Discussing Myanmar's invitation for the UN envoy to the country, Ibrahim Gambari, to visit the country, Louis Charbonneau of Reuters writes:

Security Council diplomats in New York say that enough time has past since Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar two months ago, leaving 138,000 dead or missing, and that it is time to ratchet up the pressure on the junta to comply with council demands that it improve the state of human rights and democracy.

It's hard to say whether this is due to Charbonneau's peculiar way of phrasing this sentence, or whether Security Council diplomats are actually thinking along these lines on the matter, but there is something objectionable in the notion that the UN needs to wait "enough time" after a major humanitarian disaster to continue promoting human rights and democracy in a member country. Myanmar's obstruction of relief efforts did indeed make delivery of humanitarian aid an immediate priority, but this should not be seen as in exclusion of human rights concerns. Rather, the two are tied up quite intimately.

At any rate, it's far from certain whether Myanmar's most recent invitation will result in open access for Gambari, or whether the country's leaders will repeat past practice.

Gambari has said his most recent visit to Myanmar was a disappointment and yielded no concrete results. One of the problems was that he was unable to meet senior junta leaders.

In coverage of the ICC chief prosecutor's recommendation for Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir to be indicted, two precedents for such action are generally cited. As Mark has already highlighted, Richard Goldstone, the prosecutor of the court that tried Slobodan Milosevic, defends the ICC's action from critics who contend that it will disrupt Sudan's [non-existent] peace process. With the position taken by David Crane, the prosecutors responsible for both of the two oft-cited indictments have each affirmed their support for Luis Moreno-Ocampo's strategy of calling for Bashir's arrest.

Asked how these charges could be proved, Crane says, "It's a careful investigation. You have to consider...the facts, the law, even the politics as you move forward in your investigations. I did this when I was investigating President Charles Taylor of Liberia. And I know that my good friend Luis Moreno-Ocampo carefully sorted through the facts, considered the law and the politics and the diplomacy of the issue - peace versus justice - before he moved forward. A good prosecutor has a solid case against a head of state before he actually issues an indictment. You can't make a mistake."

Some say an indictment of the Sudanese president could destabilize the country. Crane responds, "This is a short term view... But if they use the Charles Taylor case as a good case study, you'll see that five years after I unsealed the indictment against Charles Taylor...despite the condemnations, despite the calls that this would hamper peace, Liberia now is on a road of potentially a sustainable peace under the leadership of the first female head of state ever in Africa to be elected in a free and open and fair election there in Liberia."

He calls the indictment of Taylor the "cornerstone by which true peace could have happened in Liberia." He adds, "In my opinion, the same thing will happen in Sudan."

The road from dictatorship to peace is, of course, never neatly linear. Nor are the cases of Yugoslavia and Liberia -- which were not even pursued by the ICC -- direct models for Sudan. No one can predict the fallout from Ocampo's difficult decision -- though it is safe to say that Bashir will not be on the first flight to The Hague -- but the expertise of two prosecutors who have been in a similarly tight spot can in many ways provide as stable a guide as we can hope for.

Yesterday was Le Quatorze Juillet, or Bastille Day as it is more commonly known here. That is the French national holiday, and what better way to ring in the Revolution's 219th birthday than the creation of a new international institution.

Yesterday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy celebrated the creation of the Mediterranean Union--an international group comprised of states surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. From the New York Times:

Leaders of 43 nations with nearly 800 million inhabitants inaugurated a "Union for the Mediterranean" on Sunday, meant to bring the northern and southern countries that ring the sea closer together through practical projects dealing with the environment, climate, transportation, immigration and policing.

But the meeting was also an opportunity for President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to exercise some highly public Middle East diplomacy by bringing President Bashar al-Assad of Syria out of isolation for an Élysée Palace meeting and by playing host to a session between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Somehow this whole project has managed to be off of my radar up until now, but it should prove an interesting study in whether or not the defined priorities can bring together unlikely allies.

The ability of Europeans to use soft power through practically-based international unions to slowly end conflict and spread democracy is exemplified by the success of the European Union, and I hope that this new Mediterranean Union will create the same turn-around in Middle Eastern diplomacy that the European Coal and Steel Community (which later became the EU, of course) created for European diplomacy.

I admire Robert Dreyfuss, but he gets the ICC-Bashir situation exactly backward in a post meant to criticize the Bush administration's go along, get along approach to the International Criminal Court's action in Sudan.

It's the first indictment of a sitting head of state since the ICC was founded in 2002. But Bashir will resist the charges, and no one is going to charge into Sudan to arrest him. Meanwhile, UN diplomats and peacekeepers worry that Sudan will react forcefully, making the situation in Darfur in southwestern Sudan worse. The African Union issued a statement over the weekend warning against "the misuse of indictments against African leaders" -- perhaps thinking, too, of Zimbabwe. Both Russia and China (which has close economic ties to Sudan and its oil) were against the indictments, too.Australia is already reconsidering its planned deployment of peacekeepers to Sudan, fearing greater violence. The Arab League is having an emergency meeting over the crisis.

There are two points to make here. First, of course no one is going to march on Khartoum to arrest Bashir. Similarly, there were no prospects of NATO forces marching on Belgrade to arrest Milosevic after his indictment or UN troops to march on Freetown to arrest Charles Taylor. Yet, in both cases, international indictments served to turn those heads of state into international pariahs and organic opposition groups gave them the boot. Bashir is a sufficiently unpopular ruler in Sudan that this kind of action is not without the realm of possibility, particularly as we approach the 2009 national elections.

Second, the ICC action will likely make things more difficult for aid workers and peacekeepers in the short term. But the harassment of peacekeepers was already making troop contributing countries wary of sending peacekeepers to Sudan. Aid workers were already being routinely denied access to refugee camps. The is no "peace process" of which to speak that the ICC action could be undermining.

The ICC action deserves our support because it is the only prospect of justice for Darfur's victims. But perhaps more importantly, if the international community plays its cards right, the threat of indictment--and enticement of suspending an indictment--can be leveraged to force Sudan's compliance with a future peace accord. The point is, supporting the ICC's action on Sudan is not only the right thing to do, but has the potential to break an untenable political status quo.

Blake Hounshell asks: "Did [Russian President] Medvedev get punk'd?"

A funny thing happened on the way home from the G-8 summit. Somebody seems to have changed Russia's position on U.N. sanctions on Zimbabwe.

Last Tuesday, President Dmitry Medvedev signed on to a statement expressing "grave concern" about the situation in Zimbabwe. But on Friday, Russia vetoed a proposed U.N. sanctions resolution, citing the need to protect the principle of sovereignty.

Blake speculates that Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin may have intervened to reverse official Russian position on Zimbabwe. Whatever the case, I too read the tea leaves wrong and appeared sanguine about Russia's position on the United States sponsored sanctions resolution on Zimbabwe when I posted on this last week.

From the UN News Center:

A just concluded three-year pilot project has shown that solar power can be an affordable and sustainable alternative energy source for the people of Timor-Leste, according to a senior United Nations official heading up the programme. The solar project, just one of many initiatives carried out by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affair (UNDESA) in the tiny South East Asian nation, aimed to help rural communities harness the potential of this alternative energy source. Under the pilot programme, carried out in communities on Atauro Island and in Aleiu District, community members agreed to pay $1.80 per month for the use of solar lanterns. It is estimated that communities on Atauro using the lanterns have saved over $1,800, and now other communities have also expressed interest in using the lanterns.

Read more.

The former Prosecutor of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal explains how the ICC's action against Sudanese President Omar el Bashir may provide a boon to the peace in Sudan

It is too early to tell what effects the indictment will have on peace efforts. So far, there has been no Darfur peace process to speak of. Part-time United Nations and African Union mediators recently resigned in frustration, calling for a new approach.

In the meantime, the indictments may delegitimize the government in the eyes of the Sudanese people, especially the elites in Khartoum. In 1999, after the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslovia issued its arrest warrant for President Milosevic, an opposition group called Otpor turned it into a political weapon with the slogan, "He is finished." Mr. Milosevic lost the elections in 2000. Although other factors contributed to his fall, including lost wars and corruption, the indictments played their part by demonstrating his isolation.

Human Rights Watch has more.