The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court (2009) Directed by: Paula Yates Distributed by Skylight Films www.thereckoningfilm.com 95 min. Two men make their way through a field of tall green grass and come upon part of a human skull. In this place killers go unpunished. Without justice, people have no respect for each other, states one. The film shifts to a modern office building thousands of miles away in the Dutch city of The Hague, where the clicking of computer keyboards predominates in the headquarters of the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose aim is to prosecute individuals guilty of mass when the country that would normally be responsible for that justice either cannot or will not act. The Reckoning, a feature-length documentary directed by Paula Yates, presents the historical background and context for the establishment of the ICC, then examines its efforts in four cases involving committed in Uganda, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, which had very limited success. Linking the past to the present, the film introduces Ben Ferencz, a champion of the ICC, who appears also in the archival footage as a young member of the prosecution team at Nuremberg in 1 946 . The liberation of the camps at the end of World War Two confronted humanity with irrefutable evidence of atrocities committed on an unprecedented scale. But instead of summarily executing camp commanders on the spot, the Allies took a newly systematic approach, using an international tribunal to convict the men higher up who gave the orders and to draw the world's attention to what became known as crimes against humanity. Yet atrocities continued: 200,000 civilians died in Guatemala; 1.7 million in Cambodia; 150,000 in Kurdistan; 250,000 in Sierra Leone and Liberia; 200,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and in Rwanda, 800,000. Beginning in the 1990s, international tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda tried some perpetrators, but in June 1998 a gathering of representatives from 140 nations and many non- governmental organizations (NGOs) met in Rome to establish a framework for a permanent international criminal court. The proposed constitution addressed concerns over the national sovereignty of member states, but an overwhelming majority (120) approved it in the final vote. The ICC came into existence in 2002, with sixty- six countries having ratified the Rome Statute. Russia, China and the United States did not join. John Bolton, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations at the time, expresses the active hostility of the Bush Administration toward the ICC and his desire to see it fail. Citing concerns over national sovereignty, the administration feared that U.S. citizens might find themselves the targets of politically motivated attempts to use the ICC against them. It threatened to withdraw support from allies if they joined. …