War Crimes Prosecution Watch

Cambodian Extraordinary Chambers (ECCC)

Official Website of the Extraordinary Chambers
Official Website of the Khmer Rouge Trial Task Force
Official Website of the United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials (UNAKRT)

Human rights groups call for Khmer Rouge Trial to Follow International Standards
Associated Press via International Herald Tribune
March 5, 2007

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: The planned genocide trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders must meet international standards of justice, Cambodian and foreign human rights groups said Monday.

The call came as Cambodian and foreign judges appointed to the tribunal prepared for a crucial meeting this week to thrash out differences over rules for the proceedings.
The failure so far to agree on procedures for what is formally known as Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC, has delayed the trials and could derail them altogether.

The radical policies of the Khmer Rouge led to the deaths of some 1.7 million people from execution, overwork, disease and malnutrition during the group's 1975-79 rule.

"We view the ECCC as a last chance to provide justice to the Cambodian people for atrocities suffered during the period of 1975-79," said a joint statement by the Phnom Penh-based Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative, and three other groups.

Prosecutors are expected to indict about 10 people, including the few surviving top Khmer Rouge leaders.

The draft rules at issue cover every phase of the proceedings — preliminary investigations, judicial investigations, the trial and appeals — and also the roles of prosecutors, defense attorneys and defendants.

The tribunal was created by a 2003 agreement between Cambodia and the United Nations, and after long delays had been expected to convene later this year. It has been set up to operate under the Cambodian judicial system, which is widely regarded as corrupt and susceptible to political influence.

The human rights groups urged the tribunal to adopt procedural rules "that satisfy international standards for the holding of fair and legitimate trials to try the senior leaders and those most responsible for crimes."

"National and international judges and other officials of the ECCC must perform their duties with integrity, independence, and objectivity," the statement said.

In late January, the tribunal announced that Cambodian judges and their foreign counterparts had made "solid progress" in "significantly narrowing the number of outstanding issues."

However, several major issues remained unresolved, including how to integrate Cambodian and international law to ensure transparency and fairness, especially for defendants.

In February, the tribunal suffered a public relations blow when allegations were made that Cambodian judges and other court personnel had kicked back some of their wages to Cambodian government officials in exchange for their positions on the court.

The charges were taken seriously enough to trigger an internal audit by the United Nations, although its findings have not been made public.

Crunch time for Khmer Rouge trial
Reuters via The China Post
By Ek Madra
March 5, 2007

Cambodian and international judges sitting on the Khmer Rouge tribunal hold crunch talks this week to salvage the trial of Pol Pot's top surviving henchmen for the atrocities of the "Killing Fields".

At the heart of the problem is a disagreement between local and U.N.-backed officials over legalities of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, as the joint tribunal into the deaths of Khmer Rouge's estimated 1.7 million victims is called.

A week-long meeting in November to hammer out rules covering everything from the admissibility of evidence to the protection of witnesses to the height of the judges' chairs came to nothing.

Since then a separate sub-committee has discussing many of the issues but with the clock ticking on the US$53 million three-year trial, which officially started in July, there can be no more delays.

The meeting, which will run from March 7 to 16, "must resolve all fundamental differences," a court statement said. "The judges are also acutely aware that time is of the essence," it added.

Diplomats say the U.N. side of the court will walk away if they feel their local counterparts are dragging their feet or acting on the orders of Prime Minister Hun Sen, an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier who lost an eye in the battle for Phnom Penh in 1975.

Even though there is no evidence linking Hun Sen to any atrocities, his government is riddled with former cadres from the ultra-Maoist regime, many of whom will not want prosecutors raking through their pasts.

The Khmer Rouge's main ally, China, has also been lobbying Hun Sen hard to stall the proceedings to prevent the full extent of Beijing's involvement coming to light, diplomats say.

In public at least, Hun Sen has been making it clear he wants the trial to go ahead, announcing at a recent road-opening ceremony near a mass execution site on the outskirts of the capital that victims' remains must be preserved.

"This is the evidence of genocide," Hun Sen said in a speech broadcast on national radio. "There have been demands to burn the remains so their spirits will be reborn, but if we lose this, the trial of the Khmer Rouge cannot be conducted."

On Saturday Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party said it "supports the process of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia to try the crimes which were carried out during the period of the democratic Kampuchea regime."

Helen Jarvis, an Australian expert working with the Cambodian side, said despite the procedural disagreements, prosecutors had been hard at work compiling evidence, and would be ready to lodge cases against some suspects as soon as the green light came.

"We remain optimistic that the outstanding issues will be resolved," she said. "We hope it will open later this year. We are not sure, but we're hoping."

Pol Pot, the architect of the Khmer Rouge's "Year Zero" peasant revolution, died in 1998.

Cambodian Khmer Rouge Trial Judges Protest Graft Allegations
Monsters and Critics.com
By DPA
March 9, 2007

Phnom Penh - Cambodian judges appointed to the Khmer Rouge tribunal sent an open letter Friday requesting the withdrawal of allegations made by a respected international human-rights organization that they paid kickbacks to obtain and keep their positions.

The letter - signed by Kong Srim, president of the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and issued through the tribunal's press department on behalf of all Cambodian judges involved in the upcoming trial - said the February 14 claims of corruption by the George Soros-funded Open Society Justice Initiative were untrue and deserved an apology.

'This unsubstantiated allegation, which has been published by a number of national and international media, creates public confusion and seriously undermines the reputation and integrity of all national judges appointed to the ECCC,' the letter said.

It added: 'All national judges of the ECCC hereby affirm to you and the public at large that our decisions to work for the ECCC were made without being subject to any pressure or promise as mentioned in your statement.

'We all clearly understand that bringing justice to the people of Cambodia, especially victims of the Khmer Rouge regime, is a mission that requires the highest level of professional responsibility. Therefore, we request you correct by appropriate means this unsubstantiated allegation.'

On Wednesday, local media published an open letter from Open Society Justice Initiative executive director James Goldston urging the tribunal to mount a thorough and transparent investigation into the allegations for the sake of the credibility of the hearings both at home and abroad.

Goldston acknowledged that his New York-based organization had not provided concrete proof to back the allegations but said it was the group's job to bring the matter to public attention.

He said it was the job of the tribunal to investigate and to show the public and donors to the 56-million dollar trial set up to bring a handful of former top leaders of the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge to justice that it was capable of handling such allegations and stamping out corruption if it existed rather than ignoring it.

Days after the organization made the allegations, the tribunal announced it would not deal with the group any further. Sources close to the court said there was suspicion among some government officials in the former Communist nation that the timing of the allegations was political with nationwide commune elections scheduled for April 1.

Friday's letter was issued as the tribunal's local and international judges continued to try to thrash out differences between a number of different legal systems and come to agreement on internal rules for the court, without which proceedings cannot move forward.

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, during which time up to 2 million Cambodians perished under one of the most brutal regimes of the past century.

Several prominent members of the current Cambodian government were Khmer Rouge cadre before defecting and overthrowing that regime, and some groups have expressed doubt that Cambodia, with its endemic corruption and complex political past, is capable of holding a trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders to international standards and on budget.

Major barrier to Khmer Rouge trials is removed
Reuters/ San Diego Union Tribune
March 12, 2007

PHNOM PENH – The Cambodian Bar Association said on Monday it had lifted its ban on foreign lawyers at planned trials of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, lifting a significant barrier to getting them started.

'We are making a lot of compromises, and that means foreign lawyers can join us in the defence section of the Khmer Rouge,' association president Ky Tech told Reuters after the first day of talks with the London-based International Bar Association.

'We are working on how to assign volunteer lawyers to represent the victims of the Khmer Rouge and defend the regime's leaders,' he said.

The association's ban on the participation of foreign lawyers in United Nations-supported trials expected to last three years and cost $56.3 million had cast doubts on whether they would go ahead.

Some diplomats had seen the ban as a way of delaying trials of senior Khmer Rouge figures now in their 70s and 80s and amplified doubts about whether the government, despite its public proclamations of support, really wanted them to happen.

But Ky Tech said only details had to be worked out now.

'We are meeting and working together because we do not want to obstruct Khmer Rouge trials. I am optimistic we can work together,' he said.

The agreement, however, does not clear the way to opening the trials of figures such as 'Brother Number Two' Nuon Chea, deputy to the late Pol Pot, the architect of the Khmer Rouge's 'Year Zero' revolution in which an estimated 1.7 million people died.

Foreign and Cambodian judges, who will have to work together under a complex formula designed to ensure judgments have the support of both, are half way through two weeks of talks on agreeing on the nuts and bolts of how the trials will be run.

Tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said they had made substantial progress in their third attempt to agree, but refused to provide any details.

'Discussions are still going on and we cannot provide details,' he said. 'But what we can tell you is that a lot of progress has been made over the past few days.'

Disagreements ranged from the admissibility of evidence to witness protection, even to the height of the judges' chairs, and the trials cannot begin until they are ironed out.
Other aged leaders due to face trial are former head of state Khieu Samphan and ex-foreign minister Ieng Sary.

They are living free. The most senior Khmer Rouge in detention is Duch, head of the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation centre in Phnom Penh where at least 14,000 people are thought to have been tortured and executed.

During the four years the Khmer Rouge were in power, about a quarter of the country's population was executed or died of hunger or disease.

Fee dispute may delay start of Khmer Rouge trials at UN-aided Cambodian court
UN News Centre
March 16, 2007

The United Nations-assisted Cambodian court may not be able to proceed with the long-awaited trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders, accused of mass killings and other horrific crimes during the late 1970s, until a dispute is resolved over proposed registration fees for foreign lawyers, the court’s review committee said today.

In a statement issued after a 10-day session in the capital Phnom Penh, the review committee of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which is comprised of national and international judges, said all remaining disagreements over the internal court rules had been hammered out.

But the decision of Cambodia’s Bar Association (BAKC) to impose fees on the participation of foreign lawyers “is unacceptable to the international judges, who consider that it severely limits the rights of accused and victims to select counsel of their choice,” according to today’s statement.

The international judges consider this dispute “places an obstacle to adopting” the rules, which are necessary for the trials to proceed, although the national judges regard the issue as outside the scope of the internal rules and therefore no obstacle to their adoption.

The review committee called on the BAKC to re-consider its decision as soon as possible so that a planned plenary session of judges can take place on 30 April to adopt the internal rules.

The statement called on the ECCC Defence Support Section to work closely with the BAKC in this process.

“All members of the Committee remain dedicated to completing this complex effort of successfully harmonizing international and national law so that the ECCC can discharge its historic responsibility to find justice for the Cambodian people,” the statement added.

Judges and prosecutors for the ECCC trials were sworn in last July. Under an agreement signed by the UN and Cambodia, the trial court and a Supreme Court within the Cambodian legal system will investigate those most responsible for crimes and serious violations of Cambodian and international law between 17 April 1975 and 6 January 1979.

The UN will pay $43 million of the $56.3 million budget for the trials, with the Cambodian Government providing the remaining $13.3 million.

Chief defense lawyer vows to prevent collapse of Khmer Rouge tribunal
Associated Press via International Herald Tribune
March 16, 2007

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: The chief defense lawyer for the long-delayed Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal in Cambodia said Saturday he will try to resolve a key sticking point over fees for foreign lawyers that threatens to derail the trials.

Rupert Skilbeck, the head of the defense support section for the U.N.-backed tribunal, said he wants to meet with the Cambodian Bar Association in the coming days to "see if we can find the way to resolve the problem." He said he was confident an agreement could be reached.

The impasse involves the Cambodian Bar Association's recent decision to charge foreign lawyers hundreds of dollars (euros) to represent defendants or victims in the long-awaited tribunal, which was scheduled to begin later this year.

The issue became public Friday after Cambodian and international judges finished a 10-day meeting to thrash out differences over draft internal rules for the genocide trials, but said the legal fee dispute had prevented their adoption.

Ky Tech, president of the Cambodian Bar Association, declined to comment or discuss details of the legal fees.

The Cambodia Daily newspaper reported Saturday that the bar has decided that foreign lawyers wishing to participate in the tribunal must pay the bar a US$500 (€375) membership application fee.

If chosen to work with a client, they must pay an additional US$2,000 (€1,500) and a US$200 (€150) monthly fee, the newspaper said.

Skilbeck indicated that foreign lawyers were willing to compromise, saying that "a reasonable administrative fee might be possible."

The international judges may boycott a plenary meeting next month if the fee issue is not resolved, the tribunal office said in a statement Friday.

It said the judges discussed, during their meetings, "in exhaustive detail many points and resolved all remaining disagreements, although some fine tuning remains to be done."

But it indicated that the international judges believed that the proposed fee was an obstacle to adopting the agreed rules, while the Cambodia judges believed the fee was irrelevant to the package of rules.

The fee "is unacceptable to the international judges, who consider that it severely limits the rights of accused and victims to select counsel of their choice," the statement said.

The radical policies of the now-defunct Khmer Rouge, who held power in 1975-79, led to the deaths of about 1.7 million people from execution, overwork, disease and malnutrition. But none of the communist group's leaders has been brought to trial.

Squabbling over details about the rules to govern the trials has eaten up nearly a third of the tribunal's three-year planned life span. Further delay could mean that former Khmer Rouge leaders — now elderly and ailing — will never be brought to trial.

Prosecutors are expected to indict about 10 defendants, including the few surviving top Khmer Rouge leaders.

The tribunal was created by a 2003 agreement between Cambodia and the United Nations after years of difficult negotiations.

Khmer Rouge trial rules agreed at last
Reuters
by Ek Madra
March 16, 2007

PHNOM PENH, March 16 (Reuters) - The trials of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders moved a big step closer on Friday as international and Cambodian judges said they had finally agreed on the rules of the tribunal.

"The review committee discussed in exhaustive detail many points and resolved all remaining disagreements, although some fine tuning remains to be done," they said in a statement at the end of 10 days of talks.

Disagreements which had held up the start of the tribunal, set up last year by Cambodia and the United Nations, ranged from admissibility of evidence and witness protection to the height of the judges' chairs.

The statement gave few details of what the agreement entailed, but it appeared to have ended what diplomats said was the threat of the U.N. side to walk away from trials expected to take three years and cost $53 million.

But it said one remaining point at issue was the fee demanded by the Bar Association of the Kingdom of Cambodia (BAKC) for international lawyers to join it so they can appear.

"The latest decision of the BAKC imposes a fee that is unacceptable to the international judges, who consider that it severely limits the rights of accused and victims to select counsel of their choice," the statement said.

It did not say what fee the Bar Association was demanding, but said the international judges believed it should not be an obstacle and the two sides had promised to thrash out their differences by the end of April.

START DATE AWAITED

It remained unclear when the trials would begin of 10 surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who emptied the cities and embarked on four years of radical agrarian revolution in which an estimated 1.7 million people were executed or died of hunger or disease.

But tribunal spokeswoman Helen Jarvis said the agreement meant they could start soon.

"It means step a big forward and we hope soon we will be able to move to the judicial process," she said without elaborating.

Pol Pot, the "Brother Number One" of the government which spawned the "Killing Fields", died in 1998.

But "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea, former head of state Khieu Samphan and ex-Foreign Minister Ieng Sary are all living free in Cambodia and are due to face trial.

The only senior Khmer Rouge figure in detention is Duch, head of the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation centre, a former school in Phnom Penh where at least 14,000 people were tortured and executed before a Vietnamese invasion ended their rule in 1979.

The path to their trials has been strewn with difficulties and there have been constant suspicions that the Cambodian government, despite its public protestations to the contrary, did not want them to go ahead.

The government has many officials with Khmer Rouge backgrounds who would not want their backgrounds investigated too closely and China worries details of its support of the back to the soil "Year Zero" government will come out, diplomats say.

The issue was raised at a meeting between the European Union and Southeast Asian foreign ministers this week in Nuremberg, scene of post-World War Two trials of German Nazi leaders.

Time has passed, but not all the things have been forgotten," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said as he urged a swift start to the trials.

[back to contents]

Democratic Republic of the Congo (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Selective Prosecutions Could Undermine Justice
Institute for War & Peace Reporting (London)
By Stephanie Wolters
March 7, 2007

The International Criminal Court's prosecution of Thomas Lubanga is too simplistic a solution to the vast array of war crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Anyone who has been following recent events in the remote region of Ituri, and indeed in the wider Democratic Republic of Congo as a whole, could be forgiven for feeling as though they had accidentally called up an old press release from 2005, 2004, or even 2003. That is how long the United Nations and the Congolese army have been trying to stabilise the northeast of the country.

In late February, the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo DRC, announced triumphantly - not for the first time - that the last remaining militia group in the Ituri district was finally coming to the party, its combatants disarming by the dozen every day.

The latest push to put a definitive end to the violence and looting in Ituri began last November, when the UN mission, known by the acronym MONUC, and the government managed to get the last three straggling militia leaders to agree to a plan which would see their fighters disarm and either demobilised or retrained to join the DRC army.

The men in question are Mathew Ngudjolo of the Revolutionary Movement of Congo, MRC, Cobra Matata of the Ituri Patriotic Resistance Front, FRPI, and Peter Karim of the Nationalist and Integrationist Front, FNI. They are second-and third-generation leaders of spin-offs from once-powerful militia movements that sprang up in 1999 and have been mutating ever since. Karim and Ngudjolo are opportunistic hangers-on who have ignored previous ceasefires and demobilisation campaigns because they simply had no interest and no motivation for taking part.

Their defiance has not cost them much. Although they have kept alive an ethnic conflict between Lendu agriculturalists and Hema pastoralists that has killed more than 50,000 people, devastated the economy of the mineral-rich region, and defied the best efforts of both the UN and the DRC's transitional government, they were nominated in November to senior positions in the Congolese military as an incentive to finally lay down their weapons.

The only leader not yet to have surrendered is Karim, who is now demanding amnesty in exchange for his surrender, and it looks like he might just get it.

Cut from Ituri in the far northeast to the crowded prison cells of "Pavillion 1", the increasingly dense VIP area in the central jail in the capital Kiprison nearly 2,000 kilometres to the west in Kinshasa, capital of the vast Congo, which is greater in size than western Europe. Some of the DRC's most high-profile civilian and military leaders now reside here.

The jail's population includes the leaders of the five main Ituri militia groups, who were thrown in prison in 2005 after the assassination of nine UN peacekeepers.

Prior to their incarceration, these leaders had lived in Kinshasa for almost two years at the behest of the transitional government, which led them to believe that they would be rewarded with senior state positions in return for cooperating with a peace process in Ituri.

When the UN peacekeepers were killed in Ituri, MONUC cracked down, issuing an ultimatum to the militia groups to disarm within months, or face pursuit and arrest by the UN. In an attempt to show it was taking the matter seriously, the transitional government arrested the leaders of all the groups, with little regard for whether or not they might have been involved in the incident. They remain in prison in Kinshasa to this day.

Only one Ituri militia leader- Chief Kahwa Mandro of the Hema-dominated Party for Unity and Safeguarding of the Integrity of Congo, or PUSIC, has been tried by a court in DRC. Apprehended in Ituri, he was tried on simple murder charges and given a lengthy prison sentence in Bunia, the regional capital. He is now appealing against his conviction.

Much more publicity surrounded the transfer of Thomas Lubanga, leader of the Hema-led Union of Congolese Patriots, UPC, to the International Criminal Court, ICC, at The Hague.

In February, the ICC ruled that the trial of Lubanga on the charge of recruiting child soldiers would go ahead, making him the first person ever to be tried by the fledgling war crimes court.

Lubanga and the UPC are widely held responsible for some of the worst massacres of the seven-year conflict in Ituri, and the fact that he is being tried has been greeted with much enthusiasm at home and abroad. However, the limited scope of the charge came as a disappointment for many who had hoped that the ICC would charge Lubanga with a wider range of crimes.

The ICC was set up to act where national legal systems cannot cope. But in Ituri the problem is not primarily that local legal systems are too rickety to be effective; it is that they are politicised and thus unwilling to move against people with powerful connections, whatever human rights abuses they may be accused of.

In the DRC, the transitional government led by President Joseph Kabila chose to feed Lubanga - who really counts as small fry in Congo's complex ladder of power - to the highly visible ICC, not because it believes in justice but precisely because it does not want to see it done across the board.

Lubanga is expendable: his initial arrest and incarceration in Kinshasa and now his trial have not cost Kabila or any of those sharing power with him in the transitional government a cent of their political currency, and never will.

It will certainly be a positive development if more Ituri militia leaders are eventually transferred to The Hague for trial. But for the Kabila government, the high-profile Lubanga trial far away in Europe will be a welcome sideshow that will distract public attention from the many cases in which justice has demonstrably not been served in the DRC's most recent conflict.

If the ICC chooses to accept this state of affairs by accepting the recommendations made by national governments and not widening its scope, then it will become a political vehicle for the leaders of those countries in which it is supposed to be helping to find justice.

The fact that the transitional government reacted so swiftly back by arresting Ituri militia leaders back in 2005 was not an indication of a real commitment either to help the UN or to accelerate the return of peace and stability to Ituri. Rather, it demonstrated the gulf between the situation in Ituri and the national peace process - and the expendability of its people, militia leaders or not.

One has to go back some way to trace the process by which Ituri has been sidelined.
None of the Ituri militia leaders participated in any of the national peace talks that ended the catastrophic and bewildering nationwide conflict - widely described as Africa's own First World War - that took some four million lives, and they did not sign the all-inclusive peace accords in Pretoria in December 2002.

This is in part because while the conflict in Ituri is linked to the broader war, the link is tangential and the local dynamics very different.

National rebel groups such as Mbusa Nyamwisi's RCD-K/ML (short for Rally for Congolese Democracy - Kisangani Movement for Liberation), and the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo, MLC, led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, did at various times control parts of the Ituri district. However, real power here lay with overlords from Ituri's immediate neighbour, Uganda, who deliberately stoked the smouldering conflict between the local Hema and Lendu ethnic communities, creating and backing one group after another.

The Ugandan army virtually annexed the region in 1999 and is alleged to have plundered its rich gold seams. As well as gold, the province has diamonds, timber and recently-discovered oil.

According to Human Rights Watch, official Ugandan export figures indicate that gold exports from that country are significant, accounting for 84 per cent of total mineral exports in 2001 even though domestic gold extraction is negligible. According to the same report, Uganda's gold exports reached 60 million US dollars in 2003 and 46 million dollars in 2004. Human Rights Watch said most of this gold originated in Ituri.

"Uganda is the number one gold-exporting country in this area without having a single gold mine. Tell me how that happens?" said a military intelligence official from the United Nations.

The Human Rights Watch report contained a damning assessment of Uganda's role in Ituri. "During its four years occupying the north-eastern DRC, the Ugandan army claimed to be a peacemaker in a region torn by ethnic strife. In reality, the Ugandan army provoked political confusion and created insecurity in areas under its control. From its initial involvement in a land dispute between the Hema and Lendu, the Ugandan army more often aggravated than calmed ethnic and political hostilities," it said.

The New York-based organisation further accused Uganda of playing the role of "both arsonist and fireman" and of meddling in political feuding among local Ituri leaders.

In 2002, when peace talks between Kabila's government, the main national rebel groups, the political opposition, and civil society groups kicked off in Sun City, South Africa, the exact nature and extent of the conflict in Ituri had not yet really caught the eye of the international community. Ituri's inter-ethnic conflict, stoked by Ugandan and also Rwandan interference, went almost totally ignored by the world and by Africa-based foreign correspondents. It was assumed that the MLC, RCD-K/ML and the RCD-N (Rally for Congolese Democracy-National) of Roger Lumbala amply reflected the situation there, even though they exercised minimal control over what was actually happening in the district.

Ultimately, the situation in Ituri was addressed by a MONUC-led peace effort that focused on the many local groups, and their exclusion from the national talks was not seen as necessarily detrimental. Adding the very specific Ituri conflict to the agenda of overall peace negotiations would likely have muddled both issues.

This exclusion nonetheless set the tone for recent developments in which Ituri has taken centre stage as the scene of the war's most horrific crimes, when, sadly, it is only one of many places in the DRC that have seen terrible atrocities and widespread war crimes.

The reality is that to date, Thomas Lubanga is the only Congolese rebel leader who has been formally charged with war crimes. Yet as the ICC continues to investigate other Ituri warlords, there are many other figures who are accused of committing or aiding and abetting abuses elsewhere across the vast expanses of the DRC, but are still free to go about their business.

There is, for example, Laurent Nkunda, a dissident commander in the Rwandan-backed RCD whose forces have been active in Kivu province, south of Ituri, since he rejected the offer of the post of general in the Congolese army in 2003. Nkunda has been accused of responsibility for grave human rights violations by the likes of Human Rights Watch and others, but has been seeking a blanket amnesty from the new government in exchange for laying down his arms.

Then there is Jean-Pierre Bemba, who was Kabila's main opponent in last year's presidential election, and whose MLC militia fighters were accused of horrific crimes against civilians in northwestern DRC in late 2002. Although the leaders of this action were put on trial and found guilty by the MLC itself, questions remain as to Bemba's command responsibility. The neighbouring Central African Republic has also referred a case to the ICC relating to crimes allegedly committed by Bemba's troops during an intervention in that country.

The list of those accused of human rights abuses in the DRC is very long, and includes members of all the rebel groups; the anarchic Mai Mai militias which publicly tortured victims before killing them; the government of Joseph Kabila and its predecessor led by his father, the late Laurent Kabila; the DRC military; and the Ugandan and Rwandan armies.

Local organisations such as the Voice of the Voiceless (Voix des sans Voix) and the African Human Rights Association, as well as international groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have documented these violations over the years in immense and horrific detail, and continue to advocate for justice.

The ICC says it too is investigating a number of other actors outside Ituri. But as the Lubanga trial demonstrates, building a case takes time and resources, neither of which the ICC has in abundance. There is also, as the case of Karim shows, the issue of whether amnesties as a carrot to end conflict should take precedence over justice.

These are not easy questions to resolve, but if justice is to be served at all in the DRC, the investigations must come to something - and sooner rather than later. It would be far too easy and convenient for the DRC authorities and the international community to be allowed to argue that the only atrocities worthy of investigation took place in Ituri.

Stephanie Wolters was the Congo correspondent of the BBC and Reuters from 1998 to 2001 and the chief news editor of the Congo's Radio Okapi in 2002-2003. She is currently Africa editor and deputy news editor of South Africa's award-winning Mail and Guardian newspaper.

Stressing need to end suffering in Northern Uganda, Ban Ki-moon hails talks
UN News Centre
March 12, 2007

Stressing the need to end the suffering in conflict-torn Northern Uganda, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today welcomed the latest pledges by the parties to hold their fire and voiced hope that formal peace negotiations will soon resume.

The Secretary-General’s Envoy for areas affected by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Joaquim Chissano, yesterday chaired a meeting in Ri-Kwangba, Southern Sudan, with the main parties and participants to the “Juba Peace Initiative,” a process named for the southern Sudanese town which has played host to talks on the issue.

Reacting to the latest diplomatic moves, a spokesman for Mr. Ban said he is “is pleased that all parties in attendance, including LRA leader Joseph Kony, reiterated their commitment to peace and stated their readiness to extend the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement to which they are currently bound.”

Pointing out that those who have taken part in this conflict bear a responsibility to end the suffering in Northern Uganda, the Secretary-General voiced hope that the discussions begun yesterday “can lead in the near future to a resumption of the Juba peace talks,” spokesperson Michele Montas said.

“The Secretary-General looks forward to further discussions on the situation of the LRA-affected areas when his Special Envoy visits New York later this month to brief the Security Council,” she added.

Mr. Chissano has been in the region since February carrying on consultations with the rebel group’s leadership and northern Ugandan parties, as well as with concerned regional countries.

Thousands of civilians have been killed or abducted since the LRA began its rebellion in 1986, and more than 1.5 million people have become internally displaced in Uganda. Humanitarian operations in southern Sudan, which the rebel group has often used as a base, have been severely disrupted.

Mr. Chissano was named in December, 2006 as the Secretary-General’s envoy to help with efforts to speed up negotiations towards a durable peace deal. As part of his mandate, Mr. Chissano, a former President of Mozambique, will liaise with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has indicted Mr. Kony and four other senior LRA figures for war crimes.

UN Calls for DRC to Prioritise Child Protection
BuaNews (Tshwane)
By Nozipho Dlamini
March 13, 2007

The United Nations (UN) has called for the new government in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to make child protection a priority and ensure enough resources are allocated to reintegrate former child soldiers into their communities.

"Child protection must become a priority for the new Congolese Government," said UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy.

Ms Coomaraswamy made her remarks during a press conference in Goma, at the end of her six-day visit to the DRC.

During the visit she met with government officials, representatives from civil society, children affected by conflict and other relevant parties.

She noted that during her talks with the authorities they made commitments to tackle the issues of child recruitment and demobilisation of children associated with armed groups as well as on sexual violence.

"It is therefore very important to have long-term development strategies and to allocate appropriate funds to support the efforts of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and to child protection partners on the ground," she said.

This according to her will properly reintegrate former child soldiers into their communities to avoid re-recruitment by armed groups.

Ms Coomaraswamy stressed the importance of demobilising all the children who were still in the ranks of the non integrated armed groups as well as in the Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC).

In addition, she urged the authorities to take appropriate action against violators of children's rights who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ms Coomaraswamy is now expected to report on her visit to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as well as to the Security Council Working Group on Children in Armed Conflict in May this year.

The issue of children and armed conflict is a major UN concern.

Last month, UNICEF and the French Government co-hosted a conference in Paris in which 59 countries, including the DRC, committed themselves to putting an end to unlawful recruitment and use of children in conflicts wherever they occur.

The conference's main objective was to come up with recommendations on how to free children from war and its consequences.

At that conference, Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya said the total eradication of conflicts in the continent and the world would provide a lasting solution to the scourge of children in armed conflicts.

He said special attention should be given to girl children who were exploited by armed forces and groups.

"Some of these children go through the horror of rape and many other forms of sexual violence," he said.

"In our country we are informed in our approach towards child protection by a principle that says "Any Child is my Child", and another which says "It takes a village to raise a child".

"These philosophies drive us in making our contributions towards making our country, and the world, a better place for children," said Dr Skweyiya.

The UN mission in the DRC (MONUC) has overseen the DRC's transition from a six-year civil war that cost 4 million lives in fighting and attendant hunger and disease, widely considered the most lethal conflict in the world since World War II, to gradual stabilisation.

This culminated in the first democratic elections in over four decades last year, the largest and most complex polls the UN has ever helped to organise.

Tension is high in DR Congo with a deadline for troops loyal to former presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba to disarm set to expire.
BBC News
March 16, 2007

Last week, the army gave Mr Bemba's guards an ultimatum to stand down.

But dozens of armed men are still at his residential compound in the centre of the capital, Kinshasa.

Mr Bemba, a former rebel leader, was defeated by Joseph Kabila in landmark presidential elections in October last year.

Mr Kabila now wants him to downscale his private security force, but Mr Bemba refuses to be left without armed guards.

Police replacements

Congolese Defence Minister Tshikez Diemu told the BBC that violence would not be used to disarm the guards of Mr Bemba and another former rebel leader and defeated election candidate, Azarias Ruberwa.

"We have suffered so much," he said.

He appealed to both men to disband their armed guards for the sake of the country's stability.

The BBC's Arnaud Zajtman in Kinshasa says Mr Bemba's guards have been patrolling the streets around his residential compound day and night.

They now wear the combat gear they were seen in during several violent clashes last year.

Most have tied red handkerchiefs around their heads. They have been carrying their usual AK rifles, but unconfirmed reports in the local press say some have also been seen with bows and arrows.

Last year, the UN mission in DR Congo (Monuc) estimated that Mr Bemba's armed guard comprised some 200 men.

Soldiers from DR Congo's armed forces, meanwhile, have taken up positions around the compound and UN peacekeepers in armoured vehicles have increased patrols.

Foreign nationals have received text messages from their embassies advising them to avoid the area, while schools in central Kinshasa are closed, our correspondent adds.

The army set the deadline for Mr Bemba and Mr Ruberwa to disband their armed guards last week.

They have been told to send the guards to an army reintegration programme and to accept a detachment of police guards instead.

But they have both rejected the army deadline and are asking for further negotiations.

Training for Congolese Officials in the Fight Against Impunity
United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa)
By Eoin Young
March 16, 2007

Diplomas were handed out to the 21 participants at the Kimbanguiste centre in Kinshasa on Friday March 16, 2007, which was the culmination of a two week training programme for Congolese police, military and judicial authorities, aimed at strengthening their investigative capacities in cases of human rights violations.

MONUC's Human Rights division, in conjunction with the International Institute for Criminal Investigation (IICI), were the organizers of the two week training session aimed at strengthening the local authorities' capacities in the fight against impunity in the DRC.

The training programme, which was funded by the Swedish government, was undertaken by auditors, procurers, judges, inspectors and judicial police, and was coordinated by the ICII.

Traolach Sweeney, training instructor for ICII, explained that the idea behind the programme was to develop and enhance local investigative capacity for human rights violations in a Congolese context.

"The programme both academic and practical based, and we hope that the training has left them with a better knowledge and capacity to investigate crimes against humanity," he said.

A spokesperson for the Auditor General of the FARDC, who was unable to be present at the ceremony, said that their work 'has an impact on society, so they must therefore act as a team.'

"I think this extra training will have an impact on our country, as magistrates and others will be better able to fight against impunity," he said.

[back to contents]

Darfur, Sudan (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in Darfur, Sudan

Sudan: Allow International Monitoring of Darfur Trials
Human Rights Watch
March 7, 2007

(New York, March 7, 2007) – Sudan should immediately open its special court trials to independent international monitors who can report publicly on proceedings, Human Rights Watch said today. On March 6, Sudan announced it will start trial proceedings today in a special criminal court in Geneina against three people on charges relating to attacks in West Darfur. One of the accused, “Ali Kosheib” (a pseudonym for Ali Mohammed Ali), was named as a suspect by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in court filings last week.

Under the Rome Statute, the ICC will find a case inadmissible if it determines that the national authorities are genuinely willing and able to investigate or prosecute the case in the national justice system. The national proceedings must encompass both the person and the conduct which is the subject of the case before the ICC in order for a case to be inadmissible.

"The decision to try Ali Kosheib immediately following the ICC prosecutor's announcement is obviously an attempt to pre-empt the international court case," said Sara Darehshori, senior counsel in Human Rights Watch's International Justice program. "Sudan should let independent international monitors into the country to observe the trial in if it wants to show that it's anything other than window dressing."

In June 2005, one day after the ICC prosecutor publicly announced he would be starting an investigation into the events in Darfur, Sudan's chief justice announced the establishment of Special Criminal Courts on the Events in Darfur , which he said was "considered a substitute to the International Criminal Court."

In the nearly two years since the Special Criminal Courts were established, the few cases that have been brought before them have only involved low-ranking individuals for relatively minor offenses. No one has been charged with command responsibility.

A number of legal shortcomings in Sudan present obstacles to prosecutions. These include a lack of clarity in the law on which to prosecute crimes against humanity and war crimes, and provisions granting immunity to members of the armed forces, national security agencies and police. In addition, a high standard of proof and ill-treatment of rape victims by the police have made it difficult for rape victims to pursue their charges.

"The government has so far fallen well short of the mark in bringing to trial those accused of horrific crimes in Darfur," said Darehshori. "Given Sudan's poor track record, it is essential that independent international observers be invited to Sudan to be able to view the proceedings in Geneina."

Court acts, but killing in Darfur goes on
Newspaper Enterprise Association
By Nat Hentoff
March 14, 2007

On Feb. 17, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, accused a leading member of the Sudanese government — Ahmed Haroun, deputy minister of what Sudan calls humanitarian affairs — of “criminal responsibility” for mass murders, mass rapes and other “inhuman acts” against black Muslims in Darfur. President Bush accurately calls these horrors acts of genocide.

Also charged was Ali Kushayb, primary leader of the Khartoum government’s hired Arab militia, the Janjaweed, which has been the frontline perpetrator of the mass murders and rapes, some of which have included black African children. Haroun has been the chief supplier and paymaster of the Janjaweed.

Issuance of warrants and summonses for these two heavily documented suspects of genocide will not end the accelerating pace of what the impotent United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

‘NO JURISDICTION’

Sudan’s Minister of Justice (as defined by this infamous government), Mohamed Ali al-Mardi, has indignantly declared: “The International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction to try any Sudanese, and the Sudanese government will not allow any Sudanese to be tried and punished outside of Sudan.” (The court is in the Hague, Netherlands.)

Moreover, on Feb. 22, Sudan’s monster-in-chief, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was enthusiastically welcomed in Detroit at the national conference of The Nation of Islam, best known for its indisposed leader, Louis Farrakhan. Bashir charged his critics with “lies and imposing solutions that don’t respect the dignity of our nation.” Some 450,000 black Muslims in Darfur have thus far been killed or have otherwise died as a result of the genocide.

DANGEROUS FOR INTERVIEWERS

Sudan’s epidemic of official violence is such that ICC investigators gathered evidence by interviewing survivors of the genocide in other countries because it was too dangerous for them to go into Bashir’s blood-soaked nation.

So now, who will bring troops into Sudan to deliver the criminal court’s summonses to the humanitarian minister and the head of the Janjaweed, which has forced 2.5 million black Muslims into becoming refugees who are still attacked by the Janjaweed?

The court, which was given authority to conduct its investigation by the United Nations Security Council, has no police or army. For a single life to be saved or a single rape to be prevented, the United Nations must, by its rules, persuade Bashir to allow U.N. troops into his sovereign nation to serve the warrants. It’s like trying to cajole Hitler into allowing Doctors Without Borders into Auschwitz.

In January, the general, who by all logic should also be served with a summons, pledged to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Kim Moon that he would cooperate with the U.N. proposal to at least send a human-rights team into his nation. As is his custom, the general has reneged on his pledge.

The secretary-general’s reaction is “disappointment.” He did not show a determination for the United Nations to, at long last, actually do something to restore some credibility to that body after all the Security Council’s resolutions and postures of concern about these atrocities that will soon amass many more corpses than Rwanda’s genocide, which the United Nations also did nothing to stop.

Dr. Susan Rice of the Brookings Institution, the State Department’s assistant secretary of state for African Affairs during the Clinton administration, told National Public Radio on Feb. 27 that since we have failed to “physically protect those that are being killed ... it’s not sufficient to negotiate. We need to protect the people who are dying every day even as we speak.”

WHO WILL STEP IN?

I see no other end to this daily genocide than military force. But by whom? If there is no such coalition of willing nations, what does that tell us of the world in which we live — and what has become of us as Americans? We, too have abandoned the remaining black men, women and children of Darfur. Has a single presidential candidate made their survival a “priority” or even mentioned them?

Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights.

Secretary-General says Sudan’s reply on Darfur ‘not satisfactory,’ frustration grows
UN News Service
March 15, 2007

15 March 2007 – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today said he had told Sudan’s President that his reply to UN calls for speedy deployment of a United Nations-African Union (AU) hybrid force for Darfur was “not satisfactory,” while dissatisfaction is growing among Member States and intensive diplomacy continues in a bid to end the conflict in the strife-torn region.

The Secretary-General spoke with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al Bashir last Saturday by phone, when Sudan’s leader also invited him to visit the country, Mr. Ban told reporters at UN Headquarters today, adding that he had not yet made a decision on this.

“I told him that while I accept his invitation in principle the details…should be discussed through diplomatic channels. I expressed my regret [about his reply]…that he made a number of reservations on ideas that were jointly proposed by the United Nations and African Union,” Mr. Ban said, adding that he had urged Mr. Bashir to accept the proposals for the hybrid force.

“There is growing frustration among the members of the United Nations, particularly the Security Council,” the Secretary-General said in response to questions. “What is important at this time, even though we are frustrated, the political process has been going on. My Special Representative and the AU Special Representative are going to visit Sudan next week again.”

“My own hope is that as we have been going through this political dialogue with the Sudanese Government and even though the response letter of President Bashir was not a satisfactory one, now I’m in the process of making all diplomatic efforts, including AU leaders.”

Mr. Ban received the President’s letter, responding to correspondence he’d sent in January, last week. The reply also contained a 14-page annex in Arabic.

The hybrid force represents the final phase of a three-phase plan agreed to by the UN, AU and Sudanese Government in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last year to help end the fighting between the Sudanese Government, allied militias and rebels seeking greater autonomy. So far the brutal conflict, which started in 2003, has killed over 200,000 people and uprooted 2.5 million more.

Chilling abuses chronicled as UN human rights mission to Darfur presents report
UN News Service
March 16, 2007

16 March 2007 – Sudanese Government forces, allied Janjaweed militias and rebel groups are guilty of serious human rights abuses and violations of international law in Darfur, where murders, rapes, acts of torture and arbitrary arrest occur with chilling frequency, the head of the United Nations High-Level Mission said today as she presented her report to the Human Rights Council.

Jody Williams, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, told the Council that ineffective justice mechanisms, the free flow of weapons and a climate of impunity meant Darfur had become a stranger to the rule of law.

She said civilians had become the main target in the conflict, which has also exacerbated the underlying social and economic deprivation in Darfur.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2 million others forced from their homes since 2003 when rebel forces first took up arms against the Sudanese Government. The conflict is threatening to spill over into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR).

The High-Level Mission’s report, published on Monday, calls on the Sudanese Government to cooperate with the deployment of the proposed hybrid UN-African Union (AU) force without delay and to give its full cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which may hold war crimes trials.

It also urges the international community to step up pressure, as individual Member States and through mechanisms such as the UN Human Rights Council, to ensure that the conflict ends, civilians are protected and the victims receive justice.

An independent national human rights commission should be created and the Sudanese Government should also immediately remove all obstacles to humanitarian assistance from the UN and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Ms. Williams said today.

The five-member mission was unable to get into Darfur because of visa restrictions, but still met hundreds of people and reviewed countless documents relating to the issue during its month of work that finished on 5 March. The mission visited Geneva, Addis Ababa and several cities and refugee camps in Chad.

Speaking after Ms. Williams presented the report to the Council in Geneva, Sudan’s representative Mohamed Ali Emardi said the report lacked impartiality and was part of a conspiracy against his country.

He said the international community had remained silent against those rebel groups which did not sign last year’s peace agreement that was supposed to end the fighting in Darfur, a vast region roughly the size of France.

Speaking to reporters later today, Ms. Williams said the mission’s members had known that their work would be challenged, and that the team had therefore been very careful to ensure that it operated entirely legally under its mandate, as well as in good faith, “always keeping in mind the needs of the people of Darfur.”

She added that the “responsibility to protect” principle had emerged because of the international community’s shame about its failure to act during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

“Many of the people that we met with in Chad, in the refugee camps, are giving up hope in the belief that the responsibility to protect doesn’t seem to have any meaning or relevance in their lives and in addressing the situation in Darfur.

“Responsibility to protect is supposed to be [about] protecting the people, not protecting the Government to retain its power to continue abusing those people.”

ICC judges sack defence counsel in Darfur case
Sudan Tribune
By Wasil Ali
March 17, 2007

March 16, 2007 (THE HAGUE) — The International Criminal Court (ICC) sacked the Libyan counsel of defence in Darfur case from his duties. The judges said he presented baseless requests and motions. Furthermore they described the filings made to challenge the jurisdiction of the ICC in Darfur as “frivolous and vexatious”.

The judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) today issued a strongly worded decision ordering the world court’s registry to relieve Hadi Shalluf from his responsibilities as the counsel for defence in Darfur case. The judges also dismissed Shalluf’s request to be compensated for his legal services in the period from December 2006 to February 2007.

The Libyan born counsel was appointed by the court on August 2006 to represent and protect the general interests of the defence in the Darfur case before the ICC.

The judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber I of the ICC who were assigned the Darfur case, invited the observations of Antonio Cassese the head of UN commission of inquiry on Darfur and by Louise Arbour the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights concerning the protection of victims and the preservation of evidence in Darfur.

The judges also asked the defence counsel to specifically address the issues raised by Cassese and Arbor in their observations. However, he ignored the observations and filed a long series of motions to challenge the jurisdiction of the Court and the admissibility of the Darfur case at the ICC that were eventually rejected by the judges.

Shalluf sent a letter to the head of the Division of Victims and Counsel, who handles the issues relating to counsel fees, at the ICC requesting that payments be made to him on services rendered for the periods of 1st to 31st December 2006 and 1st to 31st January.

He was informed on February 13 that no payment would be made to him for that time period on the grounds that he exceeded the scope of his mandate. The defence counsel filed a motion earlier this week challenging this decision saying it is “unlawful, flawed, void and unfair” and asking the judges to order the court’s registry to pay him for the work he performed during the last three months. Shalluf also requested in his filing the intervention of the chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to give his opinion on the matter.

The judges said in their decision that Shalluf’s mandate was strictly to respond to the observations of Cassese and Arbor within ten days of their submission and the defence counsel failed to file a timely response as requested by the court.

The defence counsel was reprimanded by the judges for filing “an inordinate number of baseless requests and motions; that he has completely disregarded the precise and clear scope of his mandate by adopting his own interpretation of the mandate”. Furthermore the judges described the filings made by Shalluf to challenge the admissibility and the jurisdiction of the ICC in Darfur as “frivolous and vexatious” and that the defence counsel “is in no position to demand payment of fees for that time period”.

The decision is not likely to have any impact on the Darfur case proceedings. Shalluf has previously accused the court in an interview published this week of “racial bias” because of his Middle Eastern background. He also criticized the Sudanese government for “not taking the ICC seriously” and offered to fully cooperate with Khartoum to handle the Darfur case. However the head of Sudan’s bar association Fathi Khalil was quoted as saying that Khartoum is not interested in any dealings with the ICC or Shalluf as such.

The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo announced on February 27 that he filed charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Ahmed Muhammed Harun the Sudanese minister for Humanitarian Affairs and Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kosheib.

Sudan has not ratified the Rome Statue, but the UN Security Council triggered the provisions under the Statue that enables it to refer situations in non-State parties to the world court if it deems that it is a threat to international peace and security.

Sudan cuts world-court ties
News24
March 19, 2007

Cairo - Sudan has decided to suspend all co-operation with the International Criminal Court in response to its accusations that Sudanese officials were involved in war crimes in Darfur, said the justice minister and a pro-government newspaper on Sunday.

Sudan has refused to hand over suspects to the international court for trial on Darfur war crimes.

Still, Khartoum has co-operated with the court on some levels, in particular by allowing its investigators to visit Sudan several times in recent years.

The government did not specify whether it would no longer grant them entry.

"We had extended our co-operation with the ICC for some time, but now the situation is completely different," justice minister Mohammed Ali al-Mardi said from Geneva, where he was attending a United Nations human rights council meeting.

Minister accused

"It's not even a question of co-operation anymore, it's a question that they (the ICC) want to try Sudanese citizens, which is absolutely nonsensical," said the justice minister.

Last month, The Hague-based court accused a Sudanese minister of state and a militia leader of orchestrating massacres, mass rapes and the forcible transfer of thousands of civilians from their homes in the remote Darfur region of western Sudan.

The court's top prosecutor said Ahmed Muhammed Harun - formerly a junior interior minister responsible for Darfur and now minister of state for humanitarian affairs - and Ali Mohammed Ali Abd-al-Rahman - also known as Ali Kushayb, a suspected leader of the pro-government janjaweed militia -were suspected of a total of 51 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The janjaweed are blamed for widescale atrocities against ethnic African civilians in Darfur amid a government campaign to put down rebels in the large territory of western Sudan.

Turned down delegation idea

More than 200 000 people have died and more than 2.5 million people have been displaced in four years of fighting.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir chaired a meeting of cabinet ministers and high-ranking judicial officials that decided to cancel co-operation with the court, reported the Al-Ray Al-Aam daily newspaper, deemed close to government circles, on Sunday.

The presidential meeting turned down a suggestion from some government officials to send a delegation to The Hague to contest the case with the ICC, said the paper.

[back to contents]

Uganda (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in Uganda

Stressing need to end suffering in Northern Uganda, Ban Ki-moon hails talks
United Nations
March 12, 2007

Mr. Chissano has been in the region since February carrying on consultations with the rebel group’s leadership and northern Ugandan parties, as well as with concerned regional countries.

U.N. envoy meets Uganda rebel Kony in Congo
Reuters / Washington Post
By Tim Cocks
March 12, 2007

KAMPALA (Reuters) - The new U.N. envoy for Uganda's conflict met the fugitive Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel leader Joseph Kony at his jungle hideout in a bid to restart stalled peace talks, Kony's deputy said on Monday.

Former Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano flew with Ugandan government officials for the talks in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday, Vincent Otti, the LRA's second-in-command, told Reuters by satellite telephone.

"They came yesterday," Otti said, adding that Chissano was accompanied by south Sudan's Vice President Riek Machar, the head of the Ugandan government's peace team, Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, and Ugandan members of parliament.

Machar is the chief mediator at stop-start peace talks between the internationally wanted rebels and Uganda's government that began in July in southern Sudan's capital Juba.

One group of LRA guerrillas is in south Sudan, but the main force led by Kony -- who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) -- has stayed hidden in DRC.

Otti gave no details of Chissano's meeting with Kony.

"It was positive. ... We told them what we wanted, and we are waiting for a response," he said, without elaborating.

CHISSANO "CIRCUMSPECT"

A U.N. official said Chissano was unlikely to comment.

"Kony met Chissano in the bush," the spokesman said. "Chissano's delegation want to remain circumspect. I don't believe they will be making public statements."

A truce in August raised hopes of ending 20 years of war that have killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 1.7 million more in northern Uganda. But it expired in February.

A month earlier, LRA delegates walked out of the Juba talks saying they feared for their safety after Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir threatened to "get rid" of the rebels from Sudan.

They demanded a new venue be found in another country.

Analysts say the LRA negotiators -- most of them rebel sympathizers from the Ugandan Diaspora -- are pushing a political agenda in which the commanders have little interest.
By meeting the LRA bosses directly, Chissano -- who began his posting as U.N. envoy for the war in January -- could be trying to cut out the middlemen to spur the talks, they say.

But some fear the top LRA leaders will never make peace with the government until the ICC drops its indictments against them.

In January, Chissano said the matter of the arrest warrants was between The Hague-based court and Uganda's government.

Uganda's war victims live on hope
BBC News, northern Uganda
By Karen Allen
March 15, 2007

It is a scene of utter devastation: a camp for people who have fled Uganda's most feared rebel movement - the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) -is ablaze just a few kilometres away from the town of Kitgum.

Round mud huts with straw thatched roofs have been reduced to ashes, and people are frantically trying to salvage a few possessions.

Groundnuts blackened with smoke are strewn across the ground and lose pages of a child's science text book have been singed by flames.

People are gingerly returning back to ancestral lands, returning to the safety of the camp at night

For at least 50 households in this camp, they have lost everything they own.

This after 20 years living under the shadow of the LRA, forced to flee their homes.

In the past the LRA rebels were blamed for torching entire settlements. This time round the fire at the camp is an accident.

A child has knocked over a cooking stove and with strong winds, the flames have quickly spread.

Camp leaders are urging people not to despair, reminding them that in the past two decades they have lost so much more.

Choice

Each and every one of them has seen a loved one snatched or killed by the rebels, infamous for their brutality. All have been made homeless.

The tens of thousands of people packed into camps like these face a difficult choice: either risk the cramped and dangerous living conditions like these, or return to their villages and face the lingering threat of the LRA.

Yet many are certain that peace is the closest it has ever been.

Some are gingerly returning back to their ancestral lands commuting daily and returning to the safety of the camp at night.

It is impossible to judge just how many of the 1.7m people who have been displaced are making this journey, but it is an upward trend.

United Nations envoy Joachim Chissano, Mozambique's former leader, has just made a second visit to rebel leaders across the border hiding deep in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

His mission was to persuade them to resume peace talks in Juba, stalled by disputes over power-sharing and accusations of bias.

Abduction

Meanwhile, a few hundred kilometres away in northern Uganda, John Otuu and his son Bosco spent the day tilling the 10 acres of land they abandoned 12 years ago.
“We are all tired of war everybody is tired of it and we just want to be able to move on and return home”

John Otuu, camp resident

The hope is that in the coming months, they will move back to the land full time - despite the horrors of Mr Otuu seeing his 13-year-old daughter abducted by the rebels.

"I strongly believe that through negotiations we can get genuine peace... we are all tired of war everybody is tired of it and we just want to be able to move on and return to our ancestral home," he says.

Like a considerable number in the Acholi community, Mr Otuu's family believes reconciliation with the LRA is the only option.

Achievable, they argue, using traditional means of justice called mato oput rather than criminal prosecutions.

Games

The International Criminal Court has indicted Joseph Kony, the head of the LRA, and his top lieutenants for war crimes.

Yet the overwhelming sense on the ground is that this could prove counterproductive and alternatives need to be considered.

So increasingly Acholi leaders have acted as mediators to try and get the LRA and Ugandan government to return to the negotiating table and reach some kind of deal.
There have been games played by both sides which have brought into question the desire of each to achieve genuine peace.

The Ugandan authorities accuse the LRA of being behind recent attacks on Ugandan transport vehicles heading across the border from Sudan, even though there are strong suspicions that Sudanese rebels or bandits may have been to blame.

In January, meanwhile, the LRA stormed out of negotiations demanding fresh location for the talks, accusing Sudanese mediators of bias.

Yet despite all this there is an overwhelming sense of optimism amongst the people who have endured this 20-year civil war.

Progress

Norbert Mao the elected representative for the district of Gulu, has been instrumental in trying to bridge the gap between the rebels and the Ugandan government which is politically unpopular in this part of the country.

“This is the only time the LRA has put its signature on any document - namely the cessation of hostilities agreement and we want that truce revived”
Norbert Mao

Gulu's peace representative
He points to the falling numbers of youngsters attending rehabilitation centres for ex-LRA child soldiers, as evidence that the rebels are running out of steam.

He insists that pressure from the people of northern Uganda will ultimately result in peace.

High hopes, despite failed attempts at resolution to this conflict in the past.
"This is the furthest we've ever gone in this peace process," he says.

"This is the only time the LRA has put its signature on any document - namely the cessation of hostilities agreement and we want that truce revived."

It is hard to say whether the genuine desire for peace amongst ordinary Ugandans will be matched by the actions of the LRA and the Ugandan government.

There may be positive signs of a resumption of talks, but the level of mistrust that persists cannot be underestimated.

[back to contents]

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)

Official Website of the ICTY

Srebrenica Muslims want town to get special status
Reuters
By Daria Sito-Sucic
March 5, 2007

SARAJEVO, March 5 (Reuters) - Muslim survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre are threatening a mass exodus unless their town is granted special administrative status, shedding the authority of the Bosnian Serbs, their former tormentors.

The brutal 1992-95 war between Bosnia's Serbs, Croats and Muslims ended with the Dayton peace deal that split the country into two autonomous regions, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic.

Srebrenica, 90 percent Muslim before the war, comes under the jurisdiction of the Serb Republic along with most of eastern Bosnia.

Now local politicians say this must change because of an International Court of Justice ruling last week that the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys near the town by Bosnian Serb forces constituted genocide.

"If there is any morality in the international community, it will not allow the victims of genocide to be ruled by those who committed genocide on them," said Sadik Ahmetovic, a Srebrenica politician and MP.

"Either Srebrenica will be outside the jurisdiction of the Serb Republic or we shall all move out of Srebrenica."

Several thousand Muslims have returned to the now Serb-majority town, mostly women duty bound to tend the graves of relatives in the vast Srebrenica memorial cemetery.

Bosnian Muslim leaders have circulated a declaration that was signed by many prominent Srebrenica citizens, and have proposed a status similar to that of the northern river port city of Brcko, a "neutral district" running its own affairs.

They have now given the authorities until mid-March to come up with a proposal on Srebrenica's future status.

Serb Republic Prime Minister Milorad Dodik has expressed regret and apologised to the victims for what he said was "a heinous crime" but has denied that genocide took place.

On Monday, Dodik appealed to Srebrenica's Muslim residents to ignore what he called manipulation by politicians and stay put. He also promised to allocate extra funds to revitalise the neglected town.

Muslims said it was too late.

"You can't put a price on the denial of genocide," Ahmetovic told Reuters. "We wouldn't budge even if the Serb Republic allocated its entire budget to Srebrenica.

Lawyer Dismissed from Operation Storm Trial
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Caroline Tosh
March 9, 2007

Judges hearing the case of three Croatian army generals have ordered a former justice minister to withdraw due to a conflict of interest.

Hague tribunal judges this week removed former Croatian justice minister Miroslav Separovic from his role as defence lawyer for the indicted Croatian general Mladen Markac.

The judges noted in their March 6 decision that Separovic had a “personal interest” in the case and was likely to be called as a witness.

Markac will go on trial on May 7 with two other Croatian generals, Ante Gotovina and Ivan Cermak. The three men are charged with the murder, persecution and deportation of ethnic Serbs during Operation Storm – a Croatian military operation launched in the summer of 1995 with the objective of retaking the Serb-held Krajina region.

Separovic, a Zagreb attorney, was Croatia’s justice minister during the time period relevant to the indictment

Judges ordered Markac to find a new lawyer, and told Separovic to assist his replacement who will have until March 30 to tell the trial chamber how much time he or she needs to take over the case.

There is no indication whether or not the trial will be put back to give the new defence counsel time to prepare.

In the ruling, judges dismissed Separovic’s protests – made at a hearing on February 28 – in which he denied having any personal interest in the trial and refused to withdraw.

They noted that one possible defence for the three men – who are charged with criminal responsibility for the acts of their subordinates – would be to shift responsibility from the Ministry of Defence to the Ministry of Justice. They noted that Separovic had ruled out using this defence, and found that if he continued to represent Markac it would “foreclose” a potential defence to his client.

Judges added that Separovic’s personal knowledge meant that it was “probable” that he would be called as a witness - a development that would place him “in a situation of having his professional judgment adversely affected by divided loyalties”.

They also dismissed his claim that Markac would suffer “hardship” if Separovic stopped defending him.

Instead, they found that “the harm caused to Markac and to the integrity of proceedings by Separovic’s continued representation would outweigh any hardship suffered by Markac” as a result of his lawyer withdrawing.

The code of conduct for defence lawyers at the tribunal outlaws counsel representing a client where there is a conflict of interest.

Article 14 of the code states that a counsel “shall not represent a client in connection with a matter in which counsel participated personally and substantially as an official or staff member of the tribunal or in any other capacity”. Further, article 26 says, “Counsel shall not act as an advocate in a proceeding in which counsel is likely to be a necessary witness except where… substantial hardship would be caused to the client if that counsel does not so act.”

Any lawyer in breach of the code can face disciplinary procedures.

Michael Karnavas, defence counsel at the tribunal and president of the Association of Defence Counsel Practising Before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ADC-ICTY, outlined possible scenarios in which a conflict of interest might arise for a defence lawyer.

“In a conflict-of-interest situation, you have to consider – do you have information that might assist your client but may be adverse to you?” he said. “Another clear example is where you have to choose between clients, or if information emerges that you are privy to because of your position,” he added.

In this case, Gotovina’s defence team first pointed out the potential conflicts of interest in April 2006, when opposing the prosecution’s proposal to join their client’s case with that of the other two former generals.

Lawyers indicated that they intended to call Separovic as a witness for Gotovina’s defence and said his testimony could help prove their client had no authority to investigate or punish criminal behaviour by military subordinates.

They flagged up a second potential conflict of interest in the same trial – as Cermak’s lawyers Jadranka Slokovic and Cedo Prodanovic were also representing Croatian general Rahim Ademi in a forthcoming war crimes trial in Croatia.

Gotovina claimed that Ademi was his chief of staff and second in command during Operation Storm and therefore would be a “crucial” witness for his defence.

When the decision to join the cases was confirmed on appeal on October 25, the appeals chamber said that unless Separovic could demonstrate his withdrawal would cause “substantial hardship” to Markac, he should withdraw.

The appeals judges said it wasn’t yet certain whether Prodanovic and Slokovic would face a conflict of loyalties in representing both Cermak and Ademi, but said that the lawyers must inform their clients of the potential conflict of interest relating to their dual representation.

An advisory opinion from the ADC-ICTY’s disciplinary council from January 17 also found that Separovic had a conflict of interest and called for him to withdraw.

Separovic’s persistence in defending his client in spite of these warnings to withdraw has led some trial observers to question why his appointment was allowed in the first place.

Court spokesman Refik Hodzic said at a press conference on February 28 that the registry had accepted Separovic on the merits of his qualifications - but added that details emerged during pre-trial proceedings where it “became obvious” that he had personal interest in the case.

It is not possible for the registry to investigate every defence counsel in detail before a case starts, Hodzic added

Karnavas told IWPR that Separovic’s representation went against the tribunal’s rules and that it was the trial chamber’s responsibility to take action against any potential conflict of interest in order to protect the rights of the accused.

He said ADC-ICTY had received no complaints in relation to the case, and would not be taking disciplinary action against Separovic.

“In order for the ADC to start disciplinary proceedings against a defence counsel, a party has to file a complaint. That can be the trial chamber, the prosecution or another lawyer,” he explained.

Goran Sluiter, a professor of international criminal law at the University of Amsterdam, is not surprised by judges’ decision to throw Separovic off the case.

“This seems to be a very clear case of a conflict of interest,” he said.

He points out a further potential conflict of interest which could arise at the tribunal, with some lawyers who start working at the tribunal as prosecutors crossing over to work for the defence.

One example is Gotovina’s defence attorney Gregory Kehoe, who previously worked as a prosecutor in the trial of former Bosnian Croat general Tihomir Blaskic, who was sentenced on appeal to nine years in prison.

But Sluiter added that judges allow former prosecutors to act as defence counsel only where they have not previously worked as prosecutors on the same case.

Kehoe told IWPR that as he never worked on the current case during his time with the prosecution, “there’s no conflict”.

He feels that the decision to take Separovic off the case was “a bit premature” and said he had proposed a different solution to the trial chamber.

“I asked the court to give us time to discuss it with the [prosecution] to see if we could agree on his testimony. If so, there would have been no need to take him off the case,” he said. “But the court refused to explore that resolution.”

"The issue hadn't been explored and I don't think it would have prejudiced anything to explore it further."

War crimes prosecutor slams 'muted' European response to Srebrenica genocide ruling
International Herald Tribune
March 14, 2006

The chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal slammed Europe's "muted" response to a landmark ruling that found Serbia failed to prevent genocide at Srebrenica, saying Wednesday it could undermine the fight for international justice.

Carla Del Ponte cited the ruling last month by the International Court of Justice finding Serbia could have prevented the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and that it should have punished its perpetrators. The court also faulted Serbia for failing to turn over one of the alleged architects of the massacre, Gen. Ratko Mladic. But the ruling absolved Serbia of direct responsibility for genocide.

"The response of the international community, and especially the presidency of the European Union, to this ruling appears to be quite muted," Del Ponte said in statement.
Del Ponte said that EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana issued a statement after the Feb. 26 ruling which "made no mention whatsoever of the fact that Serbia was found in violation of the Genocide Convention. Instead, he applauded the fact that there is no collective punishment and that the highest tribunal in the world has closed that page."

Del Ponte added that Germany — current holder of the EU's rotating presidency — made a similar statement. Mladic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have been indicted for genocide for masterminding the 1995 slaughter of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men at the U.N.-protected Srebrenica safe haven in Bosnia.

Both men remain on the run. Del Ponte repeatedly has accused Belgrade authorities of not doing enough to arrest Mladic, who is thought to be hiding out somewhere in Serbia. Karadzic's whereabouts are unknown.

Del Ponte said she was concerned that neither fugitive would be arrested and brought to justice before the court is scheduled to be dismantled in 2010.

"This is truly a potentially devastating development given the tribunal's completion strategy," Del Ponte said, adding that she was "worried that we will never see Mladic and Karadzic in our custody. That would have a devastating impact on international justice and on our battle against impunity."

The Yugoslav tribunal was created in 1993 by the Security Council to try individual war crimes suspects. The International Court of Justice, the U.N.'s highest judicial body, was founded in 1946 to adjudicate disputes among U.N. members. Last month's ruling was the result of a suit brought by Bosnia against Serbia, the first time a country was accused of committing genocide.

Both the EU and NATO are reaching out to Serbia in an attempt to support moderates in its government, but both also have said that full Serb membership of the groups is contingent on Belgrade's cooperation with the Hague tribunal.

The ruling by the ICJ, also known as the World Court, has prompted furious debate among international jurists and was denounced by Bosnian survivors and relatives of victims.

Final Rebuttal of Prosecution Case
Sense Tribunal
March 15, 2007

After the prosecution called for a life imprisonment for the Vukovar Three, the defense counsel of Mile Mrksic and Miroslav Radic presented their closing arguments, denying all allegations made by the prosecution and calling for the acquittal of the former JNA officers charged with the Ovcara massacre.

In their closing arguments, the defense counsel of Mile Mrksic and Miroslav Radic called for the acquittal of the two former JNA officers on the charges of the murder of 264 persons at Ovcara on 20 November 1991.

Miroslav Vasic representing Colonel Mrksic said that the former commander of the JNA operation in Vukovar had had "nothing to do with the transport and selection of prisoners in the Vukovar hospital". In his view, this task was carried out by a team of security officers who arrived in Vukovar from the Belgrade Security Administration.

The prosecution argued that Mrksic had given the order to take the prisoners from the hospital to the JNA barracks and then to the Ovcara farm. In the evening, Mrksic ordered the military police company to withdraw from the hangar at Ovcara. The prisoners were thus left at the mercy of the local Territorial Defense members, who executed them that night. The defense challenges this allegation, arguing that Mrksic "did not give orders for the prisoners to be handed over to the Territorial Defense and for the military police to withdraw”. At that time, Mrksic was not in the brigade headquarters in Negoslavci at all. He was on his way to Belgrade where he was to meet the federal defense secretary Veljko Kadijevic the next day.

Vasic noted that "a number of witnesses who testified against Mrksic should have been in the indictment themselves". Among them were the officers of the 80th Motorized Brigade because Ovcara was in their area of responsibility. They were thus guarding the prisoners of war who were later executed, the defense counsel said.

Miroslav Radic's defense counsel started and ended his closing argument with a quotation from the epic poem Mountain Wreath, saying that "Life’s honor may be stain’d through fear of death". Radic opted for this philosophical approach and this led him to decide to tell the truth in his testimony about the events in Vukovar, his defense counsel Borovic noted. He added that Radic "condemns the Ovcara massacre as a heinous and cowardly crime".

All witnesses against Radic except Juraj Njavro, a Vukovar Hospital doctor, testified under protective measures, Borovic noted. This means that "the public in Serbia and Croatia will never know what the evidence against the accused was". He denied that Radic "participated in the adoption of a plan to persecute the inhabitants of Vukovar, in the selection of the prisoners in the hospital and in their transfer to buses". Radic came to the hospital at a later stage on 20 November 1991 and was not in the JNA barracks when the prisoners arrived. He was not at Ovcara either. He was not aware of the threats the prisoners were exposed to or the events that followed, his defense counsel claimed. He went on to say that Radic controlled neither the Vukovar Territorial Defense nor Seselj's men from the Leva Supoderica detachment. Those units have been identified as the direct perpetrators of the crime. It was not up to him to punish them for the crime they committed. On the morning of 21 November 1991 those units were resubordinated to the 80th Motorized Brigade.

Veselin Sljivancanin's defense counsel will deliver his closing argument tomorrow afternoon.

Croatia Issues International Arrest Warrant for Ex-JNA General
HINA Croatian News Agency
March 16, 2007

VUKOVAR, March 16 (Hina) - Vukovar County Court investigating judge Nikola Besenski ordered the Vukovar Police Department on Friday to issue an international warrant for the arrest of former Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) general Veljko Kadijevic.

Kadijevic is one of the nine persons who were indicted by the Vukovar court in March 2004 for war crimes against civilians committed during the 1991-1995 conflict, Besenski told Hina, adding that the Osijek County Court had issued a domestic arrest warrant for the JNA general in 2000.

"Since that warrant has produced no results, and given recent media reports on Kadijevic's whereabouts abroad, I have decided to issue an international warrant," Besenski said.

Prosecution witness: I shot women and children
B92, SENSE
March 16, 2007

THE HAGUE -- The Kosovo Six trial continued at the Hague with the testimony of a former Yugoslav army (VJ) soldier.

The protected prosecution witness, identified as K-58, testified Thursday via video link.

He told the court his unit “took part in the cleansing” of the Trnje village near Prizren in late March 1999.

As he said, "the cleansing" meant that the Albanian civilians were expelled and killed and their houses set on fire.

The company the belonged to was a part of the 549th VJ Motorized Brigade. The troops allegedly started setting the hay stacks and houses on fire immediately after entering the Trnje village.

The witness said that about 15 women and children were taken out to a yard soon after. A sergeant ordered the him and four other soldiers to shoot them, he said. They "executed the order" and shot all of them.

He did not mention the sergeant's name today, but in his evidence at the Slobodan Miloševi? trial in September 2002 he identified him as "Sergeant Kozlin".

According to witness K- 58, this was not the only crime his unit participated in. In February 1999, they were tasked with the "cleansing" of the Jeskovo village. When they were done, the witness saw the bodies of ten dead civilians.

He later heard his comrades talking about 25 to 30 dead. He claimed that the operation was ordered by the commander of the VJ 549th Motorized Brigade, Colonel Božidar Deli?.

Deli? has been promoted to the rank of general in the meantime. According to the witness, Deli? summoned his unit and said that they were ordered "to go and cleanse Jeskovo the next day".

A little earlier, in December 1999, Deli?'s deputy, Lt. Col. Konjikovac, ordered "the cleansing" of Albanian civilians from the Ljubidža village near Albanian border.

Explaining his decision to testify about the Kosovo crimes the witness said "the screams of a one-year-old baby and other victims still haunted him in his dreams.”

The defense counsel for General Lazarevi?, former Priština Corps commander, argued that the witness's motive was different: a desire to pull himself out of a robbery charge filed against him by the national judiciary in 2002.

Those issues were discussed in a closed session so the link that the defense counsel suggested existed between the testimony in The Hague and the dropping of the robbery charge against the witness remained unclear.

The trial of six Serbian political, military and police officials continues today with the evidence of protected witness K-87.

[back to contents]

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)

Official Website of the ICTR

Another Priest Charged for Role in Genocide
Allafrica.com - Catholic Information Service for Africa (Nairobi)
March 6, 2007

Acts of extremism by Father Emmanuel Rukundo, a Catholic priest being tried for genocide before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha Tanzania, fuelled the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

According to the prosecution witness who is a Tutsi priest, Father Rukundo, a Hutu, organized a demonstration to celebrate the death of the Rwandan rebel chief Fred Rwigema.

Rwigema was the Commander in Chief of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which attacked Rwanda in October 1990 from neighbouring Uganda. He was killed in the first few days of the attack.

According to the Hirondelle News Agency, Rukundo's lawyer, Ms. Aicha Conde (France) disputed the claims, adding that, "this march was organized in support of the army throughout the country,"

As with his predecessors, the protected witness described a seminary faced with ethnic tensions which were inflamed by the war.

Rukundo was also accused of organizing a fundraiser, designed for the "war effort".

Rukundo, who was ordained a priest in July 1991, is the second priest tried by the ICTR, after Athanase Seromba, former vicar of the parish of Nyange (west), who was sentenced to fifteen years in prison last December.

A third priest, Father Hormisdas Nsengimana, the rector of the prestigious College of Christ the King in Nyanza (south) is still awaiting trial.

Press Statement by Ambassador Williamson
UN Observer
March 8, 2007

United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues Clint Williamson, visited the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) from 7 to 8 March 2007. Ambassador Williamson met with multiple ICTR officials including President Eric Møse, Prosecutor Hassan Jallow, and Registrar Adama Dieng.

The discussions held were extremely fruitful and Ambassador Williamson is encouraged by the current progress of the Tribunal, particularly its efforts to complete trials in a timely fashion.

He reiterated the U.S. Government’s position that ICTR fugitives must face trial. It is crucial that Félicien Kabuga, Protais Mpiranya, and other fugitives understand they cannot simply outlast the Tribunal and escape justice.

Ambassador Williamson pledged continued U.S. support for the Tribunal and the willingness of the US Government to do all it can to apprehend ICTR fugitives and help the Tribunal to complete its work successfully.

ICTR Suspects Could Be Transferred Next Month
AllAfrica.com- The New Times (Kigali)
by Felly Kimenyi
March 15, 2007

The first batch of Genocide suspects detained at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ( ICTR ) in Arusha, Tanzania, could arrive in the country next month, the tribunal spokesperson has said. Addressing journalists yesterday at the ICTR liaison offices in Remera, Kigali, Dr. Timothy Gallimore, said that the tribunal's prosecution has moved the motion to the ICTR leadership for endorsement.

He said the move was motivated by reports that Rwanda was in the final stages of enacting a law exonerating the would-be-transferred Genocide suspects from facing death penalty.

"After the establishment of the law which we heard that it has been passed by all authorities and only awaiting publication in the (Rwandan) National Gazette, the (ICTR) prosecution decided to file a transfer motion to the tribunal suggesting that the transfer process starts in the month of April," Gallimore, who has been on an official visit in the country, said.

He said that following talks between the tribunal Prosecutor, Bubakar Jallow and Rwanda's Prosecutor General, Martin Ngoga, it appeared that Kigali was ready for the cases. Gallimore disclosed that at least five suspects currently at the ICTR detention facility have hitherto been identified for the initial transfer phase. He did not reveal their identities of the suspects.

"This is part of the (court's) completion strategy and as you know Rwanda is one of the countries that accepted to inherit the cases when the Tribunal's mandate ends," he said.

Rwanda is the only African country that volunteered to take over the cases after the court comes to its closure in December, 2008. Gallimore said about four European countries also accepted to try the suspects. The tribunal will also close all appeal cases in 2010.

Ngoga also heads the national taskforce charged with overseeing that the transfer process on behalf of the government. The government has also among other things, built a modern prison facility in Mpanga, Southern Province, in order to suit international standards.

Meanwhile, the visiting ICTR publicity official said that efforts to apprehend Felicien Kabuga, the top most wanted Genocide fugitive, have been more robust ever since the tribunal started to closely cooperating with Kenya, where the tycoon is suspected to be hiding.

[back to contents]

Iraqi High Tribunal

Official Website of the Iraqi High Tribunal
Grotian Moment: The Saddam Hussein Trial Blog

Aziz praises ‘hero” Saddam at Iraq trial
Turkish Press
March 5, 2007

Iraqi former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz on Monday praised Saddam Hussein and denied there had been mass killings under the executed dictator's rule, earning sharp rebukes from the judge at the so-called Anfal genocide trial.

"I had the honour to work with the former regime and with the hero Saddam Hussein," Aziz said from the witness stand at the Iraqi High Tribunal, where six leaders of the former regime are accused of genocide against Kurds.

"He is the hero behind the unity of Iraq and its sovereignty. This is an honour to me," Aziz added in a statement that belied the reputation he enjoyed in some quarters as a moderate in Saddam's camp.

"Shut up -- don't speak," said the trial's chief judge Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifah, angrily trying to silence the ailing Aziz.

"Why do you prevent me from speaking?" Aziz answered calmly.

"I will take legal measures against you," the judge warned.

Aziz replied: "Why? I am already a prisoner. What would you do to me?"

The judge again ordered him to "shut up."

Aziz, 71, surrendered to US troops in Iraq in April 2003. Since then he has been under lock and key at Camp Cropper, a holding centre near Baghdad international airport.

His family has repeatedly called for his release on health grounds, saying that he suffers from diabetes and respiratory problems.
Aziz is suspected of involvement in the execution of dozens of members of the former Baath regime in 1979 and mass killings of Shiites and Kurds in 1991, but his lawyers say he has yet to be charged.

On Monday he was brought to the High Tribunal to give evidence against the six defendants in the Anfal trial of Saddam aides charged with involvement in the killing of up to 182,000 Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s.

But Aziz denied there had been any mass killings under Saddam.

"I was foreign minister... The government I was part of did not commit genocide against the Kurdish people," he insisted.

His comments again angered the judge.

"You are here testifying (on behalf of) the regime, not the accused," the judge said. "No, I am testifying (on behalf of) the accused," Aziz answered.

Saddam was executed last December 30 after being found guilty of crimes against humanity in a previous trial, but the Kurdish genocide trial is continuing with six of his former allies still in the dock.

Al-Anfal trial adjourned to March 15
Kuwait News Agency
March 5, 2007

BAGHDAD, March 5 (KUNA) -- Chief justice of the second tribunal of the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court Mohammad Al-Arbeidi wrapped the 48th session of Al-Anfal trial Monday and slated March 15 for the next session.

Al-Arbeidi ruled that March 15 is the ultimatum for defense witnesses to attend the trial.

Tareq Aziz, former Iraqi foreign minister during Saddam Hussein's reign who attended Monday session as defense witness accused Iran of attacking Hababja town with poisonous gas.

Meanwhile, Al-Arbeidi refused to guarantee that the defense witnesses would not be arrested if they were implicated in any criminal case.

"While the defense witnesses shun the court session lest they might be arrested for involvement in certain cases, I can not constrain the Iraqi judiciary with my word," he said.

"At the same time I can not help the defendants through hearing the testimonies of defense witnesses in places other than the court premise," he added.

For his part, a defense lawyer said in such a case it would be difficult to hear the testimonies of 16 witnesses most of who were former leaders and senior officers of the disbanded army and were wanted for the incumbent authorities. The attack Hababja town during Saddam Hussein's reign, known as Al-Anfal case, killed up to 182,000 Iraqi persons in 1988.

Saddam trial judge seeks asylum in Britain
Reuters
March 9, 2007

DUBAI, March 9 (Reuters) - The Iraqi trial judge who sentenced former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to death has asked for asylum in Britain, Al Jazeera television said on Friday.

The television's London correspondent said that Raouf Abdel Rahman had asked for asylum after going to Britain with his family in mid-December on a visitor's visa.

"The information we have is that the judge sought asylum for reasons including that he fears for his own life and the lives of family members ... The application is being considered by the Home Office," said the correspondent, Nasser al-Badri, citing unnamed official British sources.

There was no immediate comment from British or Iraqi officials.

Saddam Hussein was executed on Dec. 30, 2006 after being found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang on Nov. 5 in the court headed by Abdel Rahman. The trial was over the killing of 148 Shi'ite men after a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Iraqi town of Dujail.

Abdel Rahman, a Kurd, was named as chief judge in the trial in January 2006, after Rizgar Amin resigned in protest at what he said was pressure from the Iraqi government.

Abdel Rahman also found guilty and sentenced to death Saddam's former chief judge, Awad Hamed al-Bander and Saddam's half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. Both were executed.

Iraq tribunal sets sights on Iran opposition group
Reuters
March 12, 2007

BAGHDAD, March 12 (Reuters) - A top Iraqi prosecutor plans to bring charges against senior members of an exiled Iranian opposition group over its alleged role in oppressing Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds under former president Saddam Hussein.

Jaafar al-Moussawi, chief prosecutor of the Iraqi High Tribunal, said on Sunday the Mujahideen Khalq helped Saddam suppress Shi'ites in the south and Kurds in the north during a 1991 uprising after Iraq's defeat in the first Gulf War. "We have full evidence implicating the Iranian group in siding with the former regime in committing crimes against humanity," Moussawi told Reuters. A spokesman for the Mujahideen denied the accusations.

The Mujahideen once fought the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran but soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution quarreled also with the new rulers in Tehran, whom they sought to overthrow from bases set up in the 1980s in Saddam's Iraq, then at war with Iran.

The group, which has mounted attacks inside Iran, was believed to have received military aid from Saddam, but its fortunes changed after a U.S.-led invasion toppled him in 2003. U.S. forces bombed its bases and the group handed over its arms.
The group is on a U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations but is supported by some conservative U.S. politicians as a lever against the Iranian government. It was the first body to expose a covert nuclear programme by Iran.

The Iraqi High Tribunal was set up after the 2003 invasion to prosecute crimes against humanity and genocide committed during Saddam's rule. Its statutes give it jurisdiction over non-Iraqi residents and any case against the Mujahideen would be its first against foreigners for Saddam-era crimes.

The court sentenced Saddam to death last year for crimes against Shi'ites and is currently hearing a case against former senior Iraqi officials for genocide against Kurds. "The prosecution chamber will have a thorough discussion of the case and it will be referred to the investigative panel soon," Moussawi said, adding that charges could be brought against senior Mujahideen members.

VIDEO TAPES

Iraq's Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has re-established diplomatic ties with Iran, accused the group last July of meddling in his country's affairs and suggested it could face expulsion. The Mujahideen said that would be submission to "the demands and wishes of the theocracy ruling Iran".

Moussawi said he had strong evidence including video tapes showing Mujahideen Khalq senior officials meeting with high-ranking Saddam-era Iraqi intelligence officers and receiving large sums of money to implement Saddam's orders. A spokesman for the Iranian group, Shahrayar Kia, called the accusations "baseless and politically motivated".

"We are clear of all charges raised by Jaafar al-Moussawi and our presence in Iraq is completely protected under the Geneva convention," he told Reuters on Sunday by telephone from the group's Ashraf base north of Baghdad. The first case to be tried by the Iraqi High Tribunal led to Saddam being found guilty of crimes against humanity for the killing and torture of Shi'ites from the town of Dujail after a failed assassination attempt there in 1982.

Saddam was executed at the end of December but another trial continues for a campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s. Several other cases are expected to come to the court, including another one against Iraqi officials for the oppression of Shi'ites after the first Gulf War.

Court officials have said they expect prosecutors in the Kurdish case to present closing arguments next week. Prosecutors are expected to ask for specific sentences for each of the six defendants, which could include death.

Iraq wants to abolish death penalty – minister
Reuters
by Laura MacInnis
March 14, 2007

GENEVA, March 14 (Reuters) - The government of Iraq, which was heavily criticised internationally for the way it executed Saddam Hussein, wants to abolish the death penalty, its human rights minister said on Wednesday.

The first step would be to limit capital punishment, which was re-introduced over two years ago to combat spiraling criminal violence, to the most extreme cases such as genocide and crimes against humanity, Wijdan Michael told the United Nations Human Rights Council.

"We are working at the present moment in order to pave the way to eliminate capital punishment in Iraq, after restricting it to the largest possible extent," Michael said, speaking through an interpreter.

Images of the country's former dictator being taunted as he awaited execution in December, and the accidental decapitation of his half-brother and aide Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti during a January hanging, caused an outcry.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour appealed unsuccessfully to Iraq to stop the executions of Saddam and his aides on the grounds that their trials for crimes against humanity did not meet minimum international standards.

Under international law the death penalty can only be used as an exceptional measure, and there must always be a right of appeal against the sentence, something that was denied to Saddam, she said.

Although the United Nations opposes capital punishment, the death penalty still exists in nearly 70 countries, including the United States, which led a 2003 invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam and unleashed a sectarian conflict.

More than 1,200 people convicted of insurgent activity by the U.S.-sponsored Central Criminal Court of Iraq have so far been sentenced to death, but there are no precise figures on convictions and executions.

Capital punishment was frequently used under Saddam, but it was suspended by the U.S.-led military alliance.

The minister said Iraq, where human rights activists say torture and abuse is widespread in prisons, also wants to join the optional protocol of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits cruel and inhuman punishment and arbitrary executions.

Iraqi appeals court confirms death sentence for former Iraqi VP
Kuwait News Agency
March 15, 2007

BAGHDAD, March 15 (KUNA) -- Iraq's Court of Cassations approved on Thursday the death sentence verdict and rejected all appeals in the Iraqi High Tribunal on Taha Yassin Ramadan, former vice president to executed dictator Saddam Hussein, for crimes against humanity.

Iraqi Judge Munir Haddad of the appeals panel told a press conference that all nine members of the appeals court ratified the death sentence on Taha Yassin Ramadan.

The former vice president was originally given a life sentence over the Dujail killings, which followed a 1982 attempt on Saddam's life in the town.

"He can be hanged at any moment but the official period is that the sentence be carried out within 30 days if it is being confirmed by the appeals court," Judge Haddad added.

Ramadan was sentenced on February 12 by the Iraqi High Tribunal, which is trying former regime officials, for his role in the slaughter of 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail in the 1980s.

His sentence was automatically reviewed by the appeals panel, which confirmed the execution by hanging.

However, a US-based Human Rights Watch has urged Iraq not to carry out the death penalty on Ramadan because it said there was insufficient evidence linking him to the murders.

Last month Richard Dicker of the Organization's International Justice Programme said in a statement that "Ramadan was convicted in an unfair trial, and increasing his punishment from life imprisonment to death reeks of vengeance." Ramadan was captured by Kurdish fighters in Mosul, northern Iraq, in August 2003 and later turned over to US forces.

Iraqi appeals court confirms death sentence for former Iraqi VP
Associated Press via San Diego Union-Tribune
by Qassim Abdul-Zahra
March 18, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A session of the war crimes trial of six former officials in Saddam Hussein's government was canceled Sunday after a defense attorney who had been ejected last week made an unexpected appearance, court officials said.

Judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa asked bailiffs why Badie Arif Ezzat was back in his courtroom, and was told the attorney was there on the order of U.S. officials attached to the court in an advisory capacity, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

“So, does my decision mean nothing?” an angry al-Khalifa responded, referring to his decision to eject and hold Ezzat in contempt last week. The two had a heated exchange over comments Ezzat made in a television interview. The judge said the remarks were an insult to the court.

Al-Khalifa adjourned the trial until March 26.

The six remaining defendants in the Anfal case face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from their roles in a military crackdown on Iraq's Kurdish population in 1987-88. The prosecution says 180,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed.

The defendants face the death sentence if convicted.

Saddam was a defendant in the case but was sentenced to death after his conviction for the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims in Dujail after a 1982 attempt on his life. He was hanged Dec. 30.

The court officials said the U.S. officials argued with al-Khalifa that Ezzat could not be held in contempt because of comments made in an interview and should be allowed to resume his duties.

The court officials did not know what al-Khalifa's response was, but added that negotiations between the two sides would continue until a mutually satisfactory settlement is reached.

They said the U.S. officials took custody of Ezzat from Iraqi authorities over the weekend, keeping him under protection in a residence located inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified Baghdad region that houses the U.S. Embassy and offices of the Iraqi government and parliament.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said he was checking on the report but could not immediately offer comment.

Ezzat and al-Khalifa have had an often stormy courtroom relationship.

Last November, al-Khalifa briefly ejected Ezzat when he insisted on calling the judge “brother” despite repeated orders to stop.

Just before he was ejected last week, Ezzat shot back at the judge: “I am old enough to be your father.”

[back to contents]

Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) &
Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Offical Website of the Special Court for Sierra Leone
The Sierra Leone Court Monitoring Programme
Official Website of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia

Body of Sam Hinga Norman Handed Over to Family
Special Court for Sierra Leone Official Website
March 7, 2007

The body of Sam Hinga Norman was handed over to family members today after being returned to Sierra Leone from Dakar, Senegal.

Mr. Norman’s body was flown by helicopter from Lungi International Airport to the United Nations headquarters in Freetown, arriving just before 1:00 p.m.

In a brief but solemn ceremony, Special Court Registrar Lovemore Munlo, SC and a representative of the family signed a document which formally handed the body over to family members.

Mr. Norman was taken to Dakar in January for a routine medical procedure which is not available in Freetown. The procedure was performed successfully on February 8. On February 22, Mr. Norman collapsed in his hospital room. Doctors attempted unsuccessfully to revive him.

War criminal or hero? Militia leader’s disputed legacy
CNN International
March 8, 2007

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (Reuters) -- Hundreds of mourners flocked on Thursday to see the body of former Sierra Leonean militia leader Sam Hinga Norman, hailed by some as a hero but accused by others of being as barbaric as the rebels he fought.

A former interior minister and coordinator of the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) militia during the British colony's 1991-2002 conflict, Norman died from heart failure two weeks ago after a routine operation in nearby Senegal.

His fighters were accused of roasting and eating their victims and Norman had been on trial for war crimes at a U.N.-backed tribunal in Freetown, with a verdict due in the coming weeks. But he is seen by many in the country as a hero who helped save them from the hands of brutal rebel forces.

"It was Norman who saw me and said to me they need me in the fight for democracy and I should give my assistance," said Mamay Hawa Massaquoi, a former militia fighter attending a public viewing of the body in Freetown's Victoria Park.

"Norman is dead but his soul has not died. He was a believer," he said, fighting back tears.

Obscene brutality reported on both sides

The CDF fought to defend President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's government against the Revolutionary United Front rebels, who chopped limbs, lips and ears off their victims and carved the letters RUF into the bodies of children they kidnapped to fight.

Pro-government militia fighters used similarly brutal tactics, recruiting underage fighters and hacking to death and burning civilians suspected of supporting the rebels.

But Norman's sympathizers say his role as coordinator of the CDF must be seen in context: a minister asked by his government to protect people from rebels who forced children to murder their parents and mutilated with impunity.

"Sam Hinga Norman is regarded as one of the heroes of the war and played a key role in helping the peace," Peter Penfold, former British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone, told Reuters.

"It's tragic that this person who has done so much for his country and his people spent his final four years in prison."

Prosecution: Norman's fighters roasted, ate victims

Norman, who was leader of the feared Kamajor hunters that formed the backbone of the CDF, was charged with eight counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone.

The indictment against him and two co-defendants stated Kamajor fighters killed scores of civilians suspected of sympathizing with the RUF. It said Norman knew and approved of the recruitment of children under 15 into the Kamajor.

The prosecution told the U.N.-backed court that drug-addled Kamajor fighters had paraded severed heads and eaten the roasted flesh and intestines of their victims.

Government wants state funeral

Norman maintained his innocence throughout the trial, which began in June 2004.

"My father suffered for too long and the Special Court was responsible for his death," his daughter, Juliet, told Reuters.

President Kabbah, whose successor is due to be chosen in July polls, has said Norman will receive a hero's burial.

"Though he was charged with alleged crimes against humanity, the court did not find him guilty of the allegations since he died with no verdict given," Kabbah told state radio last week.

"Because of this, my government is of the view that Norman should be given a state funeral," he said.

Norman's body will be taken to his home village of Ngolala, in the southern region of Bo, for a Christian burial on Sunday.

Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to Get Boost From Northwestern University in Chicago
Voice of America
March 8, 2007

A university based in Chicago, Illinois, is helping to bring justice to those who suffered during Liberia’s long civil war. Northwestern University’s Center for Human Rights Law is working with the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to collect testimony from Liberians living in the US who witness human rights abuses, or suffered from them.

The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in 2003 as part of the peace deal that ended the decades old civil war. It was officially launched last year and given the mandate to look into the root causes of the violence that devastated this West African nation.

As part of its effort, the commission has enlisted the help of Northwestern University. Its law school recently held a forum with Liberians living in the Chicago area. The participants were approached about making official statements and were offered information on how to participate in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Sandra Babcock, clinical associate professor and director of the Center for International Human Rights, chaired the forum. Also participating was Jennifer Prestholdt of the group Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights; and James Qualah, a member of the Liberian diaspora living in Minnesota.

Babcock says that Liberians all over the United States will be given an opportunity to participate in the TRC-mandated process.

“The nine (TRC) commissioners will advise us on the time frame…. their mandate ends in two years and what we do here will largely depend on their schedule,” she said.

Babcock says that at the end of the process, there will be a report issued the commission that reflects the views of the Liberian community in the United States.

“What we are finding is that many Liberians…. are eager for criminal prosecutions against those that are most culpable of committing atrocities during the civil war,” she said. Babcock added, “It is too early to say what the recommendations [will be in the report], because that will depend on what individual Liberians want, and we are here to serve that community”

Babcock stressed that the process of taking statements is controlled and governed by Liberians even though her organization is collecting the affidavits. Recently representatives from the Center for International Human Rights and Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights explained the statement-taking process to hundreds of Liberians in the area.

The Liberian TRC has collected over 2,000 statements since it began collecting testimony last October. It began public hearings in Liberia began January 30.

The Center for International Human Rights is part of the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law, focusing on research and clinical experience for students interested in human rights law.

UN SG Ban Ki-moon recommends one-year extension of UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia
United Nations News Service
March 16, 2007

Despite numerous successes made in Liberia to bolster peace and further economic progress, the impoverished West African country still faces many obstacles including poverty, high unemployment and incapacitated public services, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in a new report, calling on the Security Council to extend the UN peacekeeping mission there for another year.

Although “Liberia continues to make steady progress in consolidating peace, stability and democracy, as well as in promoting economic recovery,” Mr. Ban says in his latest report to the Council on the situation in Liberia, the country “still faces significant reconstruction and development challenges arising from 14 years of civil strife.”

In response, Mr. Ban recommends that the mandate of the mission, known as UNMIL, which is set to expire at the end of this month, be extended until 31 March 2008.

The report also points to the threat to stability stemming from high unemployment, including among former combatants and deactivated security personnel. The threat must be addressed, Mr. Ban says, through labour-intensive employment opportunities in the short term, with sustainable jobs being created by a revitalized economy in the long term.

The country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is being hindered in its progress by management, personnel and budgetary difficulties, and “these problems need to be resolved on an urgent basis so that the Commission can continue its valuable work of ensuring lasting peace in Liberia,” Mr. Ban writes.

The Secretary-General warns that the “unpredictable situations” in Liberia’s neighbours such as Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea also threatened the country’s stability. He recommends continued cooperation among UNMIL, the UN Mission in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) and the Sierra Leonean and Guinean armed forces to patrol border areas as well as urging relevant Governments to promote peaceful relations among them.

Mr. Ban calls on the international community to continue its support of Liberia, which is seeking to rebuild after the civil war that killed almost 150,000 people and sent 850,000 more fleeing across its borders.

He lauds the enthusiasm international partners displayed at the Liberia Partners’ Forum, a consortium of donors, which met last month, and stresses the importance of assisting the Government in institution and capacity building. Mr. Ban also says that international help is crucial in helping the State reassert control over its natural resources, including its rubber plantations which are among the world’s largest.

UNMIL was established in 2003 to support Liberia’s ceasefire and peace process, and currently has over 15,200 uniformed personnel, along with around 500 international civilian personnel, almost 1,000 local staff and 220 UN Volunteers.

[back to contents]

United States

Hearing delayed more than 2 months in Haditha case
Chicago Tribune
by Thomas Walker
March 14, 2007

SAN DIEGO -- What would have been the first court hearing about the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha has been delayed more than two months, an attorney said Wednesday.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani was due in a Camp Pendleton courtroom next week for a preliminary hearing, but the investigating officer can't be there, attorney Brian Rooney said.

To accommodate the schedules of everyone involved, the next hearing was pushed back to May 30, he said.

Chessani is charged with dereliction of duty and violation of a lawful order. He is the highest ranking of eight Marines who were charged.

On Nov. 19 2005, a Marine squad suffered one fatality when its convoy was rocked by a roadside bomb blast. In the aftermath of the explosion, troops killed 24 Iraqis.

Following several lengthy investigations, four enlisted Marines were charged in December with unpremeditated murder and four officers were charged with failing to adequately report the deaths.

Rooney said the charges were without merit and the defense team would use the delay to review nearly 5,000 pages of newly declassified evidence, which augments an already bulky, 8,000-page investigation.

In the coming weeks, the attorneys plan to video record depositions by Chessani's intelligence officer and executive officer before they are redeployed to Iraq, Rooney said. Lawyers also will review footage from a remotely operated aircraft that could show Marine reaction to the roadside bomb blast..

Rooney works for the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., a nonprofit Christian law firm that takes on issues of faith, family values and patriotism. Rooney said Chessani, from Rangely, Colo., is a committed Christian and the firm will represent him free of charge.

"He is a typical, no-nonsense, just-the-facts, this-is-what-happened career infantry officer," Rooney said. "We are not hesitant to get into court."

Rooney, a recently retired Marine captain, said he believes the actions of Chessani's battalion were justifiable and Marines on the ground responded to the bomb blast with the right amount of force.

"I know of instances where Marines went into homes or hospitals or mosques and didn't go in hard enough and ended up dead," Rooney said.

An attorney for 1st Lt. Andrew A. Grayson, another officer charged in the case, said his client may have his pretrial hearing, known as an Article 32 investigation, on April 23. Hearings for other defendants are expected in the coming months, though the Marine Corps would not confirm any dates.

Two Senators Secretly Flew to Cuba for Alleged 9/11 Mastermind's Hearing
The Washington Post
by Dafna Linzer and Josh White
March 16, 2007

Two key congressional leaders secretly flew to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Saturday to observe the closed military hearing for al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed, according to Capitol Hill staff members and Pentagon officials.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), a committee member, watched the proceedings over closed-circuit television from an adjacent room, said Tara Andringa, a spokeswoman for Levin. They were joined by a representative from the CIA, according to one U.S. government official. Lawyers from the Justice Department did not attend the hearing, a spokesman for the department said.

The official transcript of Mohammed's hearing, called to establish whether he qualifies as an "enemy combatant," acknowledged the presence of five unnamed military officers, a translator and an official tribunal reporter. It is unclear why the presence of two senators who helped write the law codifying the tribunals was not announced. Yesterday evening, Graham said he was not prepared to discuss the trip, citing an agreement with Levin. "We'll issue a joint statement tomorrow, but we were there together," Graham said.

Saturday's trip underscores congressional efforts to exert oversight of one of President Bush's most controversial programs in his fight against al-Qaeda. After recent criticism from the Justice Department's inspector general over its use of surveillance powers under the USA Patriot Act, the Bush administration is under pressure to demonstrate greater transparency than it has been willing to offer in the past.

Though there have been hundreds of status hearings for Guantanamo detainees, last week's hearings for Mohammed and two other al-Qaeda suspects marked the first time that Combatant Status Review Tribunals were closed to the media and the public. Pentagon officials argued that hearings for Mohammed and 13 others who were held inside the CIA's secret detention program, some for years, have to be secret for unspecified national security reasons.

Eager to assert his central role in al-Qaeda's war against the United States, Mohammed went far beyond claims of masterminding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. According to the transcript from his hearing, portions of which were made public Wednesday, Mohammed took credit for more than 30 plots and attacks over the past 15 years, including many for which the government did not hold him responsible.

His statements, as quoted in the Pentagon transcript, paint a deeper portrait both of Mohammed, who comes across as a confident and large-egoed man fascinated with airline plots, and of the inner workings of al-Qaeda. The transcript is also revealing of the Bush administration's efforts to buttress the case for the secret detentions and the opaque legal process under which detainees such as Mohammed are being held.

Mohammed's description of his treatment while in CIA custody was redacted from the transcript. Allegations of abuse that he raised with the panel were forwarded to the CIA's inspector general for investigation, two officials said.

John Sifton of Human Rights Watch said the redactions and the secret nature of the tribunals raised concerns about the process. "There have been serious allegations of torture, and yesterday's transcripts are redacted in the precise portion of the hearing when torture allegations are made -- which further casts doubt on the legitimacy of these proceedings," he said.

Yesterday, the Pentagon released an additional portion of the transcript in which Mohammed, in gory detail and boastful prose, said he personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in February 2002. Four people, including a British citizen, Sheik Omar Saeed, were convicted in July 2002 for Pearl's murder. Saeed was sentenced to death for masterminding the abduction and murder. The other men were sentenced to life in prison.

"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan," Mohammed is quoted telling the military panel Saturday. "For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."

FBI and CIA officials who reviewed a videotape of the murder have long known that Mohammed took part in the killing. His orchestration of the Sept. 11 attacks -- detailed in the 9/11 commission report -- was also publicly known for several years. But some officials and terrorism experts yesterday cast doubt on other claims by Mohammed, suggesting that he was exaggerating.

Though he did not reveal his attendance at the hearing, Graham said in an interview yesterday on Fox News that one could question whether Mohammed tried "to embellish his role in jihadist history."

"I believe the details will be corroborated," he said.

Steven Simon, a terrorism expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mohammed was involved in some of the successful and failed plots for which he claimed credit, including one to blow up airliners headed from the Philippines to the United States and another to blow up a flight en route from London. "He had this thing with crashing airplanes," Simon said.

Mohammed did not claim credit for attacks such as the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 or an attack on a U.S. consulate in Pakistan in June 2002.

In arguing that Mohammed deserves the status of enemy combatant, the Pentagon noted only his role in the death of 2,972 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

Mohammed did not dispute that claim. But he tried to argue that other evidence against him, especially information on a computer at the home where he was arrested in March 2003 in Pakistan, did not belong to him. Evidence on the computer accounts for about half of the 22 findings the Pentagon presented against him at Saturday's hearing. Mohammed also disputed a report that he claimed to be an al-Qaeda military commander in a 2002 al-Jazeera interview. He asked to call two witnesses, also being held at Guantanamo Bay, to corroborate his version of events, but the panel refused.

Mohammed appeared at the hour-long hearing, speaking in Arabic and English before a panel of three officers, including a Navy captain and lieutenant colonels from the Air Force and the Marine Corps. An Air Force lieutenant colonel assigned to usher Mohammed through the tribunal process was also present, but Mohammed did not have a lawyer, was denied a request to call witnesses and was not shown classified evidence against him.

Defense officials said yesterday that it could take several weeks to rule on Mohammed's status, even though he boasted of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and called himself an enemy combatant.

After Mohammed's status is determined, military prosecutors could decide to try him, through a military commission, for his alleged involvement in the attacks. The commissions, with rules outlined by Congress last year, are untested. Until then, he would remain in custody at Guantanamo.

Military commission charges can include the possibility of a death penalty, but the only case presented so far under the new laws -- against Australian citizen David M. Hicks -- was referred to a commission as a non-capital case. It is unclear whether military prosecutors would pursue a death-penalty case against Mohammed.

Democrats eye cutting funds for Guantanamo
United Press International
March 16, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 16 (UPI) -- Suspected terrorists now held in the prison at Guantanamo in Cuba could be transferred to military brigs in the United States, a report says.

Some Democrats in Congress are considering removing funding for the Guantanamo prison camp, the Lawrence, Kan., Journal-World reports.

"One thought is to put them in military brigs," said Austin Durrer, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va. "There were some names thrown out there just as examples, but there are no plans to bring them there."

Possible destinations include the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and brigs in Quantico, Va., and Charleston, S.C., where suspected terrorist Jose Padilla had been held as an "enemy combatant" for more than two years. The only maximum-security military prison is at Fort Leavenworth.

Moran heads a congressional investigation into Guantanamo.

"We're working on a policy proposal to shut down Guantanamo Bay through a defense appropriations bill, and then we'd ask the president and the Department of Defense to come up with a plan as to where to house those detainees," his spokesman said.

Senators say alleged abuse of Sept. 11 terrorist must be taken seriously
The Associated Press via The International Herald Tribune
March 16, 2007

WASHINGTON: Two senators who watched Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confess to planning the Sept. 11 attacks and other plots said Friday that his allegations of mistreatment by U.S. captors should be taken seriously and investigated.

"To do otherwise would reflect poorly on our nation," Sens. Carl Levin, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said in a joint statement.

At a closed military hearing last Saturday at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval prison in Cuba, Mohammed claimed responsibility for plotting more than 30 attacks and personally beheading American journalist Daniel Pearl.

He also gave military officials a written statement alleging mistreatment before arriving at Guantanamo Bay. He had previously been held by the CIA at secret facilities.

Levin and Graham acknowledged Friday that they watched the proceedings on a closed circuit television in an adjoining room. The public and press were barred from the session, and the senators' attendance had not been announced.

A transcript of Mohammed's hearing, released Wednesday by the Pentagon, refers to a claim he made that he was tortured by the CIA, though he said he was not under duress at Guantanamo when he confessed to his role in the attacks. The CIA has said its interrogation practices are legal, and it does not use torture.

"Allegations of prisoner mistreatment must be taken seriously and properly investigated," the senators' statement said.

According to the senators, the military officials hearing Mohammed's testimony said the allegations would be submitted to the appropriate authorities.

The two senators have battled the Bush administration in recent years on the treatment of the nation's most dangerous terrorism suspects. In 2005, the Bush administration resisted legislation backed by Levin and Graham that banned cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, contending that the president needed flexibility when it came to terrorist interrogations.

Last year, Congress passed and President Bush accepted legislation that granted prisoners rights such as legal counsel and access to evidence used against them. But the bill curtailed other rights common in civilian courts, including the right to protest one's detention by filing a habeas corpus petition.

Levin and Graham said they were impressed with the tribunal's professionalism, but did not rule out further changes to the system.

"The true test of the (tribunal) process is not a case in which the detainee admits the allegations against him, it is a case in which the detainee disputes those allegations," the senators wrote.

Noting potential legal challenges to the law, "we will continue to review the process and will explore possible ways to improve this process through congressional action," they added.

US officer defends Haditha shootings
Guardian Unlimited
by Peter Walker
March 16, 2007

A US marine charged with killing 18 Iraqi civilians near the town of Haditha, among them women and children, justified his actions by saying he was following military procedures and stands by his decisions.

Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who led a squad of marines near Haditha on November 19 2005, is among eight soldiers charged in connection with the deaths of a total of 24 Iraqi civilians.

In an interview with CBS television's 60 Minutes programme, to be broadcast on Sunday, Staff Sgt Wuterich, 26, said he was sorry for the civilian deaths but had not done anything wrong and would do exactly the same thing again under similar circumstances.

"There is nothing that I can possibly say to make up or make well the deaths of those women and children, and I am absolutely sorry it happened that day," he said.

"What I did that day, the decision that I made, I would make those decisions again today. Those are decisions that I made in a combat situation, and I believe I had to make those decisions."

In the interview, he admits shooting five unarmed Iraqi men in the back but says this was necessary as they were running from a car that had appeared on the scene after a marine had been killed by a roadside bomb, and that they did not follow instructions.

"Normally the Iraqis know the drill ... if something happens ... get down, hands up ... They started to take off, so I shot at them," he said.

Other marines have told investigators the Iraqis seemed to be following orders and were not fleeing.

But Staff Sgt Wuterich said he also thought at the time the men might been involved in detonating the bomb, saying: "Those are the things that went through my mind before I pulled the trigger. That was positive identification."

He also said that an attack he led on two houses in which a number of women and children died was justified under military procedures because the marines thought they had been fired on from one of the homes.

The marines threw a grenade into one of the rooms before charging in to shoot any survivors, something Staff Sgt Wuterich said was the standard way to clear a house.

"You can't hesitate to make a decision. Hesitation equals being killed, either yourself or your men ... That's what we do. That's how our training goes."

He continued the assault because he saw an open back door and assumed the sniper had gone to the next house.

"My responsibility as a squad leader is to make sure that none of the rest of my guys died ... and at that point we were still on the assault, so no, I don't believe [I should have stopped the attack]," he said.

In the second house, a man, two women and four children were killed.

"Did we know that civilians were in there? No. It would have been one thing if we went in those rooms and looked at everyone and shot them," he said.

"We cleared these houses the way they were supposed to be cleared."

Staff Sgt Wuterich faces 13 counts of unpremeditated murder. Three other squad members were also charged with unpremeditated murder and four officers were charged with failing to properly investigate or report the killings.

The episode has come to be known as the conflict's My Lai, a reference to the notorious massacre of civilians in the Vietnam war.

Sgt. found guilty
Associated Press via The Leaf-Chronicle
by Kristin M. Hall
March 17, 2007

A military panel found a 101st Airborne soldier guilty of three counts of negligent homicide in the deaths of three Iraqi detainees.

The panel could have found him guilty on the more serious charges of premeditated murder.

After four hours of deliberations Friday night, the panel returned the verdict in the court-martial of Staff Sgt. Ray Girouard, 24. He was also found guilty of obstruction of justice for lying to investigators and a conspiracy charge for trying to conceal the crime.

A negligent homicide charge carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Girouard could have faced a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole if he had been convicted on premeditated murder charges.

Girouard hugged his defense attorney Anita Gorecki after the verdict. The soldier's sisters, who were also in the courtroom, smiled and hugged their brother.

Jurors are scheduled to begin the sentencing phase of the court-martial Monday morning.

Girouard was accused of telling his soldiers to release the detainees they captured during the May 9 raid near Samarra, Iraq, and then shoot them as they fled. Girouard is the last and most senior soldier from the 101st Airborne Division to face trial in the killings.

Girouard had testified that he lied to investigators about the slayings to protect his soldiers, but that he never told Spc. William Hunsaker and Pfc. Corey Clagett to kill the detainees.

After he discovered the slayings, Girouard said, he decided to help them fake an attack, cutting Hunsaker and punching Clagett in the face, and lying to superiors by saying his soldiers shot the detainees in self-defense.

In closing arguments earlier Friday, Gorecki said Girouard did not plan the slayings and that prosecutors never provided a motive for Girouard to order the killing during the mission.

"It simply doesn't make any sense why he would take that opportunity to kill someone," Gorecki said.

Prosecutors, however, characterized Girouard as a liar who can't be trusted and that he only changed his story when the other soldiers agreed to make plea agreements.

"He helped cover up a war crime," said Capt. William Fischbach. "This guy is all about cover-ups."

Hunsaker, Clagett and another soldier, Spc. Juston Graber, have pleaded guilty to other charges. Hunsaker and Clagett testified that Girouard gave them the orders, while Graber testified that the soldiers were given an option to participate in the plan to kill the detainees.

[back to contents]

UN Reports

UN Prosecutor Urges End to Impunity for Wartime Sex Crimes
Voice of America
by Peter Heinlein
March 8, 2007

In an impassioned speech to a conference on the status of women, the Swiss prosecutor said part of the legacy of the Yugoslavia Tribunal will be its condemnation of gender-based wartime violence. She noted the 34-year sentence handed down to one man convicted of rape in Bosnia, and said more such convictions are coming.

The theme of International Women's Day observances is 'ending impunity for discrimination and violence against girls and women'.

But Prosecutor del Ponte said her experience in prosecuting wartime sex crimes has revealed insensitivity to victims.

"For example, one of the key barriers to women seeking justice for violent crimes in common law countries is the retraumatization that so often accompanies cross-examination in an adversarial system," she said. "We have had cases where judges have been observed laughing during sexual violence witness testimony."

Among a list of dignitaries addressing the U.N. Women's Day observance such violence, yet the reality is that too often it is tolerated under the fallacious cover of cultural practices and norms, within the walls of the home," he said.

"Or it is used as a weapon in armed conflict, condoned through tacit silence and passivity by the State and the law enforcement community," he added.

On the eve of Women's Day, the U.N. Security Council called for an end to "pervasive violence" against women during conflict, and demanded punishment for perpetrators.

A Council statement emphasized governments' responsibilities to put an end to impunity and prosecute those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, including those relating to sexual and other violence against women and girls."

The statement also urged Secretary-General Ban to appoint more women to posts as senior envoys to peacekeeping missions and other field operations in the developing world, especially in non-traditional roles such as military observer and civilian police units.

UN Official Urges Sudan to Cooperate With ICC
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
by Katy Glassborow
March 12, 2007

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has warned the government of Sudan that it will be legally obliged to detain two men named in connection with war crimes in Darfur if arrest warrants are issued by the International Criminal Court, ICC.

Speaking after an International Women's Day conference in The Hague on March 8, Louise Arbour told IWPR that if the Sudanese adopt a policy of non-compliance with the ICC it would be interpreted by the international community as non-compliance with the UN Security Council.

On February 27, ICC prosecutors released evidence that they hope can prove that Ahmad Muhammad Harun, formerly Sudanese interior minister and now minister of state for humanitarian affairs, and Ali Kushayb, a leader of the government-backed Janjaweed militia, committed 51 counts of crimes against civilians in Darfur, including rape, torture and inhumane acts.

The evidence focuses on events in four villages - Bindisi, Mukjar, Arwala and Kodoom in west Darfur - between August 2003 and March 2004.

Arbour said the ICC's evidence centres on "specific incidents, when the crime base in Darfur is immense".

Now ICC prosecutors are waiting for pre-trial judges to decide whether there is enough evidence against the men to issue arrest warrants or court summonses.

The UN Security Council first referred the situation in Darfur to prosecutors at the Hague-based ICC in 2005, because it was agreed that Sudan was “unwilling and unable” to prosecute cases in its national legal system.

Khartoum has since undertaken a series of measures, such as establishing new courts and dismissing evidence gathered by ICC investigators, in an effort to prove its own willingness and ability to conduct trials and to discredit international justice.

Because the Sudanese government in Khartoum was uncooperative, ICC prosecutors could not secure access into Darfur during their 20-month investigation. They were instead forced to conduct witness interviews and gather evidence from 17 other countries.

Sudan's belligerence is not solely targeted at the ICC. Recent reports from the ground tells of humanitarian aid workers facing increasing visa and access restrictions from Sudanese officials, with some workers being sexually assaulted and beaten.

Deirdre Clancy, co-director of the International Refugee Rights Initiative, IRRI,, told IWPR that one of the men wanted by the ICC prosecutors – Harun – is a "bete noire for humanitarian aid and humanitarian access in Darfur". Despite having ministerial responsibility for humanitarian operations, Harun has obstructed aid workers and has even suggested they are only there for their own salaries, according to Clancy.

Members of a five-strong mission by the UN Human Rights Council were recently denied visas by Sudanese authorities to visit Darfur to carry out an assessment, and were forced to work from neighbouring Chad, which is now home to millions of Darfuris in refugee camps.

The mission - headed by Nobel laureate Jody Williams and including the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Sudan, Sima Samar - explained in a report just made public that in late January, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon received a personal assurance from Sudanese president Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir that his country would cooperate fully with the mission.

Nevertheless, despite more than a dozen attempts to obtain visas over a 20-day period from January 26 through February 14, made in Geneva, Addis Ababa and Khartoum, the team were refused entry and were forced to head for eastern Chad.

In their 35-page findings, the mission concluded that the government of Sudan has "manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur from large-scale international crimes, and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes".

This being the case, the mission said the "solemn obligation of the international community to exercise its responsibility to protect has become evident and urgent".

Arbour warned Khartoum that the UN Security Council has coercive means at its disposal, including the possibility of imposing no-fly zones or even sending UN peacekeepers into the region without clearance from Khartoum.

"But first and foremost we need clarity what is going on in Darfur," Arbour told IWPR. She said this had been made increasingly difficult by Khartoum's strategy of refusing visas to UN and international aid workers alike.

Arbour warned the President al-Bashir’s government that her Office for Human Rights has "documented the Sudanese government's response to crimes in Darfur and has noted a small increase in paper activity, but nothing more".

Back in 2004, the US government sent a team to collect evidence from 1,200 Darfuri refugees in neighbouring Chad, prompting the then Secretary of State Colin Powell to label the attacks by Sudan’s government and its militias as genocide.

The US then proposed a resolution to the UN Security Council, which sent a Commission of Enquiry to investigate the crimes in Darfur in late 2004, reporting back in January 2005 that crimes amounting to genocide were taking place.

Arbour is particularly concerned about widespread reports of crimes of sexual violence in the region and the Sudanese government's refusal to acknowledge this.

"My office is currently investigating sexual violence in Darfur, and the level of denial is extraordinary," said Arbour, referring also to the Commission of Enquiry which reported evidence of widespread gender-based violence and concluded "that sexual violence amounted to crimes against humanity".

She added that she sees "very little sign of anything improving", but told IWPR that she is pleased "specific crimes of sexual violence have been included in the evidence" currently before the ICC’s pre-trial judges.

Before becoming UN High Commissioner, Arbour was the first female chief prosecutor for the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, where she insisted that if there was evidence of sexual crimes, these counts must be included in indictments.

She told the audience at the “Women Groundbreakers in the First International Courts” in The Hague that in the early days of the Rwanda tribunal, she had not been surprised to find that sexual violence was not a focus of prosecutions.

In their new report, the Human Rights Council said that sexual violence and rape, including gang rape, are widespread across Darfur, and despite the well-known patterns of rape of women around camps for displaced persons, the authorities have done little to reduce the threat or investigate cases when they are reported.

Monitoring of the Sudanese criminal justice system over the last two years has shown that "very few cases of rape are investigated or prosecuted relative to the number of incidents that occur", the report said.

Access to justice and rape prosecutions are further complicated both by cultural norms and institutional factors such as criminal law provisions that combine rape and adultery in the same article, members of the mission pointed out.

In the remarks she made on International Women's Day, Arbour told her audience that "even in advanced countries, rape is grossly under-reported and under-prosecuted, and rape and sexual violence continue to be the most common crimes committed and the most under-prosecuted".

The question for international war crimes tribunals is what can be done about this, said Arbour, explaining that "we have tried to strategise about how to investigate whilst being sensitive to the shame and social pressures felt by rape victims".

These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that investigators have to contact women through interpreters, which Arbour noted "which makes it difficult to build trust" and necessitates the creation of a dictionary of "clinical words" to describe traumatic sexual violence so that "prosecutors do not bring euphemisms into court".

As a former chief prosecutor, Arbour identified another challenge - persuading prosecutors to document rape and sexual violence when they are being sent out to investigate mass killings on an unimaginable scale. She insisted that they must remain aware that "rape is as significant even when the scale of killings is so high".

U.N. mission urges charges in Darfur crisis
The Los Angeles Times
by Maggie Farley
March 13, 2007

UNITED NATIONS — A high-level U.N. mission to Darfur reported Monday that the Sudanese government had orchestrated human rights crimes against its own people and urged that leaders of Sudan's government and allied militias be charged with war crimes.

But the Sudanese government in Khartoum is successfully blocking United Nations attempts to stem the violence, organizing opposition to the mission's report and stepping back from its agreement to accept a joint U.N.-African peacekeeping force in the region.

Sudan's government "has manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur from large-scale international crimes, and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes," says the report by a team commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council in December.

The 35-page report adds that rebels "are also guilty of serious abuses of human rights" in the fighting with government forces and their allied militias. In four years of conflict, more than 200,000 villagers have died and more than 2.5 million have fled their homes, the U.N. says.

The Human Rights Council will consider adopting the report Friday, but Sudan's allies are trying to thwart that from happening, human rights advocates say.

Khartoum had blocked the team, led by Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams of the U.S., from visiting the war-torn western region, so the mission had to rely on interviews with refugees across the border in Chad. The conclusions, say opponents, are "compromised."

The report recommends that officials from Sudan's government and allied militias be tried for war crimes. The International Criminal Court has already named a militia leader and a state minister as suspects for allegedly working together to organize attacks against civilians.

Darfur is one of the top issues being discussed at the fledgling Human Rights Council, which is still trying to establish its credibility after previous sessions focused mainly on Israel and, critics say, ignored more serious human rights abusers.

The council replaced the largely discredited Human Rights Commission, which had been taken over by "arsonists rather than firefighters," said Mark Lagon, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of State for international organizations. The United States chose to sit out the council's first term, and last week announced that it would not seek a seat at the next election for council membership either, opting to promote human rights from the outside.

But the new group, now in its fourth session, is still struggling to confront violators, human rights advocates say. Meanwhile, Sudan is rallying allies to defend it from censure Friday.

"It is still unclear whether the council can take action to further the recommendations of the human rights mission," said Peggy Hicks, the global advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, who is in Geneva for the council's three-week session.

"There is debate about the conclusions because the mission wasn't able to reach Darfur. But this report simply confirms what is well known and documented by other missions and investigations into what is happening in Darfur — some of the most serious human abuses in the world."

The report comes days after Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir rejected a plan for the U.N. to share control of a new peacekeeping force with the African Union, dashing hopes that troops could soon arrive to help protect civilians.

In a letter delivered Thursday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Bashir insisted that the AU keep full command of a planned joint force of 22,000 to augment the overstretched 7,000 AU peacekeepers now in Darfur. The regulations of the United Nations mandate that the world body control the peacekeeping operations it funds.

British Ambassador to the U.N. Emyr Jones Parry said Bashir's letter was an attempt to renegotiate a hard-won agreement to deploy the U.N. troops and foreshadowed months more of delay.

"It's a major setback," he said Monday.

U.S. and European diplomats with the U.N. Security Council have said it is time to impose sanctions on Sudan and its leaders for allowing the violence to continue. But veto-holding members China and Russia have resisted sanctions against Sudan, arguing the penalties would cause the African nation to break off the little cooperation it has offered the U.N., and strand the people of Darfur.

UN tribunal dismisses appeal of Croatian journalist convicted of contempt
UN News Centre
March 15, 2007

The appeals chamber of the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia today dismissed the appeal of a Croatian journalist found guilty of contempt for publishing closed session transcripts and part of a witness statement.

In a ruling released in The Hague, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) dismissed all seven grounds of appeal filed by Josip Jovic and ordered him to pay a fine of €20,000 (euros) within 30 days.

Mr. Jovic, a former editor-in-chief of the Croatian daily newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija, published a series of articles in November and December 2000 containing transcripts from the trial of the former Croatian Army general Tihomir Blaškic and part of a statement given to prosecutors by Stjepan Mesic, who later became Croatian President, in the case against Mr. Blaškic.

Mr. Blaškic was originally sentenced to 45 years’ jail after being found guilty over his role in a massacre of Muslims in the Bosnian village of Ahmici in April 1993, but on appeal all but three of the 19 convictions were overturned and his sentence was reduced to nine years. Mr. Blaškic was given early release in August 2004.

When the ICTY trial chamber convicted Mr. Jovic last August, the judges expressed particular concern over his decision to ignore a cease and desist order from the Tribunal after the first four articles had appeared, noting that he went on in subsequent editions to boast that the transcripts he was publishing were “secret.”

“His actions not only were contemptuous, but also stymied the Tribunal’s ability to safeguard the evidence of a protected witness and risked undermining confidence in the Tribunal’s ability to grant effective protective measures,” said the trial chamber in its judgement summary.

Last month the ICTY sentenced another Croatian journalist, Domagoj Margetic, to three months’ jail after he published a list of protected witnesses in the Blaškic trial on his personal website last year.

Chilling abuses chronicled as UN human rights mission to Darfur presents report
UN News Centre
March 16, 2007

Sudanese Government forces, allied Janjaweed militias and rebel groups are guilty of serious human rights abuses and violations of international law in Darfur, where murders, rapes, acts of torture and arbitrary arrest occur with chilling frequency, the head of the United Nations High-Level Mission said today as she presented her report to the Human Rights Council.

Jody Williams, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, told the Council that ineffective justice mechanisms, the free flow of weapons and a climate of impunity meant Darfur had become a stranger to the rule of law.

She said civilians had become the main target in the conflict, which has also exacerbated the underlying social and economic deprivation in Darfur.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2 million others forced from their homes since 2003 when rebel forces first took up arms against the Sudanese Government. The conflict is threatening to spill over into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR).

The High-Level Mission’s report, published on Monday, calls on the Sudanese Government to cooperate with the deployment of the proposed hybrid UN-African Union (AU) force without delay and to give its full cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which may hold war crimes trials.

It also urges the international community to step up pressure, as individual Member States and through mechanisms such as the UN Human Rights Council, to ensure that the conflict ends, civilians are protected and the victims receive justice.

An independent national human rights commission should be created and the Sudanese Government should also immediately remove all obstacles to humanitarian assistance from the UN and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Ms. Williams said today.

The five-member mission was unable to get into Darfur because of visa restrictions, but still met hundreds of people and reviewed countless documents relating to the issue during its month of work that finished on 5 March. The mission visited Geneva, Addis Ababa and several cities and refugee camps in Chad.

Speaking after Ms. Williams presented the report to the Council in Geneva, Sudan’s representative Mohamed Ali Emardi said the report lacked impartiality and was part of a conspiracy against his country.

He said the international community had remained silent against those rebel groups which did not sign last year’s peace agreement that was supposed to end the fighting in Darfur, a vast region roughly the size of France.

Speaking to reporters later today, Ms. Williams said the mission’s members had known that their work would be challenged, and that the team had therefore been very careful to ensure that it operated entirely legally under its mandate, as well as in good faith, “always keeping in mind the needs of the people of Darfur.”

She added that the “responsibility to protect” principle had emerged because of the international community’s shame about its failure to act during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

“Many of the people that we met with in Chad, in the refugee camps, are giving up hope in the belief that the responsibility to protect doesn’t seem to have any meaning or relevance in their lives and in addressing the situation in Darfur.

“Responsibility to protect is supposed to be [about] protecting the people, not protecting the Government to retain its power to continue abusing those people.”

[back to contents]

NGO Reports

Sri Lanka: ICRC assists displaced civilians in Batticaloa
International Committee of the Red Cross
March 13, 2007

The ICRC has stepped up its relief operation in Batticaloa district in order to assist several thousand civilians who have been displaced over the past four days by fighting between the Sri Lankan security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

These newly displaced people fled their homes in the Vavunatheevu and Karadiyanaru areas and headed for the town of Batticaloa, where they are now sheltering in local schools and in camps set up over the past few months by humanitarian organizations working in cooperation with the local authorities. Together with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, the ICRC has already provided about 5,000 of these people with 1,750 mats, 900 tents, 450 hygiene kits (soap, washing powder, razors, towels and shampoo), 850 jerrycans, 170 baby kits (laundry soap, washable diapers, baby powder, blankets and towels).

The ICRC is also installing sanitary facilities and water-distribution systems at Korralankerni camp, where the newly displaced are gradually arriving. In other camps, located in Alankulam, Kiran and Mavadivembu, the ICRC is continuing to distribute drinking water on a daily basis and to build latrines and showers. The ICRC launched its relief operation in Batticaloa district in cooperation with the local authorities and other humanitarian organizations present on the ground.

The ICRC reminds both parties to the conflict of their obligation to comply with international humanitarian law, especially of their duty to protect the civilian population and to grant freedom of movement to internally displaced people.

Sri Lanka: Civilians Who Fled Fighting Are Forced to Return
Human Rights Watch
March 16, 2007

Government Should End Forced Returns, Protect Displaced Persons in Areas It Controls

(New York, March 16, 2007) – Sri Lankan authorities are using threats and intimidation to force civilians who fled recent fighting in Sri Lanka’s civil war to return home, Human Rights Watch said today. Government and military officials are threatening to cut aid and withdraw security for displaced persons who refuse to return.

Since March 12, the government has been returning people from at least six internally displaced person sites in eastern Batticaloa district. At least 771 individuals have been sent to Trincomalee district farther north as part of a plan to return approximately 2,800 internally displaced persons. To pressure individuals to return home, government officials and military personnel have threatened to withdraw humanitarian aid, food and other essential supplies. Some officials have threatened families that they would revoke their family cards, which entitle them to food rations. In some cases, the security forces have said that they would no longer be responsible for the security of the displaced persons who stayed behind.

“The Sri Lankan government says it will never force civilians to return home after they have been displaced by fighting,” said Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch. “But there is clear and incontrovertible evidence that forced returns have begun, right under the noses of international observers.”

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), an estimated 127,000 persons are displaced in Batticaloa district, of whom more than 40,000 fled fighting over the past week. Authorities have organized at least 21 buses to transport displaced persons from camps in Batticaloa to Trincomalee district. At one location, Zahira College, armored vehicles of the police’s Special Task Force led the convoy. The Special Task Force has been implicated in serious abuses against Tamil civilians during military operations against the armed opposition Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Thousands had fled Trincomalee in August after major fighting between government forces and the LTTE. Many sought shelter in the LTTE-controlled area of Vaharai, on the coast road between Trincomalee and Batticaloa, but later fled that area when the government defeated LTTE forces there this January. The LTTE tried but failed to block the departure of civilians from LTTE areas.

In interviews in February, more than a dozen displaced persons from Trincomalee and Vaharai told Human Rights Watch that they were afraid to go home. Most cited security concerns, particularly if fighting resumed between the government and the LTTE. Some said they were worried about reprisal killings by the military after an LTTE attack, as well as communal violence from Sinhalese communities.

“The situation is very bad in Mutur so we can’t go back,” said a 48-year-old fisherman, referring to his home town in the Trincomalee district, which he fled in August 2006. “We have said our homes are damaged, nothing is left there. We want to go, but security is a problem. Every day there are killings. How do we go back?”

In addition to returns to Trincomalee, the government last week returned some 200 families to the area of Vaharai, the former LTTE stronghold that the government overran in January. It is not clear to what extent those returns were genuinely voluntary.

“We would like to go back, but the government must give us security and essential items,” a 34-year-old father of three from Vaharai told Human Rights Watch. “We need fishing equipment. We need things to do our cultivation. The government has not said anything about providing this.”

The protection of displaced persons in Batticaloa is also under serious threat, Human Rights Watch said. Armed members of the Karuna group, a breakaway faction of the LTTE, have been seen in and around various camps, threatening and sometimes using violence against displaced persons. The group is also intimidating international nongovernmental organizations providing services to these camps. The group is known to have abducted at least four children from displaced persons camps in Batticaloa district. The LTTE is known to have abducted at least three children from camps in areas under their control.

“Pressuring displaced persons to return home goes against UN-recognized principles and is contrary to the Sri Lankan government’s repeated promises not to force people to return,” Adams said. “The government must only return people with their free consent, and provide aid and security for all those who decide to stay until conditions improve.”

Human Rights Watch said that the primary responsibility for ensuring the protection and security of displaced persons within the country lies with the Sri Lankan government. The LTTE is responsible for the protection of displaced persons in areas under its control.

UNHCR and dozens of nongovernmental organizations have been serving displaced persons in Sri Lanka. On March 13, UNHCR said that “heavy pressure has been applied on internally displaced people,” and cited local authority statements that assistance would be stopped if they stayed in Batticaloa.

“UNHCR and donor governments should be especially vigilant in monitoring these returns and should report frequently and publicly on conditions of return,” Adams said. “They should do everything possible to help these civilians in need.”

The UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement provide that every internally displaced person has the right to liberty of movement, the right to seek safety in another part of the country, and the right to be protected against forcible return to any place where their safety would be at risk.

The Sri Lankan government has forcibly returned displaced persons in the past. In September, the government sent between 15,000 and 25,000 displaced persons back to their homes in and around Mutur in Trincomalee district. While representatives for the displaced persons said that all wanted to return to their homes, many families wished to wait until they could be sure the area was safe and that renewed fighting was unlikely.

Israel: Stop Forcing Civilians to Assist Military Operations
Human Rights Watch
March 16, 2007

Investigate and Prosecute Those Responsible for Using Civilians as Shields

(Jerusalem, March 16, 2007) – The Israeli army should immediately cease deliberately endangering Palestinian civilians by forcing them to assist military operations, Human Rights Watch said today. During recent military operations in the Old City of Nablus, Israeli soldiers forced at least three Palestinians at gun point, two of them children, to assist in searching apartments for suspects. International humanitarian law prohibits a party to a conflict from using the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military operations.

“The soldiers’ actions fly in the face of the Geneva Conventions, an Israeli high court decision, and the IDF’s own prior commitments,” said Joe Saunders, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch. “Israel should put an immediate end to this wholly illegal practice which deliberately abuses the immunity to which civilians are guaranteed under international law.”

According to testimonies gathered by the Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, on February 25, on the first day of Israel’s military operation in the Old City of Nablus, Israeli soldiers forced two cousins, `Amid and Samah Amirah, ages 15 and 24, to walk at gun point in front of them as they entered and searched nearby homes. `Amid also described how the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) used him at his own house at a time when the IDF apparently believed one or more suspects might be inside, as suggested by the fact that soldiers fired shots during the search: “They aimed their weapons at me. One of them pushed me so that I would go into the house first. I went in first, and then the soldiers entered. One of them pushed me to a corner of the room, and then fired into the house. They fired 5-6 shots inside the house. They told me to go into the rooms and then they came in behind me.”

The soldiers also forced `Amid’s cousin Samah at gun point to enter all the rooms of a house and later fired live shots into the rooms. AP television cameramen filmed and broadcast part of this incident.

Three days later, on February 28, Israeli soldiers ordered an 11-year-old girl, Jihan Tadush, to accompany them on a search of a nearby home in the Yasmina quarter of the Old City where she lives. She told B’Tselem: “He [the soldier] ordered me to walk toward the house. Three soldiers walked behind me. At the house, there were lots of soldiers. The soldier ordered me to go inside. The soldiers followed me into the house. The house was dark, and the soldiers lit it up with their flashlights. There were locked rooms and a kitchen. The soldier asked me what room we were in, and I told him it was a kitchen. He asked me about the stairs leading to the roof. I showed them to him, and the soldiers went onto the roof and then came back.” Jihan described her feelings after the incident: "I was shaking with fear. I was afraid they would kill me or put me in jail. The only thing I wanted to do was sleep. I am afraid that the soldiers will come back and take me." Jihan also provided video testimony, which is available on YouTube, where she describes her ordeal.

“It is particularly reprehensible that the Israeli army has forced children to act either as shields or as agents for them in recent military operations,” said Saunders. “Children are entitled to special protections under international human rights and humanitarian law, and these actions represent a most serious violation of those protections.”

Article 51 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits forcing civilians to partake in its military operations, a basic principle of the laws of war which is absolute and affords no derogation. The convention also prohibits the exercise of “physical or moral coercion against protected persons” (Art. 31), and requires that civilians be protected “especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof” (Art. 27). Article 51 (7) of Additional Protocol 1 sets out the customary law prohibition that parties must not direct “the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations.”

Human Rights Watch said Israeli officials should immediately investigate the IDF’s recent operations in the Old City of Nablus, prosecute and sanction anyone responsible for deliberately endangering civilians by forcing them to assist military operations and ensure that military commanders communicate unequivocally any military orders against such practices.

Background

Human Rights Watch and Israeli and Palestinian organizations documented numerous cases of Israeli forces using Palestinian civilians as human shields during the early years of the current intifada. After seven human rights organizations petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice on May 5, 2002, the state told that court that “the IDF has decided to issue immediately an unequivocal order to the forces in the field. The order states that forces in the field are absolutely forbidden to use any civilians as a means of ‘living shield’ against gunfire or attacks by the Palestinian side.” However, the state contended that the IDF’s use of the “neighbor” or “early warning” procedure, whereby they used Palestinians to gain entry to other houses during military operations, did not constitute shielding and was lawful. Nonetheless the army declared that where a field commander believed that this practice would endanger a civilian, it would not be used.

Finally after a three-and-a-half-year legal battle, on October 6, 2005, the High Court of Justice ruled that it is illegal for the IDF to use Palestinian civilians during military actions, including through the “neighbor” or “early warning” procedure. However, even since the High Court’s ruling, Human Rights Watch and other organizations have documented several cases of Israeli troops using Palestinian civilians in military operations, including during Israel’s prolonged incursions into the Gaza Strip during the second half of 2006.

[back to contents]