“Preparations to become a member of the ICC are continuing. But it is clear that it may take time for us to join the ICC,” the text of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s presentation to a parliamentary commission said. “It is thought necessary to observe the trends emerging from the ICC review conference in Uganda in May 2010 and make a new assessment on whether our country will become a member of the ICC,” the booklet on the presentation said.
The text led to comments in the Turkish media that Turkey is reversing a partial commitment made by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to become a party to the ICC. But diplomatic sources speaking to Today’s Zaman said the commitment remains in place.
“The expressions within the text of the presentation do not at all mean a step backwards in Turkey’s position regarding the issue. The goal of becoming a party to the 2002 Rome Statute, which established the ICC, is still firm,” diplomatic sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.
The issue of Turkey’s ratification recently made headlines both in national and international media due to a planned visit to İstanbul by Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who in March became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the ICC in The Hague. He was among the heads of state and government that İstanbul was to host for an Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) economic summit during the 25th session of the OIC’s Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC). However, al-Bashir eventually abandoned his plans to attend the summit.
The goal to which the diplomatic sources referred was announced by Erdoğan in October 2004. “Legal changes that will enable Turkey to become a party to the International Criminal Court, like the majority of the members of the Council of Europe, are among the reforms that we have accomplished. In this context, our new penal code includes the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity in line with contemporary norms. We enacted the necessary amendments to the Constitution. Having completed the domestic legal preparations, I would like to announce today from this rostrum that Turkey will, in the near future, ratify the Rome Statute and become a party to the International Criminal Court,” Erdoğan said in an address delivered at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
Many legal reforms for harmonization with the Rome Statute have been made since October 2004, but there are more needed, the same diplomatic sources said. When asked about Ankara’s expectations of the ICC’s review conference in Uganda, the sources said: “There are two main reasons for Turkey not becoming a party to the Rome Statute yet. The first one is Ankara’s determined willingness to have ‘terrorism’ included in the statute and the other one is removing the ambiguity over the definition of ‘aggression’ within the statute.”
