn to drugs; to commit crime; and to run away from home.
CPS charges that “recent moves to reduce the distinction between marriage and cohabitation ignore the evidence. Government efforts to tackle child poverty are dealing only with symptoms, not causes. Where the state intervenes to replace family support, it provides greater incentives not to marry.”
Most European economies have fiscal instruments of support for marriage, through joint taxation. In Britain, as in Canada, family commitments have become largely irrelevant to tax assessment, whereas in most of Europe adults with families to support are paying tax at much lower rates than single earners. CPS urges “For the sake of the children and to repair the damage to society, it is time for the state to signal its approbation and support for the structure most successful in maintaining social stability: the married family.”
Kirby concludes: “The nurture of children should be a primary objective of every civilised society. The perverse consequence of our fiscal, social and welfare policies has been to incentivise and institutionalise child neglect. It is time for a new approach.”
See the CPS release on the study:
https://www.cps.org.uk/jillkirby.htm
STUDY FINDS DIVORCE CAN BE DEADLY FOR MEN
PITTSBURGH, PA, February 12, 2002 (LSN.ca) – A study published in the February 11 edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that divorce is linked to a greater likelihood of early death in men. The study by Dr. Karen Mattews of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Dr. Brooks Gump of the State University of New York-Oswego studied 10,904 men. It found a relative risk of 1.37 (95% confidence interval, 1.09-1.72) for those who divorced compared with those who remained married for total mortality.
The study which used a nine-year follow-up found the most deaths among men who experienced both work stress and divorce. The authors suggested “remaining married in mid-life has protective effects in the face of adverse experiences at work.”
See an abstract of the study from the Archives of Internal Medicine:
https://archinte.ama-assn.org/issues/current/abs/ioi01038.htm…
LIFESITE NEWSBYTES
SECRET DOCUMENTS REVEAL CHINA’S ANTI-CHRISTIAN MEASURES
https://www.cnsnews.com/ForeignBureaus/archive/200202/FOR2002…
ABORTION BOAT DENIED MEDICAL LICENSE
https://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignB…
/FOR20020211e.html
FEMINIST BLASTS NOW (NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF WOMEN) FOR BACKING UNFPA
https://www.ifeminists.com/introduction/editorials/2002/0205….
MORE STEM CELL LINES FOUND TO QUALIFY FOR US FUNDS
https://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?ptitle=Top%20World%20Ne…
ad_topright_topworld&T;=markets_bfgcgi_content99.ht&s2;=ad_right1_windex&bt;=
ad_position1_windex&middle;=ad_frame2_windex&s;=APGg2sBTRTW9yZSBT
UK PRO-LIFE GROUP’S CHALLENGE TO MORNING AFTER PILL HEARD TODAY
SPUC UK’s judicial review of the government’s decision to make the morning-after pill available from pharmacists without a prescription began this morning in the High Court in London. Speaking on national radio this morning, John Smeaton, SPUC’s national director, said that the presentation of the morning-after pill as emergency contraception was a “cynical deception of women”. He continued: “We think it is deliberately promoted as contraception because… if you talk directly about abortion, women do not like it. What we have is almost entirely unsupervised abortion by pill.”
(with files from SPUC)