Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I do not wish to go back to the previous amendment but it appears that the basic obligation under Article 86 has not been transmitted. Specifically in regard to this amendment, the whole purpose of the Rome Statute is the removal of impunity. It appears from the point of view of trying to achieve the best possible result in regard to international law that the recognition of other sources and forms of impunity which strike at the heart of the statute itself is a contradiction. If one accepts the legislation, and if it is the Government's intention to accept it in its strongest form, I cannot understand why one should leave open, as it were, what are really strategies to refuse to be bound by the statute itself or to seek to undermine it by constructing, as it were, strategies of evasion or escape.

What is interesting in the amendment is that it proposes that those who refuse to accept our system or various legal obligations and construct contractions or strategies to escape from its obligations and who invoke the concept of impunity should not be regarded in Irish law. A state is either with the destruction of such impunity as the statute sets out to address or it is in favour of those that seek to avoid it.

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