UNITED NATIONS – As the situation in Sudan’s Darfur region worsens, with 10,000 people dying each month, diplomats at the United Nations are set to engage in a dispute about whether the newest weapon in the multilateralists’ arsenal, the International Criminal Court, is the right tool to deal with the crisis.

While presenting Human Rights Watch’s annual world report yesterday, the organization’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, revealed that the European Union is set to recommend at the Security Council a referral of the Darfur situation to the Hague-based ICC, which was set up in 2002 to try suspects for war crimes and crimes against humanity. America opposes the court.

Publicly, European council members refused to confirm that such a decision has already been taken by the E.U. “We are waiting to find out exactly what happened [in Darfur] before we make a decision,” Theodossis Demetracopoulos, spokesman for the Greek U.N. mission told The New York Sun. Greece joined the council in January.

Other European diplomats also said an official decision will not be made before the January 24 report due from a fact-finding committee that was set up by the council last year. “The E.U. clearly supports the ICC,” said one diplomat, while another said a compromise might still be found.

The ICC proponents say other tools have failed to stem the bloodshed in Darfur. “It is not possible for the African Union to do it by itself,” Mr. Roth said in reference to a monitoring force of some 1,000 A.U. troops that has been dispatched to the region by the council.

Similarly, he added, creating a special war crimes tribunal, or extending the mandate of existing tribunals, could be ineffective in deterring war crimes. “We are past the era of ad-hoc tribunals,” he said.

The U.N. and others refuse to join Secretary of State Powell in defining what is occurring in Darfur as “genocide.” Human Rights Watch calls the systematic murders “ethnic cleansing.” The convention against genocide, thought rarely applied, does entail certain punitive measures, Mr. Roth admitted. However, he said, the definition is complex and the past has shown that sanctions under that convention are hard to enforce.

The one thing the rulers of Sudan fear more than anything, he contended, is prosecution under the Rome Statute that founded the ICC and came into effect in July 2002. “We are hopeful that Washington will set aside its ideological aversion [to the ICC] in order to save the people of Darfur,” he said.

But a State Department official told the Sun yesterday that everyone at the council knows that this is a nonstarter for Washington. “Our position on the ICC is well known,” the official said, asking not to be named.

The Clinton administration did not ratify the Rome Statute, and the Bush administration has dismissed it completely out of concern that the Hague based court will quickly be turned against Americans, who are involved in more global disputes than any other nation.

“The ICC is a noble idea,” the ambassador-at-large for war crimes at the State Department, Pierre-Richard Prosper, told students at Boston College last month. “The problem is that it is unchecked. It is in a sense uncontrollable.” One diplomat added that the first few cases brought to the ICC have failed to stop the ongoing carnage in Congo.

The debate over Darfur has already split the Security Council, as powerful members headed by China have prevented even the threat of meaningful sanctions against Khartoum. Now, Washington is concerned about even a deeper diplomatic wedge over the issue of the ICC.

One nondiplomatic solution might be dispatching an American aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean in order to enforce a no-flight zone over western Sudan. Asked about it by the Sun, outgoing U.N. ambassador John Danforth said only, “We’ll certainly think about anything.”