European Union officials have been meeting in London to review progress towards setting up a permanent International Criminal Court to try crimes against humanity.

The British Foreign Office minister, Tony Lloyd, opening the meeting, said there was a groundswell of opinion in favour of the idea, which is intended to be realized at a diplomatic conference in Rome in the summer.

But the BBC diplomatic correspondent says there are still substantial differences of opinion to be overcome, such as who decides whether a prosecution is to be brought and exactly what crimes are to be covered.

A State Department spokesman James Rubin said Washington particularly objected to clauses that allowed signatories to the treaty to gain an initial immunity from prosecution, while citizens of countries that had not agreed to the treaty could be prosecuted.

He said this could allow what he called the Pol Pots of the world to escape justice, while American peacekeepers could be prosecuted.

More than one-hundred countries agreed to set up an international court in Rome at end of last week.

The committee, led by Richard Kwach, was asked to look into the affairs of the Judiciary by the Chief Justice, Zaccheaus Chesoni.

Mr Kwach said he found evidence that magistrates and other employees were involved in theft, drunkenness and racketeering.

He recommended that incompetence be made grounds for removing a judge from office.

He's also asked for a twenty-four hour judicial service to be set up at Jomo Kenyatta and Moi international airports to deal with petty crimes involving foreign travelers.

Eight judges are to be removed immediately from their posts, and decisions on another fifty are expected shortly.

The assembly, which was elected to write a new constitution, last month declared a judicial emergency, and assumed sweeping powers beyond those originally allotted to it.

The assembly is controlled by supporters of President Hugo Chavez, and its opponents say its creation amounts to a de facto coup by him. Correspondents note that the latest developments follow an outcry last week, when two judges threw out charges against more than twenty bankers accused of involvement in the country's 1994 banking scandal.

The crisis cost the government more than half that year's budget and almost brought down the entire banking system.

The procurator-general Han Zhubin said many other officials had been dismissed, wrongful verdicts were being reviewed and hundreds of people who were wrongly imprisoned have been released.

The Xinhua news agency said that almost half-a-million court cases had been re-examined and a small proportion -- around fifteen-hundred -- needed to be corrected.

The BBC Beijing correspondent says part of the problem is that local prosecutors often have inadequate legal training.

He says a telephone hotline for complaints about prosecutors has been receiving fifty calls a day -- a sign that many people remain to be convinced about attempts to clean up the judiciary.

The Italian Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, has promised to introduce reforms to the country's judicial system which he says has severely deteriorated.

But he warned there would be no instant solution to the problem.

Mr Prodi's remarks follow the recent disappearances of two top criminals under police surveillance.

They were free pending final appeals against their sentences.

The Italian Justice Minister, Giovanni Maria Flick, offered to resign after facing heavy criticism over the scandal but his resignation was not accepted.

The BBC correspondent in Rome says confidence in Italy's creaking judicial system is traditionally low but now it is near rock-bottom.

Judges and members of the legal profession held a demonstration outside the courthouse in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

One of the protesters Issa Abu Sharar, complained that the judicial system was not independent.

He said judges were striking in particular about decisions to shift them from post to post; they see this as a deliberate attempt to weaken the judicial system further. In June, Mr Arafat appointed a new chief justice to the Palestinian Supreme Court nearly eighteen months after the previous top judge was dismissed for complaining about political interference in the judicial system.

The constitutional assembly in Venezuela -- the body elected to carry out President Hugo Chavez's radical reforms -- has suspended more than one hundred judges accused of corruption.

A senior assembly official, Rene Molina, said it was a preventive measure to protect the judicial system while investigations continued, and that they would be reinstated if they were found innocent.

Each of the one hundred judges is facing at least seven separate corruption charges stretching back as far as fifteen years.

Correspondents say Venezuela's justice system is widely viewed as one of the most corrupt and inefficient in the world, with defendants routinely bribing judges in order to secure a favorable verdict.