The United States is withdrawing a small number of troops from two UN peacekeeping operations as they are no longer exempt from prosecution at the International Criminal Court, a Pentagon spokesman said on Thursday. 

Seven servicemen will be removed from a UN mission that is mandated to keep peace between the African nations of Eritrea and Ethiopia, and two liaison officers will be withdrawn from the UN mission in Kosovo, spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told a news briefing.

"In these two particular cases it was determined on an interagency basis that the risk was not appropriate to our forces, and so they were withdrawn," he said.

The spokesman added that the United States will review all UN peacekeeping missions with a US presence. "We'll continue to evaluate these missions going forward and additional UN missions," he said. 

Four Americans in the Ethiopia-Eritrea mission will leave immediately and three others in senior positions will leave once replacements are found, Di Rita said.

The move followed the Bush administration's failure to get a new exemption for US servicemen from prosecutions at the International Criminal Court, which started operating last year.

The court, based in The Hague, the Netherlands, is the first permanent world tribunal set up to prosecute individuals for war crimes, genocide and other gross human rights violations. Ninety-four countries to date have ratified a 1998 treaty creating the court, of which the United States is not a member.

The United States has signed 90 bilateral agreements that bar prosecution of US troops by the court for war crimes, but that does not include the areas the nine people will be leaving.

(Xinhua News Agency July 2, 2004)