This is a follow-up article to yesterday’s "Big Push for UN’s International Criminal Court"
The International Criminal Court has been dependent on a vast support network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from the get-go. Long before the United Nations 1998 Rome conference which established the ICC, the UN’s army of NGO activists provided boots on the ground for aggressive lobbying of national governments to support creation of the tribunal.
At the Rome conference, the UN brought the raucus NGO rent-a-mob inside the convention site to turn up the pressure on the official national delegates. This correspondent sat in strategy meetings in Rome during which UN officials and NGO leaders coordinated their pressure cooker plans and conspired to neutralize opposition. The NGOs have been absolutely essential to the ICC — every step of the way. It is not an exaggeration to say that without the controlled NGO lobby there would not be an ICC. And the radical “human rights” NGOs are playing an indispensible role in the current campaign to boost the ICC to the next power level.
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The ICC’s multitudinous, multinational, multilingual NGO choir is composed of a global network of hundreds of organizations designed to give the impression of popular planetary consensus. However, the old adage, “He who pays the piper calls the tunes,” applies here. And the paymasters who are calling the tunes are a familiar lot. They are the same big tax-exempt foundations aligned with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) that have been funding the movement for world government (although they now prefer to call it “global governance”) for much of the past century: Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. To these have been added more recent massive largesse from George Soros’s Open Society foundations, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Communitas Foundation, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust, as well as direct taxpayer funding through the U.S. State Department, the European Union, and the foreign ministries of Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, and many other European nations.
The Soros network of foundations has been an especially significant source of pro-ICC funding, providing much of the financial support, for instance, for the 2009 documentary The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court.
A brief look at some of the principal organizations comprising the leadership of the NGO choir is sufficient to confirm that they are indeed singing for the same globalist paymasters. The top tier of the ICC’s NGO lobby includes the Coalition for an International Criminal Court (CICC), the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP), Human Rights Watch (HRW), the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ) and the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
The Coalition for an International Criminal Court claims an impressive membership of “more than 2,500 civil society organizations in 150 countries.” Nevertheless, it is merely a world federalist front group and shares the same staff, advisors, and donors as the WFM-IGP. In fact its physical mailing address is: “c/o WFM, 708 3rd Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10017, USA.” That location is but a short walk from UN headquarters.
The CICC’s web site tells us:
The Coalition is deeply appreciative of the generous support provided … by the European Union, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Sigrid Rausing Trust … as well as by the governments of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland ….
Sitting on the CICC’s advisory board is Jonathan F. Fanton (CFR), former president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Likewise, the WFM-IGP web site informs us:
WFM-IGP is deeply appreciative of the generous support provided by … the European Union, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Sigrid Rausing Trust … as well as by the governments of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland ….
The web site of the World Federalist Movement (formerly known as the World Federalist Association) also proclaims:
World federalism now faces the challenge of showing that it is capable of taking the lead in transitioning toward world government.
For this ambitious task, the CICC and WFM-IGP folks know they can count fellow world federalist Hillary Clinton as one of their strongest supporters. In 1999, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton appeared, via closed-circuit television, at the World Federalist Association’s annual banquet to congratulate legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, who was receiving the WFA’s Norman Cousins Global Governance Award. WFA President John B. Anderson (CFR) praised Cronkite for his “lifelong” commitment to world government. In his acceptance speech, Cronkite stated:
It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. [Emphasis added.]
Mr. Cronkite went on to outline the steps he saw as essential to attaining that desideratum, to wit:
Most important, we should sign and ratify the Treaty for a permanent International Criminal Court.
Walter Cronkite’s speech can be viewed below. (Note also, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s teleconferenced congratulatory message to Cronkite toward the end of the video):
Human Rights Watch, the big dog on the NGO block, was launched from a gathering at the Rockefellers’ Bellagio Villa at Lake Como, Italy, in 1982. The conference was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Robert L. Berstein (CFR) was named founding chairman and remains on the group’s Emeritus Board, along with CFR members Alice Henkin, Jonathan Fanton, Vartan Gregorian, Lisa Anderson, and Stephen L. Kass. The CFR members on the HRW current board of directors include: James F. Hoge, chairman; John J. Studzinski, vice-chair; Joel Motley, vice-chair; Bruce Rabb, and Michael Gellert. Its executive director is Kenneth Roth (CFR).
On its “Partners” web page, HRW says:
Human Rights Watch is grateful to these and other foundations for their partnership and support: Open Society Institute & Soros Foundations Network, The Atlantic Philanthropies, Ford Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Oak Foundation ….
The Rome-based No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ) lists among its main donors: the Coalition for the ICC (CICC), Open Society Institute, the Carter Center, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust, as well as The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and The World Bank.
The NPWJ’s founder and patron is ECFR Board member Emma Bonino, also a leader of the Transnational Radical Party and Vice president of the Italian Senate. Ms. Bonino was one of the principal ringleaders of the NGO circus at the ICC’s founding conference in Rome.
The New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) was launched by the Ford Foundation in 2000, and continues to be supported by Ford, along with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Open Society Institute, UN Democracy Fund, UN Development Program, UNIFEM, and the governments of Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, and Norway.
ICTJ’s officers, directors, and board members include CFR veterans Joan Edelman Spero, Ken Miller, Vincent A. Mai, Thomas Buergenthal, and Donald F. McHenry.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) lists among its “major donors” and “funders”: George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Communitas Foundation, Unicredit, and the government ministries of Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Spain — to name but a few.
The pattern is the same with literally hundreds of other “human rights” groups which are lobbying for the ICC: CFR leadership and funding from the usual world-government-promoting foundations and government agencies. In other words, there is no such thing as a “grassroots civil society movement” for the ICC; it’s all elitist-backed astro-turf. And this kept “movement” is working assiduously to concentrate enormous new judicial, prosecutorial, and police powers in the ICC designed by, and for, the CFR’s globalist elites.
Related articles:
Big Push for UN’s International Criminal Court
The ICC: International Court of Criminals
The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline
Photo: U.S. financier George Soros, center, speaks during a meeting with the Indian business leaders, in New Delhi, Dec. 19, 2006. AP Images
