War Crimes Prosecution Watch

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (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)

CAMBODIA: Khmer Rouge Tribunal staff to appeal salaries within months
Radio Australia
Presenter/Interviewer: Rob Sharp
Speakers: Dr Helen Jarvis, Chief of Public Affairs with the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
June 27, 2007

There's been a breakthrough in a salary dispute that threatened to disrupt the trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders. Some tribunal staff were worried by potential plans to cut staff salaries, to ensure a 56 million US dollar budget would last three years the process is expected to take.

JARVIS: We are just in the process actually of releasing a statement by four parties that have been involved, that is of course the Extraordinary Chambers ourselves. The United Nations Development Program, UNDP, the United Nations headquarters which is involved through the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the fourth organisation is the European Community. And this has been an explanation of a project forward meeting held last Friday.

SHARP: There was concern last Friday of the 56 million dollar budget for the three year process, has that issue been resolved?

JARVIS: The problem of the overall budget has been one that we've been aware of for some time. Of course we're aware that there is a shortfall of approximately four million on each side, both the Cambodian side and the UN side, and that has been the case since the pledging in March of 2005. However we are relatively optimistic that that will be met. We haven't engaged in a second appeal because we are waiting to get the process really underway, and we didn't think it was appropriate to be asking for more funds when we're still in the early stages. We've now gone through to have the internal rules approved and the investigating process is getting underway. So it'll be within a few months that we will do a consolidated revaluation of what we are likely to need and make a second appeal.

SHARP: In the meantime will staff face pay cuts at all?

JARVIS: I don't believe so, I think that actually two issues have been contemplated here. There's been an ongoing issue about the shortfall in the overall budget, and in fact some revisions of expectations that will mean that we are lucky to actually ask for more funds beyond the original 56 that was requested. However that has been as I say an ongoing situation, and at the same time there has been some comment about reviewing or examining relativities of staff salaries between the UN side and the Cambodian side and looking actually at the absolute salaries being paid. But I don't see those two really as linked, they just happen to be going on at the same time.

SHARP: There was a comment last Friday from one judge who said the impending salary crisis could cause a walkout by local staff. Do you believe that's been averted now?

JARVIS: Well I think in any institution if you did suggest to people that they cut, their salary was going to be cut by 45, 50 per cent you would expect to have a reaction, and I don't think that our institution is different in that regard. The Cambodian government agreed with the United Nations in 2004 that the salary scale for the Cambodian professional staff, the national professional staff, which actually amount to about 48 people, would be set at 50 per cent of the UN rate. There has been some discussion about precisely what the 50 per cent was 50 per cent of; i.e. is it a net rate, a gross rate, does it include allowances etc. And so there's been some discussion about it. But the principle of the 50 per cent was a well established one and has been our operating procedure for the last year since we setup the court. If I can just expand on that a little bit, at the time of the negotiations there were different points of view put forward. Some people argued that the national and international staff should get the same salary, that after all they had the same responsibilities, they had the same tasks and the same obligations and they should receive the same remuneration, as is the case in for instance Sierra Leone where national and international are getting the same rate at hybrid court. Other people argued that since the Cambodian government had wanted the Extraordinary Chambers to be in the courts of Cambodia that the Cambodian staff should be paid as normal national government officials, and the internationals would come in on the UN rate. I think there are different considerations being looked at about possibilities of adjustment, but I don't see it as an impending crisis. I think that it can be worked through.

SHARP: So is it fair to say Helen Jarvis that all agencies and bodies concerned in this salary dispute have agreed to work towards a resolution?

JARVIS: Yes I think that's indeed a good way of putting it.

Cambodian ruling party: Khmer Rouge tribunal no place for politics
Deutsche Presse-Agentur / Monsters and Critics
June 28, 2007

Phnom Penh - The president of the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP), Chea Sim, used the party's anniversary celebrations Thursday to warn that the upcoming trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders were no place to play politics.

Speaking at party headquarters during the CPP's 56th anniversary celebrations, Chea Sim said his party was solidly behind the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the hearings were a place to find justice for all Cambodians above all else.

'The CPP reiterates it continues to support the ECCC. We sincerely hope the tribunal is conducted smoothly and successfully to bring peace, stability and justice to the Cambodian people,' he told thousands of CPP faithful.

'The conduct of this tribunal should not be exploited by any political entity which would violate the true principals of the tribunal and deeply disrespect the souls of the victims.'

Critics have accused the CPP of stalling the hearings, which are expected to try a handful of surviving former Khmer Rouge leaders on charges of genocide and human rights abuses.

The CPP has vehemently denied the allegations, saying those critics have anti-government agendas and lack a deeper understanding of a complicated civil war.

The CPP marks June 28, 1951 as its birth date, when it carried the word 'revolutionary' in its name, and some members subsequently joined the struggle for independence from French colonial rule.

Some prominent current CPP cadre later joined the Khmer Rouge, but many of them came from provinces close to Vietnam which formed the movement's more moderate Bophea faction, and defected after the paranoid and rabidly anti-Vietnamese Khmer Rouge leadership turned upon its own and began bloody purges of their members.

Many, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, fled to Vietnam and formed the nucleus of the forces which returned with Vietnamese backing to overthrow the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime in 1979.

The CPP has shrugged off the Khmer Rouge past of some of its members, pointing out that Hun Sen requested the United Nations help set up the 56-million-dollar joint UN-Cambodia tribunal which it eventually agreed to in 2003.

Up to 2 million Cambodians are believed to have died during the 1975 to 1979 DK regime. Former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died without ever facing justice in 1998.

Guilty Keep Vigil after Gold Rush in Killing Fields
The Scotsman
By Seth Mydans
July 1, 2007

THE killing fields of Cambodia, containing the graves of thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge from the 1970s, are being ripped open by impoverished villagers scavenging for jewellery.

Researchers documenting the atrocities have found that at one site alone hundreds of graves have been dug up. Bones have been scattered through woodland by locals looking for trinkets to pay for basics such as rice and cooking oil.

"Everyone was running up there to dig for gold, so I went too," said Srey Net, 50, describing what seems to have been a communal frenzy that seized the poor and isolated village of Sre Leav. "If they can dig for gold, why can't I?"

"People said, 'This goose has no owner,' " said Ouk Souk, 60, a farmer. Few valuables were in the graves, but villagers took whatever they could find.

It was the first such raid the researchers had recorded in the thousands of burial grounds they have documented around the country. Altogether 1.7 million people died during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror between 1975 to 1979, from starvation, overwork and disease as well as torture and execution.

The invasion of what has been almost sacred ground suggests that past traumas are starting to fade even as Cambodia prepares to begin a long-delayed trial of some Khmer Rouge leaders, said Youk Chhang, a leading expert on the period.

"I think it has become a memory, rather than a physical thing any longer," he said, speaking of the pain of the past. "There will be no more tears. There are no more feelings to express. Only a flash of memory when you see a piece of bone."

For younger Cambodians, who know remarkably little about the Khmer Rouge period, he said, "It's just a dead person."

Youk Chhang heads the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, which has researched the killing fields and amassed a huge archive on the Khmer Rouge years. Two of his investigators said there could be as many as 9,000 bodies buried in the woods behind Sre Leav, 100 miles south of Phnom Penh.

Although the pain of the past may have faded, the bones and the ghosts of Khmer Rouge victims still terrify many rural people. After the assault on the burial ground, this little village seemed filled with remorse and dread.

The digging has stopped and several people said they had been awakened at night by screams from the graves.

"People heard voices calling out, 'Help me! Help me!'" said Svay Saroeun, 50, a deputy village chief. "Maybe they are angry at the villagers for digging up their graves. Or maybe they were tortured to death, and now they are being tortured again by people who are disturbing their sleep."

Srey Noeun, 47, a farmer with four small children, said she could not sleep for three nights after digging two small gold earrings out of a grave.

"I'm afraid that the owner will take revenge on me because she died with nothing but her earrings and now I have taken them," she said. "She'll say, 'Please give them back. They are all I had.'"

Srey Noeun said she sold the earrings as quickly as she could and bought things that she really needed: four pounds of pork, a sack of rice, oil for cooking and for oil lamps, salt, pepper, seasoning and milk powder for her youngest child.

"We never have enough rice," she said. "Normally we can't afford to buy pork."

The buried treasure seemed paltry after nearly a week of digging: one gold necklace and 27 small gold earrings. But it represented a fortune to those who live without electricity or running water, far from the nearest clinic, school or paved road.

The luckiest villager was Pen Chia, 27, who recovered the necklace and sold it to buy a cow. Most people found nothing but shattered skulls, bits of bone that looked like broken sticks and scraps of mouldy clothing.

"I dug all day without eating," said Pron Sythoeun, 36, a farmer. "I dug for four days. And I got nothing."

He has gone back to poke through the scraps with a stick, but few other villagers have returned except to light incense and pray for forgiveness from the restless souls.

The killing field sits empty now in the pouring rain, cratered with shallow pits and mounds of freshly turned red mud, silent under the trees except for the lowing of thin white cattle in a nearby field.

Some villagers said they had not known it was there, although its existence had not been a secret. It was beside them through the decades, like the suppressed traumas of the past, a blank spot in their minds.

They rediscovered it by chance, when Vietnamese soldiers came by searching for the remains of their own missing men. The Vietnamese Army drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, then occupied Cambodia for a decade.

Helping the soldiers dig, Pon Khlaut, a farmer, saw the glint of an earring in a pit. When he showed it to his neighbours, they abandoned their homes and fields and rushed to the woods to dig.

Among them was Srey Net, who knew the graveyard well. As a teenager, she said, she had been enlisted to bury the bodies of people who had died in labour gangs building one of the huge irrigation dikes that were a particular folly of the Khmer Rouge.

Nearly 20,000 killing fields, holding anywhere from a few bodies to hundreds, served as burial grounds for Khmer Rouge victims as well as execution sites.

Like many of the victims, Srey Net said, the people here died from accidents, exhaustion and starvation as well as fevers, malaria and an epidemic of diarrhoea. Many of them were sent to a small, crude clinic nearby from which few emerged alive.

"Whenever a patient died, they would ring a gong or blow a whistle," she said. "Even in the middle of the night, I had to run up there to help carry away the bodies."

Last week she was among the graves again, hacking at the ground with a hoe, unearthing what may have been some of the same bodies she had buried years ago. And then, finding no gold, she reverted to her former role, retrieving and re-burying some of the bones.
"I felt pity for them, that's why I collected the bones," she said. "They were scattered all over the place."

Srey Noeun, the farmer who sold two earrings to buy food, also had a connection with the bodies in the graves. Like many of them, she had been a member of a work brigade here, but unlike them she had survived.

"I went to see what was happening but I didn't have a hoe," she said of the raid on the burial ground. "I said to someone, 'Give me your hoe, I want to dig too.'"

The first thing she found was clothing, then bones, and then gold.

"I dug downwards to the feet, and then I started upwards," she said. "I found the teeth and the skull. I moved them down around the feet and I cleared the ground around them with my hands. I saw the earrings, first on the left and then on the right."

She said they were exactly like the small gold rings she had worn in her ears as a girl until they were taken from her when she was forced to join a work brigade.

Srey Noeun said she had no idea whether she had ever met the woman whose grave she raided, and she said she did not know why the Khmer Rouge had let the woman keep her earrings.

Death and delay thwarts the quest for justice

Cambodian leader Hun Sen has pledged a quick start to genocide trials for former Khmer Rouge leaders.

After repeated failures over the past six months, Cambodian and foreign judges announced the rules for the tribunal on Wednesday, paving the way for it to begin investigating the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders over the deaths of 1.7 million during their 1975-79 communist rule.

However, observers said efforts to prosecute the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders face further hurdles.

"The hardest part has yet to come, and that is who and how many [suspects] should be or should not be" indicted, said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, an independent group collecting evidence of the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

There is also a growing concern that ageing defendants could die before the trials begin.
"Cambodia can embrace ... a bright future only after this matter has been settled, the trials have been held and punishment will be given," Hun Sen said last month.

He himself was a junior Khmer Rouge member who defected from the group before the regime was toppled from power in 1979.

The top Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot died in 1998. Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge army chief, died last July while in detention pending trial by the special tribunal. He was believed to be 80.

The only potential defendant now in custody is Kaing Khek Iev, also known as Duch, who headed the notorious S-21 torture centre in the capital, Phnom Penh.

Nuon Chea, the movement's chief strategist; Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state - live freely in Cambodia but are in declining health.

Cambodia and the United Nations created the genocide tribunal last year under an agreement they reached in 2003. The 17 Cambodian and 12 foreign judges and prosecutors have spent the past six months in sometimes rancorous disagreement on guidelines. The tribunal is an unprecedented hybrid. It will operate under the Cambodian judicial system, which is often criticised as weak and corrupt. Decisions require support from a majority of the Cambodian judges, backed by at least one UN-appointed judge.

Neither the Cambodian nor the foreign judicial officials have given details about their cases or revealed names and the number of potential suspects.

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Central African Republic

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Cases: Central African Republic

Security Council urges opposing Central African groups to hold dialogue
UN News Service
July 3, 2007

The Security Council today called on authorities in the Central African Republic (CAR) to hold a dialogue with the country’s opposition forces and civil society groups amid mounting concern at the continuing violence and instability in the impoverished country.

Council members, who heard a briefing from Lamine Cissé, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative and the head of the UN Peacebuilding Support Office in the country (BONUCA), also said they remain willing to consider deploying a multi-dimensional UN mission to the northeast of the CAR and to neighbouring Chad.

In a statement to the press, Ambassador Wang Guangya of China, which holds the Council’s rotating presidency this month, said the 15-member panel was encouraging dialogue between the Government and others to try to consolidate peace and stability in the country.

“They encouraged the Government to continue its discussions with rebel groups in order to restore security to the whole territory, and called on these groups to act in accordance with the constitutional and legal framework by giving up any armed activity,” he said.

The security situation has been worst in recent months in the northwest and northeast, where fighting has forced an estimated 200,000 people to become internally displaced and thousands of others to flee to Chad or Cameroon as refugees.

In his most recent report on the work of BONUCA, the Secretary-General called the situation in the country extremely precarious, citing deteriorating humanitarian conditions, repeated violations of human rights, a culture of impunity, a lack of dialogue and tolerance between opposing groups, and persistent poverty and corruption.

Today’s statement called on Central African authorities to tackle impunity and expressed serious concern at the human rights situation and reports that Government forces have used disproportionate force in their fight against rebels.

The statement condemned the human rights and international humanitarian law violations by both sides in the conflict, and noted the continuing activities of armed bandits as well.
But it voiced appreciation for the efforts of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa, which has deployed a multinational force in the CAR, as well as to the African Union and the European Union for maintaining their political and financial support.

The CAR is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the Council statement said the Government and its international partners must intensify their efforts to fight poverty and promote sustainable economic development.

Court Urged to Probe Officials
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Katy Glassborow
July 4, 2007

As it begins investigating the CAR conflict, the ICC is facing calls to adopt a more even-handed approach.

Human rights groups are urging Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, ICC, to do a better job of probing government officials as he embarks on his fourth investigation, in the Central African Republic, CAR.

After criticism for not seeming to look into the actions of government ministers who referred situations in their countries to the ICC - namely, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC - the prosecutor should probe senior officials as well as rebels in CAR to combat a perception that the court only investigates crimes committed by the latter, activists say.

If Moreno-Ocampo does not look at the role of governments which refer their situations to the court, “his arguments need to be convincing”, Geraldine Mattioli from Human Rights Watch, HRW, told IWPR. “Investigations are not complete or satisfactory if they do not looking into those who bear the greatest responsibility,” she said.

This is tricky for the ICC because it’s being asked to probe conflicts in which ministers and troops have played a substantial role. Indeed, on July 3, the UN Security Council expressed concern at reports that government forces in CAR have used disproportionate force to fight rebels.

Prosecutors looking into crimes committed in Uganda and the DRC seem to have focused on those by rebel groups in both countries, with arrest warrants issued for one member of the Union des Patriotes Congolais, UPC, in DRC and five leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, in Uganda.

Prosecutors have been criticised by human rights groups for seeming to ignore the part government officials played in crimes against civilians.

CAR’s president François Bozize, a former army chief, referred the situation in his country to the ICC in December 2004, but he is inextricably linked with the violence the ICC is investigating, having led a failed coup against then-president Ange-Felix Patassé in 2002.

Bozize finally won power in 2003 after a protracted and bloody struggle, which involved civilians in and around the capital Bangui being killed and raped, with a pattern of widespread sexual violence, perpetrated by armed men, a central feature of the conflict.

This makes ICC staff awkward houseguests of the CAR government, reliant on its political will and logistical support for access to documents, unrestricted travel and a degree of security, while at the same time mandated to sort through all its dirty laundry, and hang it out to dry.

Although the Moreno-Ocampo has said that the focus of the initial investigation - which began in May - is on violence immediately following the 2002 failed coup, human rights violations persist with many civilians still subject to atrocities.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, cited the deteriorating situation in CAR’s north as the world’s most neglected crisis, with an estimated 200,000 people internally displaced and thousands of others forced to flee to Chad or Cameroon.

Tensions are compounded by government instability and a spillover of violence on its northern border from the Darfur region of Sudan and Chad.

Human rights groups say that ICC prosecutors must have an eye on those responsible for violence taking place today as well as that in the aftermath of the abortive coup.

“Prosecutors must investigate individuals in the current government who continue to commit atrocities with impunity,” said Godfrey Byaruhanga from Amnesty International, AI.

Human rights groups say that for the ICC to re-establish credibility as an impartial world court, prosecutors must look into the actions of the governments which refer their situations, regardless of the fact that their cooperation is needed to facilitate investigations.

Moreno-Ocampo says the CAR investigation will not target any particular suspect at this stage and will be guided solely by the evidence that emerges, with prosecutors pledging to investigate up the chain of command on all sides of the conflict.

Prosecutors investigating conflicts in Uganda, Darfur and the DRC have been criticised for indicting relatively middle-ranking rebel leaders and government “policy implementers”, instead of those who ultimately orchestrated violence.

Florent Geel from the International Federation for Human Rights, FIDH, said in DRC, the ICC gives the impression that maintaining a stable political climate was more important than rocking the boat by accusing key political figures of grave war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ensuring political stability seems to have been such an important consideration that targeting the politicians and militias which human rights groups believe the most responsible, including ex-vice president Jean-Pierra Bemba and President Joseph Kabila, appears not to have been countenanced.

In February 2006, the relatively middle-ranking rebel leader Thomas Lubanga became the only Congolese to be charged by the ICC, for conscripting children to fight in the military wing of the UPC in Ituri, the far northeast region of the DRC.

The UPC is a Hema ethnic militia and Lubanga faces charges of kidnapping children and using them in frontline actions against the Lendu, the Hema's ethnic rivals, UN peacekeepers and the Congolese national army.

Human rights groups have urged the ICC to look into the suspected crimes of other rebel groups in the country, as well as those orchestrated by government officials. The court recently announced that a second arrest warrant will be released in the coming weeks, but which of the aforementioned will feature in it is unclear.

According to Geel, some victims groups in DRC feel the ICC has so far been manipulated by the government and do not see the court as credible, so will be interested to see if prosecutors go after another mid-ranking rebel or a weighty minister in the new indictment.

As in DRC, the insurgency in northern Uganda, sparked by the LRA, was referred by the government.

Five indictments were issued for the leaders of the LRA in July 2005, and now international and local human rights groups, including AI, are pushing for the ICC to look into alleged abuses by Uganda’s own military - the Uganda People’s Defence Force, UPDF - during the conflict.

“If the UPDF is under ICC investigation, this has not been made clear to the Ugandan government,” said Byaruhanga.

At the same time, Kampala’s enthusiasm for the court has waned, seemingly due to its failure to bring those it indicted to justice.

Some observers suggest that government disillusionment with the ICC may have prompted President Yoweri Museveni to enter peace talks with the LRA - hosted by the government of south Sudan in Juba - in which there have been discussions about alternative justice mechanisms and even offers of amnesties.

Other commentators are of the view that Museveni’s apparent change of heart towards the ICC stems from concerns that the court might soon begin to investigate Ugandan government and military officials. Striking a peace deal with the LRA would keep ministers and commanders away from the beady eyes of the ICC, and also placate some communities in the north who argue for peace to have precedence over justice.

Byaruha suggested that Bozize would not have referred his country to the ICC if he felt he could be investigated and held responsible for his actions during the coup attempt. “[The government] was unlikely to submit a referral including crimes committed by all parties to the conflict,” he said.

Beatrice le Frapper Du Hellen, who heads the ICC’s Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation Division, JCCD, which secures government cooperation, told IWPR that from the outset, authorities are made aware of the ICC’s independence and impartiality.

When talking to governments that refer their countries to the ICC, Du Hellen says she makes sure they understand that prosecutors will determine the focus of the investigation, and will not be swayed by the referral of the state.

“Authorities know we have no intention to lead a one-sided investigation,” said Du Hellen.

However, she admitted that that the most difficult part of any investigation is determining who bears most responsibility.

Despite the fact that prosecutors have already identified witnesses in CAR to prove crimes like organised and systematic mass rape took place after the failed coup, it is difficult to identify those who gave the orders for these crimes, say analysts.

And more of a challenge still if those individuals now hold positions of power in the CAR government.

During the ICC investigation into crimes in Darfur, prosecutors were forced to find witnesses in 17 countries outside Sudan because Khartoum does not recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction, and refuses to cooperate or provide any logistical support to prosecutors. The situation in Darfur was referred to the ICC not by Khartoum but the Security Council.

This investigation has led to two arrest warrants being issued - one for Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb an another for Ahmad Harun, a former interior minister, who is now minister of state for humanitarian affairs in Darfur.

Du Hellen said that while prosecutors will lead the CAR investigation with government assistance, they “can do it without if necessary”, and that alleged crimes by government forces will also be probed.

Just how cooperative the CAR government will be remains to be seen. The omens are not good. Since Bozize’s government is struggling to run the country - with basic services in a state of collapse - it’s unclear how it will realistically provide logistical support for the ICC or access to documents and records, says Joel Charney from human rights group Refugees International.

Toby Lanzer, the UN humanitarian and development coordinator in CAR, told IWPR that “some stumbling blocks may arise” as the ICC investigation expands.

As head of state, Bozize has responsibility for crimes committed by CAR armed forces and presidential security units, known as the Presidential Guard, but Lanzer says this has only recently been made clear to the president.

“People [in CAR] are used to impunity as there is no tradition of the rule of law,” said Charney.

UN agencies have spent time with Bozize and senior ministers explaining that they are responsible for the actions of the Presidential Guard who are alleged to have torture and killed innocent civilians.

“Lines of accountability get smudged,” admitted Lanzer, who maintained, however, that the authorities are interested in clearing up crimes of the past and establishing the rule of law, to get away from an “all encompassing climate of impunity that has reigned in this country for far too long”.

But whether Bozize understood that referring CAR to the ICC could mean he is investigated for crimes committed before he became president, and ones that continue to be perpetrated under his presidency, remains a fairly critical unanswered question.

"It does not matter that the Bozize government referred the situation to the ICC. If anything, the ICC must demand and expect a greater level of cooperation from the government. The government must demonstrate that it was motivated by justice and not using the ICC to 'persecute' its opponents," said Byaruhanga

"The ICC has so far failed to demonstrate that being in power is not a basis for enjoying impunity. This has been the case in DRC and Uganda, with regard to suspects in positions of power."

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Democratic Republic of the Congo (ICC)

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

A Painful Way to Die
New York Times
June 25, 2007

If you think you face tough choices, imagine you were living here in eastern Congo.

“If women go to the fields, they’re raped,” said Shabain Katuija, a local man. “If they don’t go to the fields, they starve.”

So why don’t men go to the fields instead? Olivier Sbasoro, a villager here, explained:

“They rape the women, but it’s worse for the men, because they kill them or kidnap them to make them slaves.”

On this “win a trip” journey through central Africa with a teacher and a student, we’re visiting the forgotten war inside Congo. The death toll has already reached four million, making this the most lethal conflict since World War II.

The warfare has also caused a vast and potentially rich land to sink into hunger and poverty. Roads have returned to jungle, so as the rest of the world has gotten smaller, Congo has become bigger. When foreigners drove into a village that had been cut off by the insecurity, the local people hadn’t seen a vehicle for decades — and marveled at what they called the “walking house.”

After 10 years of warfare in Congo, much of the country is finally enjoying real progress, especially since U.N.-sponsored elections last year. But here in eastern Congo, war is ratcheting up again.

Grim shantytowns have been set up for some of the 150,000 people who have been driven from their homes by fighting since January. At one of these camps, I asked a chief if I could talk to a woman who had been raped recently. He introduced me to Angella Mapendo, whose husband had been killed and who was pregnant as a result of rape by soldiers.

When I had finished hearing Angella’s story, I looked up — and there was a growing line of other women who had been raped, all waiting to tell me their stories.

The tension is thick around Jomba, where a priest was executed recently for showing compassion and leadership. When we drove into Jomba, local people crowded around us to describe kidnappings, rape and murder by soldiers of various loyalties.

Peasants in some villages are now sleeping out in the bush every night, for fear that soldiers will raid their houses. At a local elementary school, I asked the children in one class how many had lost their fathers. Too many hands went up for me to count. (Many of the rapes and killings are by soldiers loyal to Laurent Nkunda. He’s the warlord whose mountain lair I wrote about a week ago.)

You can see videos of these sights, and read the terrific blogs of Leana Wen and Will Okun, the student and teacher accompanying me, at nytimes.com/twofortheroad. The U.N. World Food Program and a tiny number of aid groups are struggling to keep people alive. The effort is led by groups of heroic Catholic nuns and priests, supported by the aid group Caritas.

This war staggers on in part because the suffering here hasn’t registered on the international conscience, and because it has been allowed to fester and continue. Barack Obama and Sam Brownback are among the few prominent American politicians who have focused on the war here.

There’s no simple solution to the conflict, but we can lean on Rwanda to stop supporting its proxy force in eastern Congo, and also to work harder to repatriate Hutus who have destabilized Congo since they fled here after the genocide in 1994. We can push a peace process. We can support the U.N. peacekeepers. We can help with the reform and training of Congo’s security forces. And a six-hour visit by Condi Rice would help put the crisis on the map.

Of the many people I’ve met here, one I can’t get out of my mind is Cecilie Nyirahabinana, a young woman with a shrinking family. A few years ago, fighting led to famine and her two oldest children died. Her youngest, Anita, was still a baby and survived on Cecilie’s breast milk.

Then a couple of months ago, soldiers shot her husband dead. Since then, Cecilie has had nothing to feed Anita but green leaves.

So Anita is now skeletal and barely able to move, having slowly starved for months. Aya Schneerson, who runs the World Food Program office in the area, explained what Anita is going through: “These kids are in constant pain,” she said. “It’s a very painful way to die.”

And the way things are going, hundreds of thousands more will die that way.

Congo Court Clears Foreign Miners of War Crimes
Voice of America
by Joe Bavier
June 28, 2007

A military court in Democratic Republic of Congo has acquitted three former employees of Australian mining company Anvil Mining Limited of complicity in war crimes by government soldiers in 2004. Judges said the charges against the miners and nine Congolese soldiers were unfounded. Joe Bavier is in the capital, Kinshasa, and has more for VOA.

Canadian Pierre Mercier and South Africans Peter Van Niekerk and Cedric Kirsten had been accused of willfully offering logistical assistance to Congolese soldiers during a short-lived armed uprising in mineral-rich Katanga province.

A U.N. human rights investigation said civilians were massacred in the town of Kilwa, near the southeastern border with Zambia, when government forces launched a counter-attack to retake the town after it had been seized by a group of 10 ill-equipped rebels in October 2004.

The Anvil company runs the nearby Dikulushi silver and copper mine and the company's trucks and planes were used by the army during the operation.

Anvil said its vehicles were requisitioned by the military and it had no choice but to hand them over.

Van Niekerk, former security director at Dikulushi, and Mercier, Anvil's country manager at the time of the uprising, both returned to Congo to stand trial. Kirsten, believed to have been out of the country during the uprising, was judged in absentia.

All nine Congolese soldiers also on trial before the military tribunal were acquitted of war crimes. But two officers received life in prison for the killing of civilians; two other soldiers received shorter sentences for lesser crimes.

Anvil CEO Bill Turner said in a statement that he was pleased the court had cleared the men, who the company has always maintained acted appropriately at the time.

Congo is still emerging from a 1998-2003 war in which rebel groups and foreign armies battled for control over the vast central African nation's abundant natural resources.

An estimated four million people perished during the conflict, mainly from hunger and disease. And parts of the country continue to suffer outbreaks of violence, despite a U.N.-backed peace process and polls last year that elected President Joseph Kabila as Congo's first democratically chosen leader in four decades.

Unlike neighboring Rwanda, which launched a tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, to judge those responsible for the country's 1994 genocide, Congo has made little effort to shed light on the dark events of its recent history.

Many had hoped the trial of the miners and soldiers, which received logistical support from Congo's U.N. peacekeeping mission, would help put an end to the climate of impunity that still reigns in the country.

Human rights campaigners decried the replacement of the court's military prosecutor in February, claiming they feared the move was a sign of political meddling. And victims' supporters said they were disappointed by the trial's outcome.

Shortly after reading the verdict human rights lawyer George Katiamba, who represented the victims and their families during the six-month trial, said he hoped the case could be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

UN's Top Rights Official Concerned at Acquittals in Military Trial
UN News Service
July 4, 2007

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights today voiced concern at the recent decision by a military court in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to acquit all defendants of killings, torture and other abuses that occurred during an operation by the country's armed forces.

"I am concerned at the court's conclusions that the events in Kilwa were the accidental results of fighting, despite the presence at the trial of substantial eye-witness testimony and material evidence pointing to the commission of serious and deliberate human rights violations," said Louise Arbour of the verdict reached in late June in the DRC's Katanga Province.

"I am pleased that an appellate instance will have the opportunity to revisit these findings," she said, urging the appeals court to "fully and fairly weigh all the evidence before it reaches the appropriate conclusions that justice and the rights of the victims demand.

The High Commissioner also encouraged all competent authorities in the DRC to use all available legal means to bring justice to the victims of Kilwa.

In 2004, members of the country's armed forces (FARDC) regained control of Kilwa from a rebel group which had briefly occupied it.

In investigating the events, human rights officers of the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) documented incidents of summary executions, torture, illegal detention and looting by the FARDC forces and concluded that little and sporadic fighting took place. Human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have also investigated the events and reached similar conclusions.

In a statement released in Geneva, the High Commissioner criticized the military court's assumption of jurisdiction over civilians in this case. "It is inappropriate and contrary to the DRC's international obligations for military courts to try civilians. While military personnel can in principle be charged by court martial, civilians may not - they should be tried before fair and independent civilian courts."

The High Commissioner called on the Congolese Parliament to adopt as a matter of priority the bill implementing the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which would provide the civilian courts with clear jurisdiction for international crimes.

She recalled that during her visit to the country in May, the authorities had provided assurances of their commitment to the fight against impunity. "The victims of serious human rights violations demand concrete signs of such commitment, in the form of truth and justice," she declared. "That is only their right."

Peace 'in jeopardy' in DR Congo
BBC News
July 7, 2007

The gains of the Democratic Republic of Congo's peace process are at serious risk, the International Crisis Group has warned in a report.

"The national army is still the country's worst human rights abuser, while another crisis is looming in the east," the think tank said. ,/p>

President Joseph Kabila's election a year ago helped unify the country and bring some security, it said.

But governing institutions remain weak, abusive or non-existent.

Last year's historic elections were supposed to mark the end of years of conflict and mismanagement in DR Congo.

The ICG said Mr Kabila's government should make good on promises to respect opposition rights and stop using repressive violence in the west of country, where support for the opposition was strongest.

Amongst its other recommendations were:

Losing presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba's security be guaranteed so he can return from the exile
Parliament, courts and media be free to serve as checks against "a worrying authoritarian drift"
A peace initiative for the Kivu regions in the east
The findings and recommendations of the mining contracts review must be made public and illegal contracts cancelled.

"If the new government does not live up its own promises to build a different [DR] Congo, it is likely to continue being perceived more as a nuisance than a legitimate authority," ICG's Francois Grignon said.

"Without clear signs of improvement before year's end, donor support will start shifting to other post-conflict theatres, and [DR] Congo could lose the peace-building gains of the past five years."

A 2002 peace deal officially ended a conflict dubbed "Africa's first world war" after it drew in the armies and rebel groups from at least other eight other countries.

The mineral-rich country the size of western Europe has hardly any roads or railways.

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Darfur, Sudan (ICC)

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

Sudan: UN Steps Up Efforts to Deploy Heavy Support Package to Darfur
AllAfrica.com via UN News Service (New York)
June 27, 2007

A senior United Nations peacekeeping official said today that the world body is stepping up its preparations for the heavy support package to the war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan, while efforts are under way to establish a hybrid UN-African Union force.

"We have a lot of work ahead of us," Hédi Annabi, Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, said to reporters after briefing the Security Council.

The current focus is on expediting the deployment of the heavy support package, which is the second leg of the three-phase programme to support and enhance the under-resourced AU Mission in Darfur (AMIS), he said.

"Most, if not all" the offers necessary have been received, he noted, and the next step will be for potential contributors to visit Darfur to assess the situation to determine equipment needs.
Regarding the hybrid operation, the last phase of the programme, Mr. Annabi welcomed the Sudanese Government's unconditional support of a joint AU-UN peacekeeping force in Darfur following talks with a Council delegation earlier this month.

He added that the 15-member body will next adopt a resolution regarding the establishment of such a force, after which a budget must be prepared.

A large troop contributors' meeting will be held this Friday to discuss the "shape and form of this hybrid operation," the official said.

Mr. Annabi said that despite the challenges the new hybrid force - which will report to both the UN and the AU - could face, the two organizations are "committed to working together to coordinate their work so that the operation can work as smoothly as possible."

G8: Few Concrete Steps Proposed for Darfur
InterPress News Agency
By Michael Deibert
June 27, 2007

PARIS, Jun 27 (IPS) - This week's summit in Paris on the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region broke up with few concrete steps towards a rapid solution, analysts say.

This was despite public agreement among participants that more must done to stem a conflict that has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives, mainly civilians, since 2003.

The Jun. 25 conference, held at the bequest of France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy and his foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, brought together the Group of Eight industrialised nations (the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan) as well as China, which buys more than half of Sudan's oil exports.

Sudan itself was not invited to the conference, and member states of the African Union, the body of 53 African states formed in 2001 with the ostensible aim of integrating the region's currency and its defence forces, as well as promoting human rights, also did not attend.

But officials of the 22-nation Arab League, the United Nations and the European Union attended the conference.

"With the Sarkozy administration, Darfur was clearly going to be an area where France would upgrade its activities, and it's an area of common ground between Sarkozy and the foreign minister," Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at Chatham House, a London think tank specialising in foreign policy and international affairs, told IPS.

Foreign minister Kouchner was previously best known as co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning charity group Medecins Sans Frontieres.

The conference concluded with the European Union pledging to spend 42 million dollars in addition to its current commitments to provide relief assistance to Darfur in coming months, with host France offering to contribute 13.5 million dollars to help finance any peacekeeping force.

"There are limits to how far this particular meeting in Paris can go but it is an important stepping stone to get a more coherent policy," said Vines.

Though initially the crisis centred around the Sudanese government's response to two non-Arab rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and the larger Sudan Liberation Movement, which were waging war against the central government for its alleged victimisation of non-Arab residents in Darfur, the chaos engulfing Darfur has since grown in intensity and scope.

Sudanese military and government-aligned Janjaweed militia forces are accused of carrying out war crimes against the civilian population in the region, while the rebel groups themselves have splintered and re-formed with dizzying speed and in an ever-shifting array of alliances.

Various peace agreements between the sides lie in tatters. During recent months, the fighting has also spilled over Sudan's borders into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic. In March 2007, Janjaweed forces crossing into Chad were said to have killed up to 400 people in villages in that country's border region with Sudan.

Though the government of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashiral agreed to a November 2006 United Nations plan to strengthen an African Union force present in Darfur, it was accused of dragging its feet over implementation.

Earlier this month, under intense international pressure, the al-Bashiral government agreed to a combined United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force of more than 20,000 troops and civilian police, but observers doubt that the government in Khartoum will keep its word.

"We would hope that the Khartoum government would accept an international force in Darfur and that they stop bombing runs there," says Diagne Chanel, vice-president of Urgence Darfour, a group comprising more than 120 French civil rights, human rights and civil society organisations. "But we don't trust the Khartoum government because in the past they have always accepted peace agreements, while at the same time choosing war."

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters before the conference that "the international community has not as of yet discharged its responsibilities very effectively." Addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2004 after a visit to Sudan, then U.S. secretary of State Colin Powell declared that "genocide has been committed" in Darfur, and denounced what he said was a "consistent and widespread" pattern of atrocities against civilians there.

The United States and Britain have previously demanded that international sanctions be introduced against the Sudanese regime if it fails to open its doors to UN troops. The punitive steps would include the possibility of a no-fly zone over Darfur to prevent Sudanese military aircraft from attacking civilian targets.

Earlier this month, French military planes commenced airlifting food and relief supplies to refugee camps in eastern Chad housing the tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians that have fled there since October.

With the crisis having been labelled genocide, there would appear to be broad international cover for the UN to act.

Article One of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that parties adhering to the convention must "undertake to prevent and to punish" genocide "whether committed in time of peace or in time of war."

Article Five of the same convention states that signatories must "undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide."

Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in Darfur continues to deteriorate, according to those who work there.

"The need now is greater than ever, there are more people displaced from their homes, there are more people dependant on the aid agencies," Alun McDonald, spokesperson for the relief agency Oxfam told IPS in a telephone interview from his base in Khartoum.

"And our ability to actually get to these people is worse now than it's been over the entire conflict. We're holding on at the moment, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to stay, our staff is being attacked every day."

Sudan welcomes new African Union peacekeeping chief for Darfur
International Herald Tribune
July 3, 2007

KHARTOUM, Sudan: The Sudanese defense minister welcomed on Tuesday the new force commander for the African Union mission to Darfur and said Khartoum was "ready to cooperate with all parties" to achieve piece in the violence-wracked western Sudan region.
Gen. Martin Agwai, from Nigeria, arrived in Sudan a day earlier to replace another Nigerian at the head of the current 7,000-strong AU mission that began to deploy in Darfur in June 2004.

The under-equipped and understaffed force has been struggling to bring a measure of peace back to the region, where over 200,000 people have died and 2,5 million fled from their homes since 2003, when local rebels took up arms against Khartoum.

Sudan's government denies accusations it retaliated by unleashing allied militias known as the janjaweed, but has refused to extradite a Cabinet minister and a suspected janjaweed chief wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Sudan also resisted for months a Security Council plan for U.N. peacekeepers to replace the overwhelmed AU mission, before accepting in June a compromise deal for a "hybrid force" to deploy.

Defense minister Gen. Abdel Rahim Mohammad Hussein vowed Tuesday that his government would cooperate with the new AU force commander, who is also due to be in charge of UN troops once they arrive.

"Our government is ready to cooperate with all parties to achieve peace in Darfur," Hussein was quoted as telling Agwai by Sudan's official news agency.

However, the minister "stressed the role of African troops (in Darfur), because their understanding of the issue," SUNA said.

Prior to his appointment in Darfur, Agwai was chief of defense staff for the Nigerian armed forces.

He has also served as deputy force commander for the United Nations mission to Sierra Leone, and deputy military adviser at the department of peacekeeping operations at the U.N.'s headquarters in New York.

China Takes Credit for Sudan Allowing UN Peacekeepers
Voice of America News
By Daniel Schearf
July 5, 2007

China's special representative on Darfur says the Chinese government's dialogue with Sudan was key to Khartoum agreeing to allow United Nations peacekeepers into the conflict-ridden Darfur region. As Daniel Schearf reports from Beijing, China has become more active in trying to resolve the Darfur conflict after facing criticism for putting economic concerns above human rights.

China's special envoy on Darfur Liu Guijin said Thursday that Sudan's agreement last month to allow U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur "could not be separated" from the Chinese government's efforts on the issue.

"From the highest leader in China to relevant foreign ministry officials, we have always used our method of using our words and made use of every opportunity and channel in every aspect of work, especially with the Sudanese government," said Liu.

Khartoum for months dragged its feet on a U.N. plan to allow thousands of peacekeepers into Darfur to relieve overwhelmed African Union forces. Last month it finally signed approval for a hybrid force of AU and U.N. troops.

Liu visited Sudan and other African nations last month. He says the deployment will begin, at the earliest, at the end of this year, pending Khartoum's agreement on a date.

China has resisted sanctions against the African nation despite accusations Khartoum has supported militias responsible for mass killings and rape in Darfur that Washington has called "genocide."

President Bush has taken a "wait and see" attitude to Sudan's agreement to the U.N. deployment.

Liu says western nations should stop doubting Sudan's intentions and be more welcoming of the steps forward.

He compares Khartoum to a naughty child who needs to be rewarded for good behavior.
"It's just like a child. If you judge him to be a bad child, when he does something good you should give him a little encouragement and say some nice things," said Liu.

Human rights organizations say China, which buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil exports and sells arms to Khartoum, is more interested in money than in human rights, an accusation Beijing denies.

Liu says China was doing its best to ensure weapons sold to Khartoum did not end up in the wrong hands.

He says attempts to politicize Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Olympics by linking it to the Darfur situation could only be due to ignorance of China's efforts to resolve the conflict or from people maintaining a "Cold War" ideology.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and two million made homeless since 2003 when rebels and government forces began fighting in Darfur.

SUDAN: UN Says Ailing Environment a Key “Stress Factor”
InterPress News Agency
By Brian D. Pellot
July 6, 2007

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 6 (IPS) - A report by the U.N. Environment Programme assessing Sudan's environmental degradation, scheduled for a national launch in Khartoum on Jul. 8, has spurred debate for linking decades of conflict in the war-torn region to broader problems like climate change.

"Competition over oil and gas reserves, Nile waters and timber, as well as land use issues related to agricultural land, are important causative factors in the instigation and perpetuation of conflict in Sudan," the report says.

"Long-term peace in [Northern Darfur] will not be possible unless these underlying and closely linked environmental and livelihood issues are resolved."

Since the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region dramatically escalated in February 2003, when members of the region's ethnic African tribes took up arms against what they saw as decades of neglect and discrimination by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, the Darfurian people have been subject to government-sponsored displacement, rape and murder.

The violence orchestrated by the Sudanese government and perpetrated by its Janjaweed militias has claimed at least 400,000 lives, displaced 2.5 million people and left more than 3.5 million men, women and children struggling to survive amid violence and starvation, according to the U.N.

"There have been some people who thought that the report was simplistic in terms of linking climate change with conflict," Nick Nuttall, spokesperson for the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), told IPS. "Others say that it is absolutely necessary and a window onto a wider world."

The report says that flooding, deforestation, overgrazing due to explosive livestock growth and a marked decline in rainfall as a result of regional climate change have been "a significant stress factor" in Sudan's largely pastoral society.

UNEP's assessment offers the Government of National Unity, the Government of Southern Sudan and the international community dozens of recommendations to alleviate environmental degradation, but whether its recommendations are financially feasible and will have the potential to create sustainable results remains uncertain.

Amnesty International's representative at the U.N., Renzo Pomi, told IPS, "It's hard to talk about building a country like Sudan with conflicts going on. My impression is that the process will be very slow moving."

According to the assessment, the total cost of all recommendations, which are to be financed primarily by the Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan, is estimated at 120 million dollars over five years. This estimate, however, does not include several costly recommendations that were not factored into the bottom line.

Two recommendations in the report call for the Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan to "increase investment in environmental health-related infrastructure and services." The report goes on to state, "the investment required to attain even a basic level of service is anticipated to be in excess of USD 1 billion over a period of more than a decade" for each of the south and the north.

This additional estimate upwards of 2 billion dollars from two recommendations alone could effectively render the 120 million dollars and anticipated one to five-year corrective action timeframe cited in the assessment obsolete.

Andrew Morton, project manager of the report, explained to IPS his agency's decision to not include these recommendations, among others, in the 120-million-dollar estimate, stating, "I don't consider these to be environmental expenditures. They are what is needed to build the country."

Several other UNEP recommendations and stipulations are never fully developed or addressed in the report. One recommendation calling for Sudan to pursue expensive carbon sequestration technologies is estimated at just 300,000 dollars, and one to shut down Sudan's illegal ivory carving and trading industry is anticipated to be cost-free.

Both recommendations account for introduction alone, but do not include implementation, enforcement or an outlook toward sustainable development.

The assessment notes that, "Many governance recommendations will result in laws, policies and plans that will have a major economic impact. This follow-on cost is not included in the estimate."

Reforming an entire country will likely not be an inexpensive or quick process. "The report is designed to be alive and relevant for many years," Morton told IPS.

UNEP plans to maintain a central role in establishing the report's recommendations through at least 2009, if adequate funds are available. "We are close to securing significant funding," Morton told IPS, but he would not name potential bilateral sources.

Some outside experts worry that the deteriorating political situation may not allow for long-term sustainable development at this point.

"The great fear that I'm seeing is of a renewed war in the south," Sudan expert Eric Reeves told IPS. "There are good reasons to believe that war will resume, and if it does, it will be unfathomably destructive."

Sam Bell, advocacy director for the Genocide Intervention Network, told IPS, "We're advocating for a renewed peace process that brings together all of the disparate rebel factions. We can't solve this without a real peace process."

Such a process would likely rely on strengthened relations between the fledgling Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan.

The report states that the "wholehearted support" of more than 10 U.N. agencies, the Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan is "required for the implementation of many recommendations."

"You'll unlikely get 100 percent buy in right away," Morton said. "The whole idea is to show, through small successes, the benefits [of these recommendations]."

Benefits could be limited if international assistance, cited in the report as a force that "should play a strong role in the fields of climate change and disaster reduction," are as difficult to come by as some predict.

"The priority [in Sudan] is humanitarian assistance and stopping the conflict," Pomi told IPS. "I don't know how willing the donor community will be to give much money to Sudan to implement a long-term environmental project."

"You can't begin to address economic issues unless you look first at the political regime," Reeves warned IPS.

Fellow Sudan expert Alex De Waal expressed similar views in a column for the Social Science Research Council stating, "The most important culprit for violence in Darfur is government."

Both Reeves and De Waal have criticised recent U.N. actions that link environmental degradation to past and present African conflicts, most notably Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's June op-ed in The Washington Post in which he stated, "Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change."

"Every Sudan expert has nothing but contempt for that piece and for Ban Ki-moon's comments," Reeves told IPS. "There is absolutely no indication in the op-ed that he begins to understand that political realities are essential."

[back to contents]

Uganda (ICC)

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

Uganda's boy soldier turned rebel chief is a victim, not a criminal, says his family
The Independent
By Lucy Hannan
June 27, 2007

Dominic Ongwen might be the youngest person ever charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

As one of four commanders in the Ugandan rebel movement the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Ongwen is wanted in The Hague for "murder, abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation, as well as mass burning of houses and looting". He is also charged with forcibly recruiting children as "fighters, porters and sex slaves".

The date of birth on Ongwen's arrest warrant is recorded as "unknown". But to his family, tracked down this week in Olwal, in the Gulu district of northern Uganda, he is remembered as a 10-year-old, one of thousands of children abducted in the 20-year conflict between the LRA and Uganda's government. He was taken from near his home in 1986. "He is a lost child," said Akot Madelena, Ongwen's aunt, who looked after him when his mother died.

His guardian, Madelena, who is heavily pregnant with her seventh child, believes there should be amnesty for child rebels. "If he needs punishment, let them give it at home, I am ready to look after him."

The eldest son, Ongwen was in effect a child farmer, responsible for three younger brothers. He rose early to work that morning in 1986. At 11am he started the 4km walk home, before it became too hot to work. "We were coming from digging and a group of men with guns took Dominic," said his cousin Kilama Christoper, now 28. "They took him because he was the biggest."

Terrified, Dominic did not resist or beg.

The LRA's fighting force is made up primarily of child soldiers, many forced into gruesome killing rituals to cut them off from their communities. Humanitarian agencies say 20,000 children have been abducted or killed in the war, and nearly two million people displaced. Ongwen was indicted by the ICC in July 2005, along with four others, including Joseph Kony, the LRA's head. But his circumstances present "a fundamental dilemma", an ICC source in Uganda acknowledges, as he is a "veteran child soldier". The ICC does not prosecute minors; but Ongwen was an adult at the time of the charges.

Andre Laperriere, of the ICC Trust Fund for Victims, in northern Uganda, said child soldiers and abductees are "among the most victimised". He said thousands of children in northern Uganda had "completely lost their childhood... forced into terrible acts during the war".

Peace talks with the government are precarious because the LRA insists no settlement can be made until ICC charges are lifted and an alternative justice system is agreed.

Many civil and political leaders in Uganda also see the ICC warrants as an obstacle and say that local justice is preferable. The opposition leader Morris Oyengo-Latigo, said: "Most of the so-called fighters are victims, who were abducted, subjugated to mental torture and transformed into a fighting force. And the challenge is, when does somebody become responsible?"

Under the traditional justice of mato oput, the community forgives crimes of the past and reconcile.

A few kilometres from Olwal, in Pagak Camp, people hold another traditional ceremony to cleanse the camp of "evil spirits". This is the site of one of the worst massacres of the war. In May 2004, 50 women, some with babies, were made to lie in the grass and bludgeoned to death by the LRA.

"We can forgive but not forget," said one Pagak resident. "The LRA leaders must be punished."

LRA talks reach agreement on accountability
IRIN
June 30, 2007

JUBA - Peace talks between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army inched closer to success on 29 June with a late-night agreement on the principles for handling accountability and reconciliation for crimes committed during the conflict in northern Uganda.

The agreement, which deals with the third item on the talks' five-point agenda, will incorporate both the formal legal system and traditional mechanisms to achieve accountability and reconciliation for crimes committed by both sides during the two-decade-long conflict.

Mato Oput is an elaborate reconciliation ceremony of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, who are among the communities worst affected by the war. Similar reconciliation ceremonies are held by ethnic communities across the region affected by the conflict, and all processes will be incorporated into the accountability and reconciliation agreement.

"This agenda item was make or break for these talks, and I'm happy we have come out on the positive side," Captain Barigye Ba-Hoku, the Ugandan delegation spokesman, told IRIN. "We discovered that neither the usual legal system nor the traditional system were sufficient to achieve accountability for crimes on such a large scale."

Barigye acknowledged that despite having reached agreement, the International Criminal Court's outstanding arrest warrants remained a stumbling block to the talks.

"We know the ICC's main problem is the issue of impunity; we hope that once all agenda items are signed we will be able to go to them and present an argument that our agreement ensures that the commission of crimes in the conflict does not go unpunished," he added. "Each person who committed a crime will be held individually accountable and will be punished accordingly."

The agreement also provides for reparations, in the form of rehabilitation, restitution, compensation, guarantees of non-recurrence, apologies, memorials and commemorations. It also takes into account the 'special needs' of women, girls and children.

Discussions on the subject have taken the better part of one month; the signing was presided over by lead mediator for the talks and Vice President of the Government of Southern Sudan Riek Machar. S. P. Kagoda signed on behalf of the Ugandan government, while Martin Ojul, signed on behalf of the LRA delegation.

In order for agenda item three to be wrapped up, however, both parties need to agree on the mechanisms of its implementation. The parties agreed to return to their constituencies for consultations and will return on 29 July to finalise discussions.

"This is just the first part; we now have to thrash out the modalities of how these principles will work in practice," the LRA's Justin Labeja told IRIN.

Since August 2006, talks have been underway in Juba, capital of Southern Sudan, to end over 20 years of hostilities that have devastated northern Uganda and displaced more than one million of the region's residents.

The five-point agenda:

- Cessation of hostilities and LRA assembly at designated points in Sudan

- Comprehensive solutions to the conflict; tackling the root causes of the conflict

- Accountability and reconciliation

- Ceasefire agreement

- Demobilisation, disarmament, reintegration

Uganda, rebels agree local justice for war crimes
Reuters
By Tim Cocks
July 2, 2007

KAMPALA - Uganda has agreed to handle war crimes committed by northern rebels internally, moving closer to protecting insurgent leaders from international arrest warrants they say will prevent them from signing a final peace deal.

In an accord signed over the weekend by Uganda's government and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Kampala stops short of promising to shelter rebel leaders from war crimes indictments issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

But the agreement -- the third in a five-stage deal to end one of Africa's longest wars -- says Uganda has "national laws capable of addressing the human rights violations during the conflict", according to a copy seen by Reuters on Monday.

The ICC has issued warrants for LRA leader Joseph Kony, his deputy commander Vincent Otti, and two other senior rebels for mass murder, mutilation and using child soldiers in the 20-year war, which has been on hold since a truce last August.

But Otti said the rebels would move no further towards a final peace deal until the ICC is called off.

"Now we've signed this, we want to see progress on the government side with the ICC. The government now should go to the ICC and get them to withdraw the warrants," Otti told Reuters by satellite phone from his Congolese jungle hideout.

"We shall go for national reconciliation only after the indictments have been withdrawn. We shall see about penalties and national courts later."

The Ugandan government has argued the LRA's only hope of avoiding the ICC warrants was to sign a deal, undergo national tribunals for crimes, and then approach the international court's judges.

"ALTERNATIVE JUSTICE"

The weekend agreement is vague on punishment and the government only promises to "address conscientiously the question of the ICC arrest warrants relating to the leaders of the LRA".

ICC officials were not immediately available for comment.

The deal outlines "alternative justice mechanisms" to promote reconciliation and traditional justice processes.

Traditional leaders from Kony's Acholi tribe, who have borne the brunt of the conflict, want the LRA undergo a "Mato Oput" reconciliation ritual, where victims effectively forgive a murderer after he admits his crime and pays compensation.

Human rights groups reject that, saying a credible process must dish out harsher penalties.

The new agreement hints that punishments for grave crimes, many of which carry the death sentence in Uganda, will be softer or suspended for the sake of national reconciliation.

"Formal courts and tribunals established by law shall ... introduce a regime of alternative penalties (to) ... replace existing penalties," it said.

In neighbouring Rwanda, traditional "gacaca" courts trying people suspected of involvement in the 1994 genocide have been criticised for being slow and biased.

Uganda says setting up special courts for rebels
Reuters
By Tim Cocks
July 4, 2007

KAMPALA - Uganda said on Wednesday it will set up a special tribunal to deal with war crimes allegedly committed by northern rebels during a 20-year conflict, but that it would not handle charges of abuse by the Ugandan army.

The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) guerrillas immediately rejected the move as a breach of a deal signed on Saturday that aims to end a war that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted nearly 2 million more.

Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, who has led Ugandan government negotiators at nearly a year of peace talks in neighbouring southern Sudan, told journalists both parties would have to agree on the details of penalties for crimes.

"It would be premature for us to give specifics. Sentences, courts, etc, will only be arrived at after consultations by ourselves and the LRA," he said.

At the weekend, the LRA and the government signed phase three of a five-stage peace deal.

Phase three deals with accountability for war crimes and promises to use a national process, implicitly rejecting calls to hand over the rebels' top commanders to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

LRA leader Joseph Kony and three others are wanted for crimes including murder and using child soldiers, but say they will never make peace unless the ICC drops the charges.

"What we are working for is that all these people should be handled in Uganda," Rugunda said.

DECEIT?

But he said only LRA fighters will face tribunals, because the national army, the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF), already has existing courts marshal for punishing soldiers.

Rugunda said the military courts had dealt harshly with many wayward troops in the past, but LRA representatives rejected the creation of special tribunals for the rebels.

"This is deceit," the head of the LRA delegation at the peace talks, Martin Ojul, told Reuters. "Accountability has to apply to both parties, as in our agreement. Is that justice if only one side is held accountable?"

Phase three does not say whether government troops will face justice but a clause in an earlier draft saying "accountability shall apply to both state and non-state actors," was removed.

Analysts said the LRA were maybe too soft in negotiations.

"There is incriminating evidence on both parties. The terms of the agreement suggest the LRA delegation was wrong-footed," said Tim Allen of the London School of Economics, an expert on Uganda's conflict.

Leaders from Kony's Acholi tribe want the LRA to undergo a "Mato Oput" reconciliation ritual, where victims forgive a murderer after he admits his crime and pays compensation. Rights groups reject that.

"Penalties need to fit the gravity of the crimes," said Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch. "We're not talking about pickpocketing, we're talking about mass murder, rape, mutilation."

Rugunda said the tribunal would blend "existing formal justice, which is punitive, and the traditional cultural mechanisms which promote reconciliation," but added that amnesties would be possible.

LRA Rejects Plea to Free Captives
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Samuel Okiror Egadu
July 4, 2007

Rebels dismiss government appeal for the release of people held against their will.

Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, insurgents have said they will only release thousands of captured women and children after a final peace agreement with the government.

The government has appealed to the LRA high command based in its main Garamba National Park forest base, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, to free people who are being held against their will.

But in a satellite telephone interview with IWPR, the LRA’s second-in-command Vincent Otti said the captives would only be allowed to emerge from bush hideouts alongside rebel soldiers once the fighting is officially over.

Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni referred the country's 21-year civil war in the north to the International Criminal Court in December 2003. In July 2005, the ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo issued arrest warrants for five senior LRA figures - its leader Joseph Kony and top commanders Otti, Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen. Lukwiya died in combat last year. The LRA leaders are accused of abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation and the killing of civilians.

“We are not going to release anybody,” Otti told IWPR. “For what purpose would the rest of us be left behind? We are all going to come out together after the signing of the peace agreement. We are currently talking peace.

“Why should we release the children? Have they been in prison? The children we have here [in the bush] are our own children. They were born in the bush.”

Reacting to Otti’s remarks, the deputy leader of the government delegation at the peace talks, Henry Okello Oryem, who is also he minister for international relations, said, “It’s the wish and the prayer of the government of Uganda for the LRA to release all children, women and any other persons in captivity against their will.”

Speaking to IWPR from Juba, the South Sudan capital where the peace negotiations are taking place, he added, “The LRA should release these children so that they go back to school and the women so they can be reintegrated with their families.”

A recent report documenting violence in the two decades-long conflict in northern Uganda said that as many as 38,000 children and 37,000 adults have been abducted and forced to join the rebels. The report, entitled Abduction: the Lord's Resistance Army and Forced Conscription in Northern Uganda, was compiled by researchers from the University of California Berkeley's Human Rights Centre and Tulane University's Centre for International Development.

“More work is needed to identify the number of people who have gone missing in northern Uganda and to investigate their whereabouts," said the report. "Cross-cultural studies have shown that most families wish to know the fate of their missing relatives and, if they have died, to receive their remains.”

Uganda’s human rights commissioner Veronica Bichetero Eragu met Otti in an undisclosed location on June 22 in a bid to secure the release of women and children still held captive by the LRA.

“The objective was: how do we handle these people when the time comes for them to go home?” said Bichetero Eragu. “We need to prepare them for life after the final ceasefire. How do they melt back into society? Some might need to go back to school, while others might need vocational education.

“He (Otti) encouraged me to make a follow-up. So the door is open for further discussion and consultation.”

Otti, in his conversation by satellite phone with IWPR, said children who have been abducted by the rebels are now adolescents or older, and some have become fathers. “We don’t have children here. Those whom we abducted are no longer children. They are now grown-ups,” he said.

The Berkeley-Tulane Universites report noted that the majority of former abductees who escape and are admitted to government and non-government organisation reception centres in northern Uganda are between ten and 18 years old. Female escapees tend to be older, between 19 to 3. They stayed longer with the LRA than males, serving as long-term sexual partners and fearing to risk escape for the sake of their children.

“Women forced to serve as ‘wives’ are likely to be kept in encampments and villages located a distance from combat zones, offering less opportunity to escape, surrender or be captured by [Ugandan] army troops,” said the report.

Otti said the rebels will continue with the Juba peace talks, but say there can be no final peace deal until the arrest warrants against LRA leaders are withdrawn. “The indictments in The Hague are the major obstacle to the peace process. We shall continue with the talks as we wait for ICC to drop the charges,” said Otti.

Talks between the two sides began in July 2006, raising hopes for an end to a civil war that has displaced nearly two million people and resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths.

ANALYSIS-Uganda rebel deal leaves questions over justice
Reuters
By Tim Cocks
Jul 5, 2007

GULU, Uganda - It is not often that families of murder victims petition the courts to forgive their killers.

But in Uganda, almost an entire tribe whose relatives were slaughtered and children kidnapped by Lord's Resistance Army rebels are lobbying for them not to be tried before an international tribunal.

Fugitive LRA leader Joseph Kony and three deputies are wanted by The Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges including mass killing, mutilation and using child soldiers. But in northern Uganda, few want them jailed.

"They should forgive Kony," said Walter Akena, a 28-year-old resident of one of Uganda's refugee settlements, as grubby children with swollen bellies and torn T-shirts gathered round.

"We want to end this mayhem. Forgiveness starts a new life, bringing people together," he says, adding that he feels no anger towards the rebels who killed two of his brothers.

On Saturday, the government and LRA signed phase three of a five-stage deal at talks in south Sudan aiming to end a 20-year war that killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 1.7 million, creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

The LRA routinely hacked off the lips and ears of victims, butchered thousands and kidnapped children to use as fighters, porters and sex slaves.

Nearly the entire population of northern Uganda -- almost all the Acholi tribe -- was forced to take refuge in squalid camps where many complained of abuse at the hands of Ugandan soldiers.

Analysts say only an agreement that allows the LRA to avoid jail and save face will coax them out of their forest hideouts and end the nightmare of war.

"DELUSIONAL"

The phase three document handles accountability for war crimes, but is vague on penalties. "Uganda has institutions under national laws capable of addressing human rights violations," it says, implying a rejection of the world court.

For the LRA, that means the government, which requested the ICC indictments in 2005, must get them scrapped.

"The challenge is for the government to go to the ICC and show we don't need them," LRA deputy commander Vincent Otti, an indictee, told Reuters by phone from his Congolese hideout.

But analysts say only the ICC's pre-trial judges can remove the indictments and cannot do so on political grounds.

"The ICC indictments can't be wished away," says Phil Clark, a research fellow at the Ulster University's Transitional Justice Institute. "All parties need to operate on this understanding -- anything else is delusional."

The government says it will set up a tribunal for rebel crimes, with possible amnesties, but has infuriated the LRA by saying the Ugandan army, which has also been accused of abuses, will not face these processes.

"Justice that is one-sided won't stick," says Ron Atkinson, an expert on northern Uganda at South Carolina University. "The government does not ... have a serious intention ... for both sides to face justice."

Both sides agree there are softer alternatives to jail.

Leaders of Kony's Acholi tribe suggest reconciliation rituals during which a murderer faces relatives of the victim and admits his crime.

In "Mato Oput", both drink a bitter brew made from a tree root mixed with sheep's blood. Compensation is sometimes paid.

"ARROGANT"

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch says such rituals are unacceptable, because credible justice must dish out punishments to fit crimes. Proponents disagree.

"Justice is in the mind," says Norbert Mao, lawyer and chairman of Gulu district, at the heart of the conflict. "Once people believe something has been done which puts the abomination behind them, it allows reconciliation."

Mao thinks those insisting on retribution have missed the point. "The purpose is to prevent revenge. It is arrogant to dismiss traditional justice as an excuse for impunity."

Critics say that approach is insulting to northerners who have borne the brunt of the conflict.

"The local justice approach seems to infantilise the north, implying it is not ready for modern governance," says Tim Allen, expert on Uganda's conflict at the London School of Economics.

Officials admit any sentences for LRA found guilty of crimes would have to be reduced from those in national law, which include death. Amnesties would be offered, which would not please ICC judges.

Foreign Affairs Minister Oryem Okello says amnesties for grave crimes were used in Northern Ireland, South Africa and neighbouring Rwanda, where traditional "gacaca" courts have levelled lesser punishments for the country's 1994 genocide.

Traditional justice, say the Acholi, will be enough.

"We slaughter goats, we eat together, we are reconciled," says Morris Okello, 28, whose parents were killed by rebels.

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International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)

Official Website of the ICTY

Del Ponte: No EU-Serbia pact before Mladic arrest
Reuters
By Mark John
June 26, 2007

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union should not grant closer ties to Serbia until former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic is arrested, United Nations war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte said on Tuesday.

Del Ponte hailed signs the new Serb government is ready to cooperate with her tribunal in bringing to justice the top war crimes indictee in the Balkans and urged the 27-member bloc not to soften its stance after years of fruitless pressure.

"There should be no signing of the SAA (Stabilisation and Association Agreement) before Ratko Mladic is arrested and full cooperation established," del Ponte, who is due to end her term in mid-September, told a hearing of the European Parliament.

Mladic is charged with genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims.

The EU froze talks last year on an SAA -- a first rung on the ladder to membership of the bloc -- and accused Belgrade of dragging its heels in the hunt for indicted war criminals.
It restarted the talks this month after the arrest of Bosnian Serb general Zdravko Tolimir, a close Mladic aide, but made the conclusion of an accord dependent on full cooperation. It left open whether Mladic's arrest was a precondition.

Some European capitals argue the EU should grant Serbia closer ties to bolster the position of pro-EU moderates, and as a form of compensation for losing Kosovo, the breakaway Serb province for which a U.N. plan envisages independence.

Del Ponte said the new coalition government in Serbia had understood the importance of handing over the last four fugitives sought by the Hague war crimes court and appeared to have the political will to arrest Mladic.

"It should be work done by the end of this year," she told the committee, noting the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was under international pressure to complete all trials on its books by next year.

"At the moment things are going well."

Del Ponte said Mladic was believed to be in Serbia, but that the whereabouts of former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, also indicted for genocide, were unknown.
"He has disappeared off my screen," she acknowledged, adding she had no information to back up rumors he was in Russia or had visited Russia.

With a few weeks to go until the end of her term, del Ponte renewed complaints the Hague tribunal had not received sufficient international backing to get through its caseload and had run up against political interference in its work.

She said the international presence in Kosovo, which has been administered by the United Nations since 1999, had impeded the tribunal's work there, citing "favoritism" which "became a serious obstacle to the process of justice".

NATO, EU force raid house of Karadzic's wife
Reuters
June 29, 2007
By Zeljko Debelnogic

PALE, Bosnia June 29 (Reuters) - NATO and European Union soldiers on Friday raided the house of the wife of Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, looking for traces of him and the network supporting him.

Karadzic, Bosnian Serb leader in the 1992-95 war in which some 100,000 people were killed and who is wanted on charges of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, has been on the run for 10 years.

"We are looking for items of interest to ICTY and for information about Karadzic's support network," NATO spokesman Derek Chappell told Reuters by telephone.

ICTY's Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte told the European Parliament on Tuesday she had no idea where Karadzic was hiding though he had to be somewhere in the Balkans.

Chappell said the operation was led by the EU peacekeeping force (EUFOR) with extra back-up from the Bosnian Serb police.

A Reuters cameraman said some 30 EUFOR and NATO vehicles blocked entrances to Karadzic's house in Pale, in the mountains east of Sarajevo, while Italian paramilitary carabinieri conducted the search.

NATO and EUFOR have raided houses of the Karadzic family on several occasions and even detained his son in 2005, but they have failed to find one of the world's most wanted man.

He and his military commander and fellow fugitive Ratko Mladic have both been indicted twice for genocide by the ICTY.

There have been no credible reported sightings of Karadzic for several years.

The two fugitives were charged over the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the July 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims in the eastern U.N. "safe area" of Srebrenica.

Two more ethnic Serbs, one from Bosnia and one from Croatia, are also sought by the ICTY to stand war crimes trials.

Del Ponte: Gotovina Was Located by a Phone Call
BIRN
July 4, 2007

Brussels _ The Croatian authorities were able to locate the fugitive general, Ante Gotovina, after he made a phone call to his wife, Carla Del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor for the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, confirmed.

"It was a telephone conversation from Gotovina to his wife,” Del Ponte said. Del Ponte was speaking at a debate organized by the Brussels-based think tank, the European Policy Center.

The telephone conversation helped Croatia’s authorities to trace the general’s precise location, which was considered a pure stroke of luck. “They [the Croat authorities] were able to intercept the conversation. They knew it was him… [because] he spoke also about me”, Del Ponte added.

Croatia’s EU accession talks were put on ice on March 17, 2005, after the Zagreb authorities failed to meet a deadline to arrest and transfer the indicted general to The Hague.

Later that year, on October 3 in Luxemburg, Del Ponte announced that Croatia was “fully cooperating” and the talks resumed. Gotovina was arrested in Spain in December of the same year.

The Chief Prosecutor said the Gotovina case offered proof of the success of the policy of conditionality applied by the European Union.

She explained that it had been very complicated to convince the authorities to act over Gotovina because he was widely considered a war hero in Croatia for his role during the war of independence in the 1990s.

How the mighty are falling
The Economist
July 5, 2007

The beginning of the end of impunity for the world's once all-powerful thugs

AS THE world's first permanent war-crimes court celebrates its fifth birthday this week, the mood is upbeat: formal investigations are under way in four countries; it has issued eight arrest warrants; it is about to gain its 105th member, Japan; its first trial begins in the autumn, and America, once hostile, now sounds decidedly more friendly. Indeed, the administration recently said it would, if asked, consider assisting the court's work on Darfur.

So far, the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is allowed to investigate atrocities perpetrated since its founding in July 2002, has no big scalps to display. Its eight accused comprise five leaders of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda, a janjaweed leader in Darfur, a Sudanese government minister and a Congolese warlord. But it has at least one ex-president, Ange-Félix Patassé of the Central African Republic, in its sights, and more may be targeted soon.

So these are uncomfortable times for tyrants, past or present. They used to be able to escape justice through brutality at home, or if that failed, fleeing abroad. Now justice's arms are looking longer and more muscular. This week Charles Taylor, a notorious Liberian ex-president and warlord, appeared at Sierra Leone's Special Court, transferred to The Hague, on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Justice may also be catching up with Hissène Habré, Chad's former president. After living in exile in Senegal for the past 17 years, he is now facing trial before a special war-crimes court set up by the Senegalese government earlier this year on the orders of the African Union. It was only after Belgium had threatened to try Mr Habré under its “universal jurisdiction” law that African leaders decided to abandon their tradition of mutual protection and vote for his prosecution by one of their own.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better-kno
wn as “Chemical Ali” for killing tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds with poison gas, was last month sentenced to death by an American-sponsored court along with two other henchmen. Mr Hussein himself and two close allies have been executed. More expect the same fate as the trials continue.

Like Chile's Augusto Pinochet and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Cambodia's Khmers Rouges, Pol Pot, managed to escape justice by dying. But his surviving underlings may not be so lucky. Last month the final obstacle to the long-promised genocide trials of an expected dozen or so Khmer Rouge leaders was removed when agreement was reached on the rules of procedure for the special “hybrid” international tribunal, set up by the UN and the Cambodian government.

In Lebanon, where attempts to create a special court to try the assassins of Rafik Hariri, the country's former prime minister, have been going on for more than a year, the Security Council has at last decided to take the bull by the horns, voting to set up a tribunal “of international character” without the approval of Lebanon's deadlocked parliament. Lebanon is already holding eight suspects, including four Syrian generals. Syria, and its Lebanese protégés, Hizbullah, have denounced the decision.

Extradition adds another dimension, giving national justice systems a global reach. Two Argentine judges want Spain to send Isabel Perón, the country's former president, home to face a war-crimes trial. Peru is pressing Chile to agree the extradition of its former president, Alberto Fujimori, on human-rights and corruption charges.

It is easy to pooh-pooh international courts. After the creation of the world's first international war-crimes tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo at the end of the second world war, it took nearly half a century before another one was established—the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), set up by the UN in The Hague in 1993. But since then, progress has been impressive. Of the 161 people the ICTY has indicted, only four are still on the run; 59 have been convicted.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up the following year, has done rather less well. Of the 70 or so indicted, 18 are still at large, including Félicien Kabuga, a multi-millionaire and alleged bankroller of the 1994 genocide. But among the 28 so far convicted are Rwanda's former prime minister, Jean Kambanda, and seven of his ministers.

The ICTY's fugitives include, of course, two of its most wanted suspects—Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, and his top general, Ratko Mladic. But since last month's arrest of Zdravko Tolimir, Mr Mladic's top aide, hopes have again been raised of the general's possible imminent arrest. Indeed, Carla Del Ponte, the court's chief prosecutor, came back from a visit to Serbia last month saying that Belgrade had told her that “they will give me Mladic”.

Few of these once-powerful gentlemen (and one lady) ever dreamed that they would—or could—be held to account for their past crimes. But times have changed. As Libya's president, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, said anxiously when his former protégé, Liberia's Mr Taylor, was handed over to Sierra Leone's Special Court last year after three years on the run: “This means that every head of state could meet a similar fate. It sets a serious precedent.” Fingers crossed.

Judges refuse to delay war crimes trial of Bosnian Muslim general to Sarajevo
International Herald Tribune
July 5, 2007

THE HAGUE, Netherlands: U.N. judges on Thursday refused to delay the trial of a former Bosnian army commander, after prosecutors asked for the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal case to be halted and transferred to Sarajevo.

Earlier in the day, prosecutors filed an urgent motion saying they wanted the trial of retired Gen. Rasim Delic on charges of murder, rape and cruel treatment moved because tribunal judges have limited the number of witnesses they can call.

"It is very serious," said prosecution spokeswoman Olga Kavran. "A week before trial the judges ruled on our witness list that was submitted eight or nine months ago."

Prosecutors originally wanted to call 91 witnesses but trimmed their list to 75. Judges have now said they can call no more than 55.

Tribunal judges did not immediately react directly to the motion to transfer the case, but in a brief written ruling refused to delay the start of Delic's trial in The Hague, which is due to start Monday, saying prosecutors have enough time and witnesses to prove their case.

"It would not be in the interests of justice to suspend the trial at the present stage of the case," the judges' ruling said.

Judges and prosecutors at the tribunal are coming under increasing pressure from the United Nations, which foots the multimillion dollar court bill, to finish their work quickly. The court is due to shut down in 2010.

Delic is one of the highest-ranking Bosnian Muslims to appear at the tribunal, which has indicted more than 160 suspects, the vast majority of them Serbs.

The former head of the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Army is charged with failing to prevent Bosnian troops and Islamic fighters known as mujahadeen from gunning down 24 Croat prisoners in June 1993.

Prosecutors say he also failed to punish mujahadeen fighters who in July 1995 captured a group of Bosnian Serb soldiers and beheaded two of them.

Delic's indictment said the remaining prisoners were eventually taken to a detention facility called Kamenica Camp, where another Bosnian Serb soldier was decapitated by the mujahadeen fighters who then forced the remaining prisoners to kiss the head. It said the head was later hung on a hook in the room where the prisoners were kept.

The Mujahadeen also are accused of raping three Bosnian Serb women and murdering other Serb prisoners in September 1995.

Prosecutors say Delic was warned the Mujahadeen "had a propensity to commit crimes, and particularly crimes against captured enemy combatants and civilians" but failed to take any action against them.

Delic surrendered to the court after he was indicted in 2005. He denies the charges.

Minister Says Macedonia Ready for Return of War Crimes Cases
BIRN
July 5, 2007

Skopje_ Macedonia is prepared to receive the four war crimes cases that a UN tribunal in The Hague wants returned to the country’s courts, Justice Minister Mihajlo Manevski said Thursday.

“Macedonia is prepared to take the four cases from The Hague tribunal, but the accent is put on preparation of personnel and the ability to ensure implementation of international standards," Manevski told reporters.

A courtroom and prison cells in Sutka prison in Skopje already meet international standards, Manevski said.

On Tuesday, Carla Del Ponte, the UN’s chief prosecutor for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, said in Brussels that she is ready to transfer the cases but awaits a “green light” from the Macedonian government to do so.

The four cases involve crimes allegedly committed by former Albanian guerrillas against ethnic Macedonians during fighting in 2001. The UN tribunal decided in 2005 not to start proceedings itself and return the cases to the domestic courts for hearings.

Since then, Macedonian governments have worked to postpone receiving the cases due to fears the issue could spark fresh ethnic tensions.

The cases were the only ones before the UN tribunal in which ethnic Macedonians were victims. The trial of former Interior Minister Ljube Boskoski and police officer Johan Tarculovski, who are accused of killing Albanian civilians in Ljuboten in 2001, started in mid-April.

Macedonia’s ethnic Albanians argue that a 2001 amnesty law exempts all involved in the ethnic conflict. Ethnic Macedonians insist the legislation does not exculpate those suspected of war crimes.

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The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes Chamber

Official Website

Custody ordered for Gojko Klickovic
Court of BiH
June 22, 2007

On 21 June 2007, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) issued a decision ordering custody of one month to the suspect Gojko Kli?kovi?. According to this decision, custody can last until 20 July 2007. Gojko Kli?kovi? is suspected of committing the criminal offence of Crimes against humanity.

In its motion seeking custody orders, the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH alleges that there is grounded suspicion that in the period between 1990 and 1992, together with other activists of the Serbian Democratic Party, as, inter alia, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Assembly of the Serb Municipality of Bosanska Krupa and President of the Wartime Presidency of the Serb Municipality of Krupa na Uni, the Suspect undertook activities aimed at dividing the Bosanska Krupa Municipality into Serbian and Muslim part. The Prosecution in its motion states that in this period, Suspect ordered, planned, prepared, aided and abetted in murder, deportation, forcible transfer and imprisonment of population.

On the basis of the evidence submitted, the Court concluded that there was grounded suspicion that the suspect had committed the criminal offence of Crimes against humanity. Further, the Court ordered custody having found that the evidence pointed to the existence of a risk of flight and a risk that the suspect, if released, would interfere with the course of the criminal proceedings.

Mirko Todorovic pleaded not guilty
Court of BiH
July 6, 2007

At a plea hearing held today before a Preliminary Hearing Judge of Section I for War Crimes of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mirko Todorovi? pleaded not guilty to charges of Crimes against humanity. Defense attorney for Miloš Radi? failed to appear at a today’s plea hearing. For the reason of absence of procedural requirements, a plea hearing for Miloš Radi? has been re-scheduled for Thursday, 12 July 2007, starting at 8.30am in courtroom 5.

The indictment alleges that on 20 May 1992, in the Borkovac village, near Bratunac, Mirko Todorovi? and Miloš Radi?, as members of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), together with four other members of the VRS attacked, using riffles, 14 Bosniak civilians which were hiding in the abandoned quarry near Borkovac village. According to the indictment, these members of the VRS arrested civilians and allegedly escorted them to the village. The indictment alleges that someone from the group of VRS soldiers killed one of the civilians from the riffle, after which the rest of the soldiers allegedly participated in torture of other civilians. Soldiers allegedly took money and valuables from these civilians. According to the indictment, soldiers, than escorted civilians to a nearby creek where they shot seven of them.

Mandic: Labyrinth of Jurisdictions
BIRN Justice Report
June 25, 2007

A court expert has not been able to confirm that the indictee was responsible for functioning of all detention camps established on the territory of Republika Srpska in 1992.
Judges at the trial of Momcilo Mandic, former minister in the government of Serbian Republic of BiH that existed in 1992, invited expert witness Zoran Pajic to testify. Pajic gave his opinion about the responsibility of the indictee based on material evidences presented by both parties. Pajic considers that responsibility for prisoners in correction facilities on the territory of former Serbian Republic of BiH during 1992 was "not fully under the jurisdiction of justice minister Momcilo Mandic". The Prosecution has tried to prove that Mandic was responsible, in his capacity as justice minister, for the 1992 establishment of detention camps on the territory of Sarajevo and Foca, which were controlled by the Serbian authorities. Zoran Pajic was introduced as an international law expert and a law school professor who has been working in the UK since September 1992. After the war he worked in the International Crisis Group in BiH as an expert. During Paddy Ashdown's term as the head of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), Pajic was the head of OHR's department for reform and legislature at the time when changes of the criminal law of BiH were introduced. "According to law, prisoners were under the jurisdiction of employees in the correctional facility, who, in turn, were under the jurisdiction of the justice ministry. Employees of the interior ministry sometimes provided assistance," Pajic said.

Based on available documentation, Pajic has concluded that this was a "labyrinth of jurisdictions" and has added that, besides the ministries of justice and the interior, Ministry of Defense "could also be" in charge. "From the available documents we can draw a conclusion that the chief commander of the army was also responsible for the organization and situation of detention camps," the court expert has said. Speaking of Mandic's personal responsibility, Pajic has pointed out that, on the one hand, the indictee was "a high official and a member of government of the former Serbian Republic of BiH", but, on the other hand, "he was not mentioned in working groups of the assembly and he very rarely signed acts passed by the justice ministry". Pajic has also said that he thinks that the justice ministry did not have jurisdiction over prisoners "having in mind that the army rented a part of prison premises", which made prison managers responsible both to the ministry and to the military commanders. Pajic's testimony marked the end of the evidence process at the Mandic trial. The prosecution will present its closing remarks on 9 July 2007.

Simsic: Call to Remove Judges
BIRN Justice Report
June 26, 2007

Boban Simsic's defense team asks for the current appeals judges to be removed and for the retrial to be postponed.
One day ahead of the previously scheduled presentation of closing remarks at the end of the retrial of Boban Simsic, the Appeals Chamber judges have received a request from Veljko Civsa, Defense attorney, for their exemption and for the postponement of the retrial "until further notice". "Having in mind that he requested exemption of the whole Appeal Chamber, I cannot say when a decision will be made," said chairman Judge Azra Miletic. The first instance Chamber of the Court of BiH sentenced Simsic to five years imprisonment, in July last year, for crimes against humanity committed on the territory of Visegrad municipality in 1992. After both parties had filed appeals, the verdict was revoked on appeal due to "wrongly determined facts" and a retrial was ordered. The Defense attorney has explained his request in writing, but the details have not been released to the general public.

This is not the first time that Civsa has raised objections to composition of the Appeal Chamber during the retrial. At the very beginning of the retrial, on 9 March 2007, Civsa asked if the Chamber was "competent enough to make such a decision". At that time he did not ask for exemption of its members, but he did insist on an "unbiased trial". Miletic responded that the Court was competent to discuss a case according to the law, and if the attorney had any complaints, he should submit them for one or more members of the council, but should give concrete reasons for them. It is still unclear when the next hearing will take place, or when a decision will be made.

Lelek: Indictee 's Tears in the Courtroom
BIRN Justice Report
July 4, 2007

Former Visegrad policeman again denies the allegations in the indictment and accuses Prosecution witnesses of dishonesty.

During cross-examination, indictee Zeljko Lelek denies once again that the allegations in the indictment are true and instead claims that Prosecution witnesses have given false statements. "During the war I never even cursed or looked at someone with anger," he said, with tears in his eyes. "During the past 14 months since my arrest horrible things have been happening to me and my family."

Lelek is being held responsible for crimes against humanity committed on the territory of Visegrad municipality during 1992. The indictment alleges, inter alia, that Lelek, a former policeman in Visegrad, acted jointly with the Beli orlovi paramilitary group commanded by Hague indictee Milan Lukic and that Lelek is guilty of murders, deportation, forcible detention and rape. During the direct examination held on 2 June this year, Lelek said that Bosniaks had been a majority in Visegrad before the war. Asked by the Prosecutor Bozidarka Dodik, during the cross-examination, if this is still the case, Lelek answered that "there is no census" but he thinks "the Serbs are the majority population". According to Lelek, Bosniaks from this municipality voluntarily left Visegrad after the Uzice Corpus of the Yugoslav National Army had entered the city in May 1992. Before leaving, they had handed over their weapons. The indictee had personally made official notes of the handover and issued certificates, as he had been working in the material and technical service within the police. He has also said that he made official notes of the suffering on Visegrad bridge, of murders and taking away of people, but he has not been able to provide details of these happenings. "I do not know the nationality of the killed people, but I heard about the murders and made a note about it," Lelek claimed, adding that he did not see who committed the crime as watching such an act being performed would make one an accessory. He has also told the Court that he "heard" that some civilians were detained in Vilina vlas spa in Visegrad that even rapes took place there, but when he visited the spa with the representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and foreign journalists, in June 1992, he did not see anything. According to the indictment and statement of witnesses, Lelek took part in the rape of women forcibly detained in Vilina vlas. The indictee has repeated his allegations that Bakira Hasecic, a prosecution witness and President of 'Women Victims of War' association, was responsible for his detention. Lelek claims to have "obtained criminal charges against Bakira Hasecic for war crimes" from the police archives in Visegrad, in April 2006, and that he was arrested afterwards. "Bakira Hasecic is responsible for all the things happening to me. She sends allegations against me to the prosecution, which works according to them. If I were in Visegrad I would try to bring the process against her to the end," Lelek has said.

He has not been able to answer the prosecutor's question if the alleged process against Hasecic was cancelled after his arrest. Lelek also claims that the Prosecution witnesses, influenced by Bakira Hasecic, gave false statements. Judge Paul Melchior Brilman concluded that Lelek's allegations imply that "Hasecic is a very important person" and asked the indictee and his defence attorney Radmila Radisavljevic when they intend to invite her to testify. "We do not intend to invite her as she already testified as a prosecution witness," Radisavljevic has responded and added that the defence did not feel the need to cross-examine this witness because "this person is well known for her behavior". The next hearing is scheduled for 17 July, when the Defence will examine three witnesses.

Lucic: Indictee Testifies
BIRN Justice Report
July 6, 2007

Kreso Lucic denies his role in taking away, interrogating and torturing of Bosniaks from Kresevo - but he does not deny that such things were happening.

Testifying in his own defence, Kreso Lucic has once again denied all the allegations in the indictment against him. He is charged to have taken part, as a commander of the Military Police of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) during the conflict with the Army of BiH in Kresevo in 1993, in the illegal capture, detention, interrogation and torture of civilians.
"The HVO military police in Kresevo, whose commander I was, did not guard the elementary school but it assisted, as per orders given by the HQ of the 3rd Battalion in Kresevo and its Security Service, in the arrest of men capable of military service and it sometimes took them to the front lines where they had to dig trenches," Lucic said. His examination has marked the end of the Defence's evidence process. The witness has explained that men capable of military service were those of 17 or 18 to 65 years of age.

According to the indictment filed by the prosecution of BiH, during June and July 1993 Lucic gave an order, as a commander of the military police, that all Bosniak men from Kresevo and the surrounding villages be detained in the elementary school premises and Sunje hangar. From there, they were taken away to perform forced works. Lucic has denied the allegation in the indictment which charges him to have tortured - together with his subordinate policeman Meho Hodzic - detainees in Sunje camp, or any other civilian. Speaking of Hodzic, who testified as a prosecution witness, Lucic has said that he "does not see why [Hodzic] accused [me] of that". "As the commander of the HVO military police I spent most of the time on the front line. In the first month I rarely visited the police premises in Elektroprivreda building, maybe three or four times only," Lucic has said. According to the indictment and statements given by witnesses, civilians were taken away to and maltreated in the Elektroprivreda premises, which were used as the police HQ. Lucic has said that Bosniak civilians were taken to the elementary school in Kresevo and Sunje hangar "for security reasons". Pietro Spera, a member of the Trial Chamber, has asked the indictee to explain "what does it mean to take people to a detention camp for security reasons". The indictee has clarified that persons living close to the front line were captured. "Do you know that the people detained in the school and Sunje hangar were taken to the front line where some of them died?" Spera asked the indictee. Lucic responded that he had heard of such situations but that he "knows that some of them went to their houses to take a bath". Prosecutor Slavica Terzic asked Lucic, during cross-examination, if the military police members used to disarm Bosniaks. He has confirmed and added that the order for these actions was given by the "Wartime Presidency of Kresevo, whose members were Croats and Bosniaks."

As Lucic has denied being responsible for Sunje detention camp, Terzic has presented to him a document, with his signature, allowing a "release and home isolation" of one detainee. Lucic has said that this was a "formality", claiming that his responsibility in this case is "none". The trial continues on 10 July, when the Prosecution will examine two additional witnesses.

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International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)

Official Website of the ICTR

ICTR Detectives Grill Kenyan Doctor
Allafrica.com - New Times (Kigali)
by Ignatius Ssuuna and agencies
June 28, 2007

Police detectives from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Wednesday interrogated a Kenyan cardiologist over reports that he treated key Genocide suspect, Felicien Kabuga.

Dr. Gerald Young was quizzed after reports that he had treated Kabuga between 2001 and 2003.

Kabuga is one of the most wanted persons for their role in the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. The investigators interrogated Yonga at his Mater Hospital Clinic in Nairobi on whether he had treated Kabuga and his close associates.

Yonga reportedly admitted that he had treated many foreigners, including Rwandese.

Sources privy with investigations on Kabuga say the interrogation confirms consistent reports that some elements in Kenya were shielding the fugitive in exchange for money.

The ICTR has been tracking Kabuga for several years and believes he is a regular visitor to Kenya, an allegation that Kenyan authorities deny. The Kenyan Ambassador to Rwanda Alex Keter could not be reached for comment by press time. But he had in the past told The New Times that Kenya was not aware of Kabuga living there.

The UN tribunal has also previosuly expressed concern over Kenya's failure to arrest the 72-year-old wealthy businessman.

Kabuga has a $5m bounty on his head offered by the US government.

However, he has continued to elude capture for the last 13 years.

Kabuga is accused of purchasing machetes and other equipment used by Interahamwe militias in during the Genocide. He is also accused of funding the Radio Television Mille Collines (RTLM), which incited Hutus to kill Tutsis.

At least one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in just 100 days.

The ICTR Chief Prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow last year visited Kenya in his efforts to convince Nairobi help in the capture of Kabuga. The UN has been accusing the Government of Kenya of protecting Kabuga and was said to be pushing the Security Council to put pressure on Nairobi to hand him over for trial.

The ICTR also says that Kabuga uses various names to disguise himself such as Faracean Kabuga, Idriss Sudi, Abachev Straton, Munyarunga Anathase and Oliver Rukundakuvuga.

Rwanda Requests ICTR Documentation
Allafrica.com - New Times (Kigali)
by Francis Kagabo
June 30, 2007

Rwanda is seeking to take over the property and documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) when the Arusha based court closes shop next year. This was revealed by the Minister of Justice Tharcisse Karugarama while appearing before the senate on Friday June 29. Karugarama also revealed that the recent visit of Ibuka President Theodore Simburadali to the Security Council was aimed at reinforcing Rwanda's request that the documents be transferred to Kigali as part of the historical legacy of Rwanda as a nation.

Ibuka is an association of genocide survivors.

Simburadali travelled to New York where he met with the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and presented a request for "civil damages" to be awarded to Genocide survivors for the pain they suffered. The ICTR does not give compensation.

The Ibuka president had earlier told journalists in Arusha on Wednesday during a stopover from New York that access to all information will enable survivors to reconstruct their history and that of their dead.

He added that the documents will give Ibuka the opportunity to fulfil its objectives of assisting and giving representation to Genocide survivors and seeking evidence of the culpability of the authors of the Genocide. The Arusha based court is due to close next year.

The tribunal, which was established in November 1994 to try people accused of involvement in the 1994 Rwanda Genocide in which more than one million people perished, has so far completed only 33 cases and convicted 28.

Some eleven cases are currently ongoing while fourteen individuals are awaiting trial in detention. The prosecutor also intends to transfer five cases to Rwanda national jurisdiction for trial.

Karugarama also expressed optimism that the 1994 Genocide convicts and detainees are in future more likely to be transferred to Rwanda given the improvement in prison conditions and the legal regime in the country.

Rwanda has recently taken steps to expunge the death penalty from the law books. The ICTR does not hand down the death sentence.

In accordance with the Security Council resolution 1503, all first instance cases that are being tried by the ICTR are supposed to have been completed by the end of 2008 and all work by 2010.

'Rwanda Ready for Post-ICTR Era'
Allafrica.com - New Times (Kigali)
by James Buyinza
July 1, 2007

Rwanda is prepared to inherit responsibilities of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) come December 2008 when the Tanzania-based UN court closes shop, a senior official has said.

Aloys Mutabingwa, Rwanda's special representative to ICTR has said that the country now has the capacity to take over tribunal's roles as envisioned in its completion strategy.

"The country is ready to receive all the ICTR convicts that have been in Arusha. We have built modern prison facilities like that of Mpanga; the issue is now about willingness for these people are brought back to Rwanda," Mutabingwa said.

He was speaking at the ICTR activists' conference at Serena Hotel last Friday.

The conference, funded by the ICTR and the European Union discussed the impacts of ICTR completion strategy on the Rwanda and suggested ways of handling issues that may arise after the closure of the tribunal.

Mutabingwa said the standards of Rwandan prisons have improved and monitoring mechanisms are in place to ensure that those standards are maintained to the United Nations demands.

He said prison officers have also been trained to the UN prison standards to ensure justice prevails after the closure of the Genocide tribunal.

He added that the government has secured funds from the EU and the Dutch government that would assist in more training.

He noted that there is need to ensure that ICTR convicts serve their sentences either in Rwanda or elsewhere.

Mutabingwa stressed: "It is mandatory that imprisonment be served in Rwanda but under Article 26; convicts have an option to serve their sentences everywhere as long as that (other) country is willing to accept convicted persons."

He appealed to the tribunal to organise information strategies with Rwandan civil society to sensitise them on their role in the post- ICTR Rwanda because they are the ones who deal with the real problems confronting the masses. The ICTR won't receive new cases in 2009 but will go on with cases that are on appeals level until 2010.

ICTR Attacks Rusesabagina
Allafrica.com - New Times (Kigali)
July 2, 2007

The Office of the Chief Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has accused Paul Rusesabagina of lying and providing unsubstantiated "information that is of no value in our work". The Tribunal response comes to counter comments contained in an interview that Rusesabagina had with the BBC Great Lakes Service Wednesday.

Rusesabagina claimed he met Abubakar Jallow (Prosecutor) who apparently assured him that the RPF members would be investigated for their alleged crimes.

"I wrote to the prosecutor Abubakar Jallow submitting my case and he personally received the document. In fact he even assured me that they (ICTR prosecution) are going to conduct investigations on the matter," Rusesabagina said in the interview.

He added: "So much so that all the RPF members and all those that committed Genocide related crimes will be followed up and punished."

Responding on behalf of his boss, the Spokesman of the Chief Prosecutor Tim Gallimore acknowledged to RNA that the Office had indeed received "communications" from Rusesabagina in November 2006.

"As a matter of routine, the Office of the Prosecutor acknowledges all communications, including those from individuals, offering information that might be useful in the prosecution of cases before the Tribunal," Gallimore wrote in an email to RNA.

He added: "Our response to Rusesabagina, (we) asked him to submit whatever information he possessed concerning crimes allegedly committed in Rwanda falling under the statutory mandate of the ICTR".

Gallimore said the Prosecutor's office 'took the further step of sending a team of investigators to meet with Rusesabagina to receive his information.' Gallimore did not however detail when such a mission was made.

"He offered nothing more than 'hearsay' information that is of no value in our Work," Gallimore said.

"This is the extent of the contact and communication between the Office of the Prosecutor and Rusesabagina," he added.

On the comment by the controversial Hotel Rwanda hero that the Prosecutor had made some sort of commitment, Gallimore said 'to clarify, the Office of the Prosecutor has made no promises whatsoever to Rusesabagina.'

Meanwhile on Thursday, Rwanda's ambassador Joseph Nsengemana called in to the similar BBC programme and categorically refuted claims by Rusesabagina that he had met UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in New York.

"Rusesabagina never met Ban Ki-Moon. In fact he was not in New York during the same period

Rusesabagina claims to have met him," ambassador Nsengemana said.

During the Wednesday BBC interview, Rusesabagina also said he had met and presented the UN boss with his letter asking for an extension of the term of the ICTR. Rusesabagina later confirmed to BBC that he never met.

In the letter, he asks the UN Secretary General to use his 'high authority to grant a term extension for the Tanzania-based Genocide tribunal beyond its 2008 deadline arguing it has fallen short of its initial Mission.'

Gallimore however also confirmed to RNA that investigations into RPF crimes were ongoing.

He explained that the Prosecutor has reported to the Security Council on 'numerous occasions that we are conducting investigations into crimes allegedly committed by members of the Rwandan Patriotic Army in 1994.'

On how the results from the investigations into alleged RPF crimes would affect the completion strategy of the Tribunal, the spokesman said 'in due course, a decision will be taken based on the results of those investigations.'

"If the results of the investigations have any impact on the Tribunal's Completion Strategy, we will address that issue at the appropriate time as the need may warrant," Gallimore said.

With the advice of the UN Secretary General Expert Commission, the Security Council established the Arusha-based court in 1995. Several years down the road, the highly staffed and funded court has just handled a handful of cases.

The same Council last year ordered the costly tribunal to phase out its activities by 2010. The remaining cases are now being transferred to Rwanda and Europe.

First Prosecution for Perjury Before the ICTR
Allafrica.com - Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne)
July 2, 2007

The indictment for perjury recently issued before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is a premiere for a tribunal where not a single trial was free from such suspicions.

The indictment followed an independent investigation initiated in 2005 by the chief Prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow, following accusations expressed during the appeal trial of Jean de Dieu Kamuhanda, former Rwandan Minister of higher education, scientific research and culture. Other cases had been previously evoked but not prosecuted.

The problematic of "false witnesses" has been raised regularly, by the Prosecution as well as the Defence. Among the previous proceedings, some were given up due to lack of evidence, some others, like in Nsengiyumva case (a senior military officer) where the Defence had lodged a complaint in July 2003, led to nothing.

Jean de Dieu Kamuhanda was sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2004. During the appeal hearing, two Prosecution's witnesses withdrew their testimonies. An investigation for perjury or contempt of court was carried out in May 2005.

The Appeals Chamber confirmed the sentence in September 2005, not waiting for the results of the investigations led by an American Prosecutor, independent from the ICTR, Loretta Lynch.

This procedure for perjury could have important consequences in the Kamuhanda case, completed since three years. The witness GAA indicted was one of the main witnesses who testified against the former Minister. On the basis of these new facts, a motion for a review could be filed.

This case took a new turn with the arrest by Rwandan authorities of a Rwandan lawyer, Leonidas Nshogoza, a member of the Defence team for Kamuhanda. In another case, the Rwandan authorities blame him for having attempted to convince a witness to change his statements, in favour of the defendant.

The files of both the ICTR and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) are mainly built on testimonies. Before the ICTR, a lot of witnesses are repentant persons. Others were tried by the Rwandan courts and some of them confessed having lied before these courts to "save their lives". The Defence often accuses some of them of being "fiction witnesses", "barefaced and obvious liars" or "a band of denunciators". It considers that testimonies like these are of no big significance.

A lot of testimonies are fragile. When the witnesses appear before the judges, more than ten years have passed and the statements made sometimes differ from the first ones given to the investigators. It is not seldom that Prosecution's witnesses become Defence's ones and vice versa.

The ICTY only faced one perjury, in 1996. Dragan Opacic, sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for genocide and war crimes by a court in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was called to testify against Dusko Tadic, former leading member of the Serbian Democratic Party and former member of the paramilitary forces.

After his testimony, the Prosecution told the Trial Chamber that it did not consider the witness as sincere anymore. Two months later, the Chamber ordered an investigation. After that, the Prosecutor did not decide prosecutions against this witness pursuant to article 91 of the Rules; nevertheless, the Chamber ordered his return to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Apart from "false witnesses", the parties often accuse each other of subornation or perjury or having put pressure on witnesses. In the Kamuhanda case, the request for investigation of the Appeals Chamber was based on alleged perjury and the attitude of two former members of Witnesses and Victims Support Section of the ICTR which characterized a contempt of court (threatening, intimidating, causing an injury or offering a bribe). The indictment filed by the Prosecutor, who claimed to be impatient to prosecute these occurrences, does not mention the prosecutions against the two former members of the ICTR. Neither does it mention the facts of suspected subornation in the former journalist Ngeze case, which had also been object of the investigation.

While prosecutions for contempt never occurred before the ICTR, sixteen cases were treated by the ICTY. Thirteen addressed the disclosure of the identity of protected witnesses; five of these cases also concerned intimidation and pressure. The prosecutions led to seven convictions. Before the ICTY, persons committing contempt are liable to seven years' imprisonment, five years before the ICTR.

According to the ICTY jurisprudence, the prosecution for contempt of court by the international tribunals pursuant to article 77 of the Rules of procedure and evidence is derived from their inherent power of sanctioning any interference with the administration of justice in order to guarantee that their "fundamental judicial function [be] saved" (Tadic case, judgement of 31 January 2000 relative to alleged facts of contempt against Milan Vujin). It also aims at the efficiency of the witness protection before the tribunals.

In this matter, the two tribunals (ICTR and ICTY) do not follow the same policy. However the protection of witnesses from Rwanda on the one hand, and from former Yugoslavia on the other hand, do not have the same scope. The protection organized in Rwanda is an open secret. The territory is small and the communitarian links are very strong, which easily makes fail a system of protection because this one quickly becomes well-known. Guaranteeing the witness protection and its possible sanctioning is a complex problem for the ICTR.

The annual reports of the ICTR regularly recall that "without witnesses, there would be no trial" since, pursuant to the common law rules, they are the main source of information and evidence. "No witness will accept to come to Arusha to testify if he doesn't feel well protected", the ICTR repeated, while not taking a firm position on this matter.

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Iraqi High Tribunal

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

Tribunal Convicts 3 Aides to Hussein: Sentenced to Hang for Genocide Roles
Boston Globe
by John Ward Anderson
June 25, 2007

BAGHDAD -- Three senior aides to Saddam Hussein were found guilty yesterday of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the Iraqi High Tribunal and sentenced to death by hanging for their roles in the slaughter of as many as 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq in the late 1980s.

The most notorious of the defendants, Ali Hassan al-Majeed -- a former general known as Chemical Ali -- received five death sentences for ordering the use of deadly mustard gas and nerve agents against the Kurds during the Anfal campaign. Majeed and Hussein were cousins.

Hussein had been a defendant in the case but was executed last year for ordering the killings of 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail, 35 miles north of Baghdad, after a failed assassination attempt against him there in 1982.

Some Kurds said after yesterday's hearing, which was nationally televised, that they felt deprived of justice because of the rush to execute Hussein. The government had hoped his quick death would allow Iraqis to put the past behind them and focus on transforming the country into a functioning democracy.

"I wished they had kept Saddam alive and had not executed him until they finish all the trials, so all Iraqis, including Kurds, could feel that they had been repaid for the injustices of his regime," said Saman Mahmood Aziz, 55, a teacher whose wife and five children died during the Anfal campaign. But he added, "We feel so happy after seeing the verdict today against Chemical Ali."

But Sukaina Taqi Khurshid al-Hamawandi 69, who lost 19 family members, including five sons, in the campaign, said: "I do not feel happy today for the verdict against my sons' murderers. This will not bring my family back."

Majeed, army commander of northern Iraq during the Anfal campaign, was one of the most powerful and feared men in the country.

In asking for the death penalty for him in April, prosecutor Munqith al-Faroun said Majeed was "the ultimate master of the genocide operations against the Kurds," while the other accused bore responsibility for a "plan that was implemented in stages to eliminate the Kurdish race from the north of Iraq."

Also sentenced to hang were Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti, 66, former armed forces deputy chief of operations, and Sultan Hashim al-Tai, 67, a former defense minister.

All three were found guilty of genocide, defined as the systematic elimination of a group of people because of their religion, race, ethnicity, or nationality. Each was also sentenced to death on separate charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

As his sentence was read, Tikriti, wearing a traditional red-checkered Arabic headdress, repeatedly interrupted Chief Judge Mohammed al-Uraibiy, saying at one point, "Thank God! We defended Iraq. We are not agents."

When Uraibiy finished listing Tikriti's three death sentences and announced a seven-year sentence for attacking religious buildings, Tikriti laughed.

"Thank God we did not become traitors, cowards, agents, nor thieves," he said. "Long live the glorious Iraqi Army!"

When his first death sentence was read, Majeed smiled and mumbled, "Thank God."

All the defendants had asserted their innocence during the trial, often saying they were simply following the orders of superiors and military action against Kurdish rebels was justified because they were backing Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

"I was a soldier, and I took the oath of my country and defended my country as best I could," Tikriti said during the trial.

The sentences will be sent to Iraq's Appeals Court, Uraibiy said in announcing the verdicts. The appeals process can be swift: Hussein was convicted of war crimes on Nov. 5, lost his appeal on Dec. 26, and was hanged four days later.

The Anfal trial, held in a courtroom in Baghdad's Green Zone, began Aug. 21. Numerous witnesses testified about the horrors of the Iraqi military's scorched-earth campaign against the Kurds, military planes dropping poisonous chemicals that blinded and burned them, men being tortured and executed in concentration camps, women being raped, and thousands of towns being leveled. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.

Early in the trial, Ali Mostafa Hama, a goat farmer, described a April 16, 1987, attack on his isolated village of Baselan in which bombs were dropped, followed by a smell "like rotting apples, or garlic."

"Minutes later, a lot of people, their eyes became sore and they started crying," and people ran to nearby mountains and caves, he testified. "Our bodies were burning us, and we lost the ability to see. The echo of our screams was coming from wherever we were, and we had nothing other than God."

A woman gave birth during the flight, and the child died with its first breaths, Hama said. The woman named her son Kimyawi, or Chemical, he testified.

In a statement released Friday, Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program for Human Rights Watch, said the Anfal trial was marred by procedural flaws, including the removal of the first presiding judge by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Cabinet for making statements perceived as favorable to the defense.

Dicker criticized the trial's "vague charges" and what he said was the defendants' inability to call witnesses because of concern for their security.

Two defendants in the Anfal case received multiple life sentences: Farhan al-Jubuiri, a former military intelligence commander in northern Iraq, and Sabir al-Duri, former director of military intelligence. In reading the verdict, Uraibiy said the court took into consideration Duri's expressions of regret.

Taher al-Ani, 70, the former governor of the northern city of Mosul, was acquitted because of a lack of evidence. Prosecutors had recommended Ani be freed when the evidentiary phase ended May 10.

Uraibiy announced that the Anfal case will continue with investigations of 423 other officials, including Wafiq Ageel al-Samaraei, former head of military intelligence under Hussein and currently a top security adviser to President Jalal Talabani.

Justice officials are considering trials in other high-profile cases, including the killings of thousands of Shi'ites in southern Iraq after they rebelled against Hussein's rule after the 1991 Gulf War.

Hussein's cousin sentenced to die
Los Angeles Times
by Tina Susman
June 25, 2007

BAGHDAD — The location was a secret. The timing was unannounced. The prosecutors were not identified as they stood silently in the chilly marble and granite courtroom, facing defendants secured in a steel pen.

For all the trepidation surrounding the televised conclusion Sunday of post-invasion Iraq's biggest trial, it was a stooped man with a cane whom everyone focused on, and he needed no introduction as he was brought in to hear his fate.

Ali Hassan Majid, dubbed Chemical Ali for his role in the gassing of tens of thousands of Kurds in Saddam Hussein's Anfal military campaign in 1988, was convicted of genocide and sentenced to death by hanging, the sixth associate of the former president to face the gallows.

The trial once had Iraqis glued to their TVs and was seen as an opportunity to acknowledge the nation's violent past in the name of national reconciliation. Ten months and about 85 witnesses later, though, the rigorous security and the reactions of people who followed the case showed how little reconciliation has been achieved.

Many Kurds, who are concentrated in the northern region of Kurdistan, want greater autonomy. They are demanding a referendum on whether heavily Kurdish areas should join their region, despite resistance from Sunni and Shiite Arabs and the central government.

A proposal to allow former members of Hussein's Baath Party and military to return to government and army positions also is stalled. Those involved in the negotiations say it is unlikely there will be agreements anytime soon on the issues, pressed by the White House as benchmarks to measure progress toward pacifying Iraq.

But a U.S. Embassy official acknowledged, "The legacy of the Baath Party and what it did for Iraq society still is not very healed, and there are a lot of exposed wounds on this thing."

The legacy was clear inside the court, where two of Majid's codefendants yelled objections as the judge announced the verdicts and sentences, and in the cafes and shops where Iraqis heard the news.

Majid was the most notorious of six defendants being tried for the Anfal killings. His cousin, Saddam Hussein, was the seventh but was hanged in December after being convicted of crimes against humanity for ordering the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites from the village of Dujayl.

The other defendants were Hussein Rashid Mohammed; Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai; Sabir Abdul Aziz Douri; Farhan Mutlaq Jubouri; and Taher Tawfiq Ani. They were high-ranking military or intelligence officials except for Ani, who was a northern governor.

The charges against them stemmed from an Iraqi military offensive in northern Iraq two decades ago dubbed the Anfal, or "spoils of war," campaign, in which as many as 180,000 Kurds were killed, according to prosecutors. During the trial, the defendants said they were acting under Hussein's orders to target Kurdish rebels allied with Iran during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Prosecutors countered that the aim was to eliminate Iraq's Kurdish population and that the victims included women, children, and farmers whose orchards were destroyed and whose livestock were shot dead. Iraqi government aircraft dumped mustard gas and nerve gas in the area, the prosecutors said, killing thousands. Others perished in detention camps or were gunned down and buried in mass graves. After Hussein's ouster in April 2003, many of the graves were uncovered.

One by one, each defendant was brought into the courtroom Sunday to hear the verdict and sentence.

Majid, Tai and Mohammed were convicted of genocide and other crimes and sentenced to hang. Jubouri and Douri were sentenced to life in prison for war crimes and received additional sentences for forcing Kurds off their land and seizing their property.

The charges against Ani, as expected, were dismissed after the presiding judge said there was insufficient evidence. Prosecutors earlier had agreed to this.

Most Kurds interviewed Sunday declared the outcome just, and many called on the government to hang the defendants in Halabja, a Kurdish town where about 5,000 people were believed gassed to death.

The Halabja killings are to be the focus of another trial, which would have included Hussein and could include the Anfal defendants, if they have not been hanged by then. With the Anfal trial over, many Halabja survivors fear they never will get their day in court.

In Halabja, survivors and relatives of those killed placed wreaths on the graves of victims and, to celebrate the conviction, handed out sweets in the marketplace.

Araz Aibid, the leader of a committee representing families of Halabja victims, offered to house Majid in his home if the government would execute the former Hussein aide in the town. "It is a victory for the souls of the Anfal victims," said Razgar Barzani, whose family was driven out of the city of Kirkuk in the 1980s during Hussein's Arabization campaign to replace Kurds in the oil-rich region. "He should be handed over to the Kurdish people to kill him in Halabja itself."

Another Kurd, Hama Aziz Shwani, said, "Let all the criminals like Ali Hassan Majid go to hell. This is the just verdict of heaven."

Members of Iraq's Shiite Arab majority, who also were repressed under Hussein's Sunni Muslim-dominated regime, also welcomed the verdicts. Sabah Shayal Dalfi, a resident of the Sadr City district in Baghdad, said there was so much evidence against Hussein's loyalists that no trials should be necessary.

Sunnis denounced the verdicts.

At a tea shop in Baghdad, several men said the trial was unfair and that the Kurds got what they deserved for not backing Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. "If I were in charge, I would have hit them with chemical weapons as well," said Abu Amir Saadi.

Raad Hadeethi said the trial was meant to settle old scores, not secure justice. He lamented conditions since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. "Under Saddam, life was good and we had security, we had peace," he said.

The trial was the second to be conducted by the Iraqi High Tribunal, established in 2005 to hear human rights cases arising from Hussein's rule. Most of the defendants, including Majid, listened quietly to their sentences. But two tried to shout over the judge as he read their convictions and sentences, which will automatically be appealed.

One was Tai, who in 2003 surrendered to a U.S. Army officer in hopes of leniency. That officer was Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, then commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul and now the four-star general commanding the war.

Tai was led from the courtroom, yelling and waving his arms.

The other, Mohammed, said indignantly, "We defended Iraq!" The judge kept speaking as Mohammed yelled, "Long live the Iraqi people!"

Majid leaned on his cane and listened quietly.

"Thanks be to God," he said afterward as he hobbled out of the dock.

Also Sunday, the U.S. military announced the deaths of two soldiers the previous day. It brought to 3,559 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the war began, according to icasualties.org, an independent monitoring group. At least 32 have died in the last week alone.

A suicide car bombing killed eight people and wounded 25 in the city of Hillah today, Reuters news agency reported. The Interior Ministry said 11 bodies were found in Baghdad.

In Baqubah, U.S. and Iraqi troops discovered an execution house and an illegal prison during the sixth day of an offensive there, the military said.

A 35-year-old Iraqi journalist was shot to death Sunday on her way home from work in Mosul, the Associated Press reported. She is the second female journalist to be killed in the northern city this month.

Iraq: Mild Reaction to Chemical Ali’s Sentence is Telling
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
by Sumedha Senanayake
June 27, 2007

The death sentence handed down by the Iraqi High Tribunal on June 24 against Ali Hasan al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, for his role in the Anfal campaign elicited a surprising response among those who both loathed and applauded him.

In contrast to the near circus-like atmosphere that swept Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish communities after former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, the sentencing of al-Majid, the former secretary-general of the northern bureau of Iraq's Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party and Hussein's cousin, for his role in the 1987-88 campaign against the Kurds was greatly subdued.

This shift in Iraqis' reactions to the sentencing is perhaps a telling indication of where the collective Iraqi psyche is four years after the fall of Baghdad.

Kurds Welcome Verdict, Quietly

Reactions to the death sentence fell along the predictable sectarian and ethnic lines, though it was fairly muted on both sides. In Irbil, capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, reports indicated that Kurds overwhelmingly welcomed the sentence, although the intensity of their joy paled in comparison to the death sentence Hussein received in the Al-Dujayl trial, when Kurds flooded the streets in jubilation.

Even statements by prominent Kurdish officials regarding the sentences were scarce. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih issued a statement on June 25 hailing the verdicts in the Anfal trial, but also used the occasion to underscore the Kurds' desire for federalism, the Kurdish daily "Aso" reported.

"Chemical Ali and other criminals should become an example for all those thinking of persecuting and threatening our people," Salih said. "The occasion of sentencing the criminals gives us the opportunity to insist on our legitimate struggle for a democratic and federal Iraq that can secure the country's future, so that the dreadful days of Anfal, chemical bombardments, and mass graves will not occur again," he added.

However, there were mixed reactions in the Kurdish town of Halabjah, where 5,000 people were believed to have been gassed in 1988. Those killings were not part of the Anfal trial, but will be the focus of a separate trial to be scheduled at an unspecified date.

Many residents of Halabjah fear that with the conclusion of the Anfal trial, combined with the execution of Hussein and scheduled execution of al-Majid, they may never get to see justice. Muhammad Faraj, the director of the Halabjah Chemical Victims Association, worried that the atrocities committed in Halabjah may never fully be recognized, slate.com reported on June 25. "We see ourselves as martyrs because we see ourselves as already dead," Faraj said. "We are dead because the world does not recognize our suffering."

Sunnis Condemn It, Quietly

On the other hand, Sunnis were even more subdued. There were no reports of the pro-Ba'athist demonstrations or confrontations with security forces that were reported after Hussein's sentencing. In fact, the lack of any visible unease within the Sunni community may be an indication that many believed that the verdict and the sentencing were a forgone conclusion.

After the fiasco that ensued following Hussein's execution, where an illicit video showed the former Iraqi leader being verbally taunted by several guards, and the "botched" hanging of former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Sunnis may have come to feel resigned to being victims of a vindictive government.

However, Ba'ath Party spokesman Abu Muhammad issued a statement on Al-Jazeera television on June 24 depicting al-Majid and his co-defendants as courageous men who sacrificed much to defend Iraq, but were now being sentenced to death on unjust charges by an illegal court. "This trial is invalid because it has taken place under an unjust occupation of Iraq and the destruction of the state. The great crime is the crime of occupying Iraq," Muhammad said.

The anger expressed by the Ba'ath Party is all the more biting, considering that the Shi'ite-led Iraqi government has yet to make significant moves toward revising the de-Ba'athification law that could allow thousands of ex-Ba'athists to return to their jobs. Many U.S. and Sunni officials believe this would give a boost to national reconciliation by enticing former Ba'athists, who are believed to form the backbone of the nationalist insurgency, to lay down their weapons and enter the political process.

Muted Coverage Reflects The Times

Coverage of the Anfal sentencing was fairly muted in the Iraqi press, particularly when compared with the media frenzy when Hussein was sentenced to death in November 2006. Reports from the courtroom indicated that only a few Iraqi journalists were present when the Anfal sentencing was read, and none from Iraq's Kurdish papers.

While the Kurdish press lauded the death sentence handed down to al-Majid and his two co-defendants, the collective euphoria that was expressed in the Shi'ite and Kurdish communities after Hussein's sentencing in the Al-Dujayl trial was clearly absent.

One reason for this is the absence of Hussein, himself a defendant in the Anfal trial, who was executed in December. Hussein, more than any other single figure, came to symbolize the ruthlessness and repression of the former regime in the eyes of the Kurds and Shi'a. And for them, his absence from the latter stages of the trial and the sentencing perhaps made many in those communities lose interest.

Indeed, the laborious trial, which lasted nearly 10 months, may have taken its toll on the interest within the Kurdish and Shi'ite communities. Following the Al-Dujayl trial that lasted over a year, Iraqis may have become weary of the spectacle of prominent figures of the former regime being on trial.

However, a more cynical reading may be that Iraqis, in general, have other more pressing issues to deal with, namely the daily carnage and chaos that plagues their country. Even Iraqis, who were once persecuted by the former Ba'athist regime, are now perhaps too worn down by the seemingly unending cycle of suicide bombings and sectarian killings to be concerned about obtaining justice for crimes that were committed by the form.

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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

Security Council urges support for Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal
UN News Centre
June 28, 2007

The Security Council today called on the international community to maintain its financial support of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), saying the war crimes tribunal needs more help to complete its efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the worst crimes during the country’s prolonged civil war.

In a statement read out by Ambassador Johan Verbeke of Belgium, which holds the rotating Council presidency this month, the 15-member body reiterated its strong support for the UN-backed SCSL and the progress it has achieved so far.

Earlier this month the trial of the notorious former Liberian president Charles Taylor began in The Hague, while last week the SCSL issued its first verdicts, finding three former rebel leaders guilty of multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“The Security Council particularly notes the contribution of the Special Court to strengthening stability in Sierra Leone and the subregion and bringing an end to impunity,” the statement said.

The second international war crimes tribunal established in Africa, the SCSL was mandated to try those bearing the greatest responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian and Sierra Leonean law within Sierra Leone's borders after 30 November 1996.

Mr. Verbeke said the Council recognized the Court’s efforts to meet its completion strategy, particularly as it moves towards its final stage of work now that trials are under way and verdicts are beginning to be handed down.

“The Security Council emphasizes the vital need for further pledges of voluntary contributions in order to allow the Special Court to complete its mandate in a timely manner, and asks all United Nations Member States to consider making such pledges.”

Charles Taylor war crimes trial delayed until Aug
Reuters
July 2, 2007

AMSTERDAM, July 2 (Reuters) - Judges at the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone have delayed the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor until Aug. 20 so a new defence team has time to prepare, a court spokesman said on Monday.

Taylor, who is charged with directing atrocities in Sierra Leone and instigating murder, rape and mutilation in a quest for the country's diamonds, has boycotted his trial since it began in June, saying he has inadequate funds to mount a proper defence. Last week Judge Julia Sebutinde ordered the court to ensure Taylor had another four people on his defence team including a lead counsel by July 31, in the interests of securing a fair trial.

Taylor, who has failed to appear in court since June, sacked his lawyer as his trial opened, initially saying he wanted to defend himself, although he has since changed his mind and is demanding a top calibre lawyer.

Witness testimony had been due to start this week after Judge Sebutinde last week ordered an interim defence counsel to represent Taylor, but in a joint motion both the prosecutor and the defence team urged the trial to be postponed.

Judges will explain their ruling when the court meets on Tuesday.

Taylor has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, related to the 1991-2002 civil war, which killed an estimated 50,000 people.

Prosecutors hope the trial will send a signal that international justice can operate efficiently and fairly as well as target the world's most powerful individuals. But some observers fear Taylor is intent on disrupting proceedings.

Charles Taylor attends hearing in war crimes trial
Houston Chronicle
by Mike Cooper
July 3, 2007

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Former Liberian president Charles Taylor appeared in court today for the first time since the start of his trial for atrocities committed during Sierra Leone's bloody 10-year civil war.

Wearing a blue suit and yellow tie, Taylor appeared 20 minutes late at a procedural hearing during which judges for the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone explained why they have agreed to postpone hearing the first prosecution witnesses until Aug. 20.

Taylor has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges that he controlled and armed rebels who murdered, raped, mutilated and enslaved civilians during Sierra Leone's civil war that ended in 2002.

He was due to enter pleas to two slightly amended charges later today.

The trial got under way June 4 for just one day and sat for a second day later in the month, but Taylor boycotted both sittings after firing his court-funded attorney and complaining he was not getting a fair trial.

First prosecution witnesses were due to be heard today, but prosecutors and a court official responsible for ensuring Taylor gets a fair trial filed a motion last week asking for the witness testimony to be delayed until August to give Taylor's new defense team — which has not yet been appointed — time to prepare.

Explaining the decision to grant the postponement, presiding judge Julia Sebutinde of Uganda blamed officials in the court's registry for not appointing new defense attorneys in time for the trial to start and said Taylor "should not be penalized for the laxity of the registry."

She said that ordering an interim lawyer to defend Taylor for a week of hearings that had been scheduled to begin today "would indeed amount to a violation of Mr. Taylor's fair trial rights."

Taylor announced he had fired his attorney in a letter to the three-judge panel on the first day of hearings and demanded a more senior trial attorney, arguing that prosecutors had far more lawyers on their team.

Prosecutor Stephen Rapp dismissed Taylor's concerns as administrative issues "blown out of proportion in order to create a reason for what we view as obstructive conduct in this case."

Rapp added that Taylor was getting more money for his defense — up to $2 million for the trial — than any other suspect charged by the court.

Prosecutors say they will call dozens of witnesses who will directly link Taylor to Sierra Leone rebels.

They claim the Liberian leader shipped rebels arms, ammunition and supplies such as alcohol and drugs used to desensitize children forced to fight. In return he got diamonds, often mined by slave laborers.

Hon. Justice Benjamin Itoe Elected Presiding Judge of Trial Chamber I
SCSL Press Release (PDF File)
July 5, 2007

Hon. Justice Benjamin Mutanga Itoe of Cameroon has been elected to a one-year term as Presiding Judge of Trial Chamber I. He succeeds Hon. Justice Bankole Thompson of Sierra Leone, who ends his term today, July 5.

Justice Itoe was called to the Bar on 25 July 1968.

After a career in the Bar, he was appointed Prosecutor General of the Bamenda Judicial Province in 1972, a post he held for nine years. During that time he was a Member of Cameroon’s National Law Reform Commission. He participated in drafting the Cameroon Criminal Procedure Code which harmonised the country’s Civil and Common Law Procedures. In 1982 he became Deputy Director of Control of Judicial Services of Cameroon in the Ministry of Justice.

From 1984, Hon. Justice Benjamin Itoe held a series of Ministerial posts in the Government of Cameroon, including Minister of Transport in 1984; Minister of Justice in 1985; and Minister of Tourism in 1989.

In 1998 he was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court.

He was conferred with the State Honour of Cameroonian Knight of the National Order of Valour in 1985, and Officer of the National Order of Valour in 1997.

Before his appointment by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to serve as a Judge of the Special Court, Hon. Justice Itoe was Deputy Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Cameroon. At the same time, he served as the Chief Judge of the Administrative Bench of that Court.

Hon. Justice Itoe is serving for the second time as Presiding Judge of Trial Chamber I. He first served as Presiding Judge of this Chamber from May 2004 to May 2005. During that tenure of office, he presided over the opening of both the CDF and RUF trials, respectively, on 3 June and 5 July 2004.

Court grants Charles Taylor more money for defense in Sierra Leone war crimes trial
Associated Press via International Herald Tribune
July 6, 2007

THE HAGUE, Netherlands: The court trying former Liberian president Charles Taylor for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone has again raised the amount of money he receives to pay for defense attorneys, a court official said Friday.

Taylor, charged with backing rebels who murdered, raped and mutilated thousands of Sierra Leoneans during the country's 10-year civil war, will receive a package worth some $100,000 (€73,500) per month, said Special Court for Sierra Leone acting registrar Herman von Hebel.

The package includes $70,000 (€51,500) per month for a legal team. He also gets a senior investigator and office space in The Hague, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

"It is almost three times as high as the other cases at the special court and (up to) two times higher than at the Yugoslavia tribunal," Von Hebel told reporters in The Hague.

Taylor's trial is being staged in the Netherlands because of fears it could trigger renewed violence in Sierra Leone if it were held there.

Taylor plunged the start of his landmark trial into turmoil last month when he fired his lawyer and boycotted the opening day, complaining he did not have enough money to fund his defense.

At the time, court officials said they would raise his monthly lump sum payment to $45,000 (€33,000) to allow Taylor to hire a more senior attorney.

Taylor is entitled to receive the money because the court has ruled he is indigent, meaning he cannot pay for his own defense, despite prosecutors and United Nations experts suggesting he has millions of dollars stashed in bank accounts around the world.

"We believe there are tens of millions," said prosecutor Stephen Rapp.

Taylor is believed to have enriched himself by taking a cut of lucrative contracts for timber and other resources in Liberia. Prosecutors also accuse him of funding the Sierra Leone rebels in part to get his hands on the country's diamonds.

Investigators are working to track down Taylor's alleged loot. If it is found and can be linked directly to him, the court has the power to make him pay back money he has been given to fund his defense.

Taylor's new defense team is expected to be in place in time for his trial's scheduled resumption on Aug. 20.

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United States

Guantanamo closure 'not imminent'
BBC News
June 22, 2007

The White House has denied reports in the US media that the closure of the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay could be announced imminently.

However, officials say discussions are continuing on what to do with about 375 detainees currently held there and how to resolve outstanding legal issues.

The White House has said it hopes to close the facility as soon as possible.

An important meeting on the issue was scheduled for Friday but was apparently postponed following the media leak.

The Associated Press news agency reported on Thursday that officials were saying a consensus on the prison's closure was near and would be discussed at Friday's meeting.

Human rights group Amnesty International responded to the news by renewing its call for the US government to close the Guantanamo prison camp immediately.

Many of the prisoners at the facility have been held without charge for more than five years.

Steps to be taken

Commenting on the reports, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "The president has long expressed a desire to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and to do so in a responsible manner."

But, she added: "A number of steps need to take place before that can happen, such as setting up military commissions and the repatriation to their home countries of detainees who have been cleared for release."

How long it will take for these steps to be carried out is not yet known.

The Bush administration has already been sending back some prisoners to their country of origin.

Reporters at a White House press briefing on Friday were told that "several dozen" Afghan detainees would be heading back to Afghanistan shortly. It was unclear who would run the prison to which they are sent.

Discussions are also under way with third party countries who may take Guantanamo detainees, the White House said.

The administration is also looking at how to bring some detainees into the US legal system.

The Supreme Court in 2004 and 2006 opposed the Bush administration's position on the legal rights of Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

Belief 'shaken'

Earlier this month, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell added his voice to those urging the immediate closure of the Guantanamo facility.

"Essentially, we have shaken the belief the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission," he told US television network NBC.

The high-security prison was opened by the US government in 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects captured during the war against the Afghan Taleban and al-Qaeda.

The inmates, regarded as "enemy combatants", are not given the same rights as prisoners-of-war and normal US court rules do not apply.

Many countries have called for the camp to be closed.

Durbin urges Bush judge to remove self from enemy combatant cases
Associated Press via Chicago Tribune
June 26, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois on Tuesday urged a Bush-appointed judge to recuse himself from enemy combatant cases and asked for an explanation about information that might contradict testimony about the White House's detainee policy.

"It appears that you misled me, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the nation," the Senate Democratic Whip wrote to Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Durbin urged Kavanaugh to remove himself from "all pending and subsequent cases involving detainees and enemy combatants." Kavanaugh's court gets more detainee cases than any other.

"Your lack of candor at your nomination hearing suggests you cannot approach these cases with impartiality and an open mind," Durbin wrote.

Kavanaugh declined to comment, but the court released a statement indicating Kavanaugh would not recuse himself from all related cases.

"Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation testimony was accurate, and Judge Kavanaugh will continue to carefully address recusal issues based on the law and facts of each case."

At issue is whether Kavanaugh, then White House staff secretary, misled the Senate panel during his confirmation hearing in May last year about how much he was involved in crafting the administration's policy on enemy combatants.

A Washington Post story Monday suggested that Kavanaugh told his White House colleagues in 2002 that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom Kavanaugh had clerked, never would accept any policy that denied American combatants a lawyer, as was then being considered by the administration.

Durbin, who first raised the issue Tuesday in an interview with National Public Radio, said the story appeared to contradict Kavanaugh's statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing.

During the May 9, 2006 proceedings, Durbin asked Kavanaugh about William Haynes, a controversial nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

"What did you know about Mr. Haynes' role in crafting the administration's detention and interrogation policies?" Durbin asked Kavanaugh.

"Senator I did not -- I was not involved and am not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants. And so I do not have the involvement with that," Kavanaugh replied, according to a transcript.

Supreme Court to rule on Gitmo detainees' rights
Associated Press via CNN
June 30, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rejecting Bush administration arguments, the Supreme Court reversed course and agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees can use the civilian court system to challenge their indefinite confinement.

The administration argues that a new law strips courts of their jurisdiction to hear detainee cases.

The justices took the action without comment along with other end-of-term orders. In April, the court turned down an identical request, although several justices indicated they could be persuaded otherwise.

The move is highly unusual.

The court did not indicate what changed the justices' minds about considering the issue. But last week, lawyers for the detainees filed a statement from a military officer in which he described the inadequacy of the process the administration has put forward as an alternative to a full-blown review by civilian courts.

"This is a stunning victory for the detainees," said Eric M. Freedman, professor of constitutional law at Hofstra Law School, who has been advising the detainees. "It goes well beyond what we asked for, and clearly indicates the unease up there" at the Supreme Court.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that "we did not think that court review at this time was necessary, but we are confident in our legal position."

Five of the nine justices must agree to take a case that previously has been denied a hearing, according to an authoritative text on the Supreme Court.

The case is expected to be heard in the fall.

In February, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a key provision of a law the Bush administration pushed through Congress last year stripping federal courts of their ability to hear the detainees' challenges to their confinement.

On April 2, the Supreme Court denied the detainees' request to review the February appeals court ruling.

The detainees then petitioned the court to reconsider its denial.

Dismissing the petitions would be "a profound deprivation" of the prisoners' right to speedy court review, lawyers for the detainees said.

The administration asked that the detainees' Supreme Court petitions be thrown out.

Many of the 375 detainees have been held at Guantanamo for five years.

In recent months, the main arena in the legal battle over the detainees has been the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The appeals court is considering how to handle the detainees' challenges to tribunals that found them to be enemy combatants, leaving them without any of the legal rights accorded prisoners of war.

The detainees' attorneys want the appeals court to allow a broad inquiry questioning the accuracy and completeness of the evidence the Combatant Status Review Tribunals gathered about the detainees, most of it classified.

The Justice Department has been seeking a limited review, saying that the findings of the military tribunals are "entitled to the highest level of deference."

An Army reserve officer and lawyer who played a key role in the enemy combatant hearings at Guantanamo Bay says tribunal members relied on vague and incomplete intelligence while being pressured to rule against detainees, often without any specific evidence. The officer's affidavit, submitted to the Supreme Court last Friday, is the first public criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

"I suspect that the disclosure about the corrupted CSRT proceedings and the very restrictive government view of what the detainees can do in the lower courts led the justices to conclude that they should take up these issues," said Washington attorney David Remes, who represents 18 detainees.

"The court's decision to hear the cases brings the detainees one step closer to receiving their day in court," said Remes.

The operation of Guantanamo Bay has brought global criticism of the Bush administration and condemnation from Democrats on Capitol Hill.

The cases are Boumediene v. Bush, 06-1195, and Al Odah v. U.S., 06-1196.

Third U.S. soldier charged in Iraq murder probe
Reuters via The Washington Poste
July 2, 2007

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Monday it had charged a U.S. soldier with the murder of an Iraqi and of trying to cover up the crime by placing a weapon by the body.

The charge is linked to an investigation into the unlawful killing of three Iraqis in separate incidents during U.S. operations between April and June near the town of Iskandariyah, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, the military said in a statement. Two other soldiers have been charged separately.

Sergeant Evan Vela, from Phoenix, Idaho, was charged with one count of premeditated murder, wrongfully placing a weapon beside a dead Iraqi, making a false official statement and obstruction of justice.

The statement said the charges were merely an accusation of wrongdoing and that the soldier was presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Murder charges were announced on Saturday for Staff Sergeant Michael Hensley and Specialist Jorge Sandoval, stemming from complaints made by other U.S. soldiers to the authorities.

The three men all served in the 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska.

The charges are the latest to be leveled at U.S. forces serving in Iraq that include the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqis in 2005 by U.S. Marines in the town of Haditha, and the rape and murder of a 14-year old girl in Mahmudiya in March 2006.

Incidents of American soldiers illegally killing Iraqis since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 have incensed Iraqi public opinion and added to calls for a withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Guantanamo inmates allowed film nights and gardening
The Independent
by David Usbourne
July 5, 2007

A holiday camp it plainly will never be but the American officers running the Guantanamo Bay compound in Cuba are taking steps to make the lives of its detainees marginally more tolerable with recreational treats such as once-a-week film nights and limited access to television.

The steps, though limited, mark a change of tack for the American military after months of seeking to toughen discipline at the facility after unrest in one of its sections - Camp 4 - erupted last year with a brief riot and the suicides of three inmates.

It is in Camp 4, which is reserved for the most compliant of the prisoners, that the first changes are being brought in. Its roughly 45 detainees - out of a total of 375 still at Guantanamo - have already been allowed to tend a vegetable garden and watch television shows selected by officers. Among them is a documentary show about deep sea fishing off Alaska called The Deadliest Catch. The idea is to provide the inmates, most of whom are accused of ties with al-Qa'ida or the Taliban, with "increased mental stimulation," Navy Rear Admiral Mark Buzby said this week. Another innovation is the expansion of language classes, both Arabic and English, for detainees who must nonetheless sit in classrooms with one ankle chained to the floor.

"There are certainly benefits to giving them outlets other than sitting in their cell or sitting in their recreation cell for hours at a time with nothing else to exercise their mind or think about other than their situation," he explained.

Admiral Buzby said it has become easier to relax some restrictions because the number of inmates has shrunk. About 100 have been released in the past year. Discipline problems have also been on the wane, although another inmate died from an apparently suicide at the end of May.

But it is hardly likely that the new recreational activities will do much to blunt criticism of Guantanamo in the US and around the world. Many inmates have remained for five years without having specific charges brought against them. The White House recently indicated it was working on plans to move them elsewhere and close the complex. However, there is little information on when a decision might be made and Admiral Buzby said his changes at the camp would go forward regardless.

"These Band-Aid measures are going to do nothing to help alleviate the hopelessness and despair that many of our clients are fighting," said Marc Falkoff, a law professor who represents 18 detainees. "I hope that learning about these 'improvements' will help the public understand how harsh our clients' lives have been for more than five years."

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UN Reports

UN Human Rights Official Condemns Killing of Colombian Hostages
Voice of America
June 29, 2007

The top United Nations human rights official has condemned the reported killings of 11 Colombian lawmakers held hostage since 2002 by the nation's largest rebel group.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour Friday called for a full and impartial investigation into the killings. She said those responsible should be brought to justice according to international standards.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, announced the deaths Thursday, saying the hostages were killed in a foiled military rescue mission on June 18.

But Colombian President Alvaro Uribe accused the rebels of executing the hostages, saying the Colombian military made no rescue attempt. He called the killings a crime against humanity.

The U.S. State Department called on the rebels to free all their captives, including three Americans.

The 11 hostages reported killed were abducted in April 2002 from the Valle del Cauca departmental Assembly. A 12th lawmaker abducted with them may have survived.

The human rights group Amnesty International is calling on the FARC and a smaller rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), to immediately and unconditionally release all civilian hostages. Amnesty also wants the rebel groups to order their members to assure the humane treatment of those they have captured.

The rights group describes hostage-taking as "a flagrant breach of international humanitarian law, which can constitute a war crime."

Secretary-General hails work of International Criminal Court
UN News Centre
June 29, 2007

The creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is one of the “major achievements in international law during the past century,” providing the opportunity to hold to account the world’s worst war criminals, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement released today to mark a key anniversary in the ICC’s founding.

Sunday will be the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Rome Statute of the ICC, which allowed the Court to be formally established after years of negotiation between countries.

“During the relatively short time of its existence, the Court has already established itself as the centrepiece of a system of international criminal justice,” Mr. Ban said in his statement. “It is both the embodiment of, and the driving force behind, a profound evolution of international culture and law.”

The ICC is an independent, permanent court that tries persons accused of carrying out the most serious crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. It holds trials only when national courts cannot or will not conduct their own proceedings.

The Rome Statute which brought the Court into being now has 104 States Parties, and Mr. Ban urged those nations that have not yet become parties to do so.

He added that “already the activities of the Court and its Prosecutor [Luis Moreno-Ocampo] have a deterring effect on potential perpetrators of international crimes.”

So far the ICC has issued arrest warrants for two suspects accused of war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region and five leaders of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. Thomas Lubanga, a rebel leader in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was arrested last year. The Court has also opened investigations into allegations of killings and rapes in the Central African Republic (CAR).

International Criminal Court already changing behaviour, says Prosecutor
UN News Centre
July 2, 2007

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is already moderating the behaviour of countries and raising awareness among local communities about their right to be protected from war crimes, even before its first case has gone to trial, the Court’s Prosecutor has said.

The fact that 104 countries have become States parties to the ICC shows that the Court is “a landmark in international justice,” binding all those countries to its rules, Luis Moreno-Ocampo said in an interview with the United Nations News Centre to mark yesterday’s fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Rome Statute of the ICC.

“States recognize now that there are some limits, and that there can be no more genocide,” he said, adding that his office’s simultaneous investigations of cases in Sudan’s Darfur region, the Central African Republic (CAR), northern Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) indicated that the perpetrators of the world’s worst war crimes and crimes against humanity can be pursued.

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo also noted the impact the Court was having on local communities around the world, such as those in the DRC now debating the use of child soldiers, an all-too-frequent occurrence in that country’s recent conflicts. In other countries, such as Colombia, he said the media has begun discussing whether activities there should be brought before the ICC.

So far the Court has issued arrest warrants for two suspects accused of war crimes in Darfur and five leaders of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda. Thomas Lubanga, a rebel militia leader in the DRC, was arrested last year, while the Prosecutor’s Office has just begun its probe of allegations of killings and rapes in the CAR.

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo reiterated his call for Sudan to arrest the two Darfur suspects: Ahmed Muhammad Harun, currently the Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs, and Janjaweed militia leader Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, also known as Ali Kushayb.

“[Mr.] Harun is now supposedly in charge of looking out for all [the displaced people in Darfur]. This is unacceptable. He has to be arrested. Sudan has to do it,” he said, adding that “while it may take time, maybe a few months or years, the destiny of [Mr.] Harun is in the dock in The Hague.”

Asked about suggestions that his pursuit of indictments and trials of suspects in some of the conflicts his office is investigating, especially in Darfur and northern Uganda, might be hampering wider efforts to bring peace, Mr. Moreno-Ocampo stressed that his role was dictated by his mandate – to investigate the worst of all war crimes.

“Peace negotiations can be long and complicated. But I can’t be involved in their aspects… The Security Council has noted that lasting peace requires justice and it’s my role to help in that. My duty is to end impunity and to contribute to the prevention of future crimes.”

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo, who took up his post in 2003, said his office had faced extra difficulties in carrying out its inquiries because conflicts or low-level violence continued to flare in the countries it has been investigating, making it hard to collect evidence and protect witnesses.

“This has been a major challenge for us,” he said, noting the differences with the UN war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and with the post-World War II war crimes trials in Nuremberg, Germany. “They were post-conflict situations and in many cases these are not.”

U.N. denounces Congo's Anvil war crimes verdict
Reuters South Africa
by Joe Bavier
July 4, 2007

KINSHASA, July 4 (Reuters) - U.N. human rights chief Louise Arbour on Wednesday criticised a Congolese military court decision that acquitted government soldiers and former employees of Australia's Anvil Mining Ltd of complicity in war crimes.

A military tribunal acquitted nine soldiers last week of war crimes charges including summary executions, torture, illegal detention and looting during a brief armed uprising in the southern town of Kilwa, Katanga province, in 2004.

Canadian Pierre Mercier and South Africans Peter Van Niekerk and Cedric Kirsten, all Anvil employees, were also cleared of wilfully offering logistical assistance to the soldiers.

Congo's Justice Minister Georges Minsay told Reuters he had not yet read the decision of the court in Katanga's capital, Lubumbashi, and could not comment on Arbour's statement.

Scores died in a massacre of civilians in Kilwa when government forces launched a counter-attack to retake the town after it was seized by a group of 10 ill-equipped rebels in October 2004, a U.N. human rights investigation found.

Anvil runs the nearby Dikulushi silver and copper mine and the company's trucks and planes were used by the army during the operation close to Congo's southeastern border with Zambia.

The firm said its vehicles were requisitioned by the military and that it had no choice but to hand them over.

Lawyers for the victims and their families have said they will appeal against the court's verdict.

Two officers received life in prison, and two other soldiers received shorter sentences for lesser crimes unrelated to the Kilwa violence.

Arbour, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said Democratic Republic of Congo's decision to try the three civilian Anvil employees before a military court violated the country's international obligations.

"During my visit to DRC in May this year, all authorities assured me of their highest commitment to the fight against impunity," Arbour said.

"The victims of serious human rights violations demand concrete signs of such commitment in the form of truth and justice. That is their right," she said.

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NGO Reports

Serbia Must Boost Support for War Crimes Chamber
Human Rights Watch
June 28, 2007

Council of Europe to Adopt Report on Balkans Prosecutions Today

(Brussels, June 28, 2007) – Serbia’s War Crimes Chamber has made significant progress in domestic prosecutions since its establishment in 2003, but the Serbian government must increase its support for the chamber if it is to end impunity for war crimes in Serbia, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released today.

Later today, the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe is expected to pass a resolution on war crimes prosecution in the Balkans and the need for states to take over the work of The Hague Tribunal regarding those suspected of war crimes.

The 32-page briefing paper evaluates the progress of the War Crimes Chamber since it was established in 2003 as a complement to the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The Hague-based ICTY will only try a limited number of top-level accused before its mandate ends in 2010. The remaining lower- and mid-level offenders need to be tried in national courts, including in Serbia.

“The Serbian government needs to show that it has the political will to end impunity for war crimes,” said Sara Darehshori, senior counsel in Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program. “Belgrade must surrender the remaining fugitives to The Hague and provide the unequivocal public support needed for domestic war crimes prosecutions.”

To date the War Crimes Chamber has completed three trials (one of which is being retried), and three more are underway. An estimated 32 to 35 cases are currently in the pre-trial or investigative stage, including cases relating to war crimes in Kosovo and Croatia.

Completed trials include the Ovcara case in which 16 people were tried for the murder in 1991 of 200 non-Serbs taken from the hospital in Vukovar, Croatia, and killed at a nearby pig farm. The trial was also completed for the Scorpion case relating to execution of Muslim civilians from Srebrenica by Serb paramilitaries in 1995.

“The fact that most of the chamber’s cases involve the prosecution of Serbs for the killings of non-Serbs is an important achievement in itself,” said Darehshori.

In the past three years the War Crimes Chamber has taken important steps to improve cooperation with Bosnia and Croatia. New measures to ensure witness protection have been put in place, and outreach efforts have helped the media become more sensitive to prosecution efforts.

However, the War Crimes Chamber has a long way to go. Much of Serbia remains unaware of the War Crimes Chamber’s work. It is unclear whether the prosecutor and his investigators have power under Serbian law to prosecute high-ranking officials on the basis of command responsibility, or the commitment necessary to do so.

A series of Supreme Court reversals and an acquittal and a five-year sentence in the Scorpion case may undermine the willingness of victims and witnesses to come forward and testify in Serbia. The War Crimes Chamber, the Prosecutor’s Office and the Witness Protection Unit remain underfunded and provisions prohibiting extradition of nationals still hinder full cooperation between countries.

“The winding down of The Hague tribunal makes domestic prosecutions in Serbia all the more important,” said Darehshori. “National prosecutions are essential for ensuring justice and exposing people in Serbia to the reality of the crimes committed by Milosevic’s regime.”

The briefing paper’s recommendations to the Serbian authorities include amending legislation to remove the ban on extradition of nationals accused of committing war crimes, placing the war crimes investigation unit directly under the control of the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office, and providing unequivocal and public support from high-ranking Serbian officials for the work of the War Crimes Chamber and Prosecutor.

The briefing paper builds on an October 2004 report by Human Rights Watch on domestic war crimes prosecution in the former Yugoslavia, “Justice at Risk: War Crimes Trials in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro”.

Myanmar: ICRC denounces major and repeated violations of international humanitarian law
International Committee of the Red Cross
June 28, 2007

Yangon / Geneva (ICRC) – The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jakob Kellenberger, has strongly denounced violations of international humanitarian law committed against civilians and detainees by the government of Myanmar and demanded that the government take urgent action to end these violations and prevent them from recurring.

''The persistent use of detainees as porters for the armed forces is a matter of grave humanitarian concern. The actions of the authorities have also resulted in immense suffering for thousands of people in conflict-affected areas,'' said Mr Kellenberger. "The ICRC has repeatedly drawn attention to these abuses but the authorities have failed to put a stop to them.''

The findings outlined below are based on observations made by ICRC delegates and numerous allegations of abuse collected by the ICRC during private interviews with thousands of civilians and detainees, mainly between 2000 and 2005. Systematic abuses against detainees and civilians are the primary source of serious concern.

Abuses against detainees

Under the prison system set up by the government, every year thousands of detainees have been forced to support the armed forces by serving as porters. This institutionalized and widespread practice has frequently led to the abuse of detainees and exposed them to the dangers of armed conflict. Many detainees used as porters have suffered from exhaustion and malnutrition and been subjected to degrading treatment. Some have been murdered.

''The practice known as 'portering' persists today despite numerous representations made by the ICRC. It constitutes a major violation of various provisions of international humanitarian law," said Mr Kellenberger.

Abuses against civilians

The Myanmar armed forces have committed repeated abuses against men, women and children living in communities affected by armed conflict along the Thai-Myanmar border. These have included the large-scale destruction of food supplies and of means of production. The armed forces have severely restricted the population's freedom of movement in these areas, making it impossible for many villagers to work in their fields. This has had a significant impact on the economy, aggravating an already precarious humanitarian situation. Furthermore, the armed forces have committed numerous acts of violence against people living in these areas, including murder, and subjected them to arbitrary arrest and detention. They have also forced villagers to directly support military operations or to leave their homes.

The behaviour and actions of the armed forces have helped create a climate of constant fear among the population and have forced thousands of people to join the ranks of the internally displaced or to flee abroad.

''The repeated abuses committed against men, women and children living along the Thai-Myanmar border violate many provisions of international humanitarian law,'' said Mr Kellenberger.

Government refusal to engage in dialogue

''Despite repeated entreaties by the ICRC, the authorities have consistently refused to enter into a serious discussion of these abuses with a view to putting a stop to them,'' said Mr Kellenberger. In addition, increasingly severe restrictions imposed on the ICRC by the government have made it impossible for the organization's staff to move about independently in the affected areas and have hampered the delivery of aid intended for strictly humanitarian, apolitical purposes. Since late 2005 the authorities have also prevented the ICRC from visiting places of detention in accordance with its usual procedures, which include carrying out private interviews with detainees.

''The continuing deadlock with the authorities has led the ICRC to take the exceptional step of making its concerns public,'' said Mr Kellenberger. ''The organization uses confidential and bilateral dialogue as its preferred means of achieving results. However, this presupposes that parties to a conflict are willing to enter into a serious discussion and take into account the ICRC's recommendations. This has not been the case with the authorities of Myanmar and that is why the ICRC has decided to speak out publicly."

"I urge the government of Myanmar to put a stop to all violations of international humanitarian law and to ensure that they do not recur," concluded Mr Kellenberger. "I would also like to remind all States party to the Geneva Conventions of their obligation, under Article 1, to respect and to ensure respect for the Conventions."

The ICRC stands ready to do everything it can to pursue its humanitarian activities for people in Myanmar who require assistance, in accordance with its internationally recognized mandate under the Geneva Conventions, the Statutes of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and its customary working procedures.

For further information, please contact:

Michèle Mercier / Thierry Ribaux, ICRC Yangon, tel. +95 980 20 529 or + 951 662 613 or +951 664 524

Carla Haddad, ICRC Geneva, tel. +41 22 730 24 05 or +41 79 217 32 26

Senegal Failing to Act on Trial of Hissène Habré
Human Rights Watch
June 30, 2007

One Year After Dakar Agreed to Try Chad Ex-Dictator, Victims are Still Waiting; Chadians March for Justice

(Ndjaména/Dakar, June 30, 2007) – One year after Senegal agreed to an African Union request that it prosecute Hissène Habré, it has not moved forward or even presented a plan for the investigation and trial of the former Chadian dictator, Chadian and Senegalese activists said today.

In January, President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal called on the Senegalese judiciary to “meet the challenge” of Habré’s investigation and trial and “show the world the powerful force of Senegalese justice,” but that challenge has gone unmet and the case remains at a virtual standstill.

Habré, who lives in Senegal, is accused of thousands of political killings, systematic torture and waves of “ethnic cleansing” during his rule in Chad from 1982 to 1990. Habré was first arrested in Senegal in February 2000, but Senegal refused to prosecute him then or to extradite him to Belgium in 2005. In July 2006, Dakar agreed to an AU decision that Habré be put on trial in Senegal.

“We have been fighting for 17 years to bring Hissène Habré to justice, and time is running out. Unless Senegal takes action soon, there won’t be any victims left at the trial,” said Souleymane Guengueng, vice-president of the Chadian Association of Victims of Political Repression and Crime (AVCRP, or Association des victimes de crimes et répressions politiques), who spent three years in Habré’s jails. “Senegal has betrayed us twice, first by refusing to prosecute Habré in 2000, then by refusing to extradite him to Belgium. We are worried about another betrayal.”

“Senegal’s image and even its credibility in the international community have been damaged,” said Alioune Tine, of the Dakar-based African Assembly for the Defense of Human Rights (RADDHO). “There is very little political will to address this case, and the question of impunity more globally. How is Africa to avoid being the eternal subject of international justice if we cannot deliver justice ourselves? How can we avoid the extradition of Habré and other African leaders if Africa fails to act?”

Today in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, victims and their supporters are marching to demand that Senegal make good on its promises.

Senegal has publicly complained that it has not received international assistance to prepare the case, but the groups said that many countries were ready to assist and that Senegal has not actually made any requests for funding.

The African Union, whose summit will be held in Accra on July 1-3, should assist Senegal and monitor its progress by naming a special envoy for the case, the groups said.

“The African Union has called on Senegal to prosecute Hissène Habré and a year later Senegal has very little to show,” said Jacqueline Moudeina of the Association tchadienne pour la promotion et la défense des droits de l’homme (ATPDH), who is also a lawyer for the victims. “It is the African Union’s responsibility to see that its decision is put into practice. The AU’s credibility, and that of all Africa, is at stake here.”

In May 2006, the UN Committee against Torture, in a case brought by Habré’s victims, ruled that Senegal had violated the UN Convention against Torture by failing to prosecute or extradite Habré, and called on the Senegalese government to do one or the other. One year later, that ruling, too remains unimplemented.

Fifth Anniversary Of Rome Statute’s Entry Into Force
International Coalition for the International Criminal Court (PDF File)
July 1, 2007

What: 1 July 2007 will mark the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The treaty entered into force following the 60th ratification of the statute on 11 April 2002. Currently, 104 countries have acceded to or ratified the statue and 139 states have signed it. The Court is currently investigating grave crimes in four countries: Northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan (Darfur) and most recently, the Central African Republic. Later this year, the Court is expected to begin its first trial in the DRC child soldiers case against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo.

Why: After World War II, the world cried “never again,” but it was only five years ago when the Rome Statute officially entered into force that the international community actually took a step forward on the path to ending impunity for the gravest of crimes. The entry into force of the Rome Statute marks the first time that a truly international and permanent court, reflecting major legal systems and all geographic regions of the world, would hold individuals accountable for massive crimes.

The last century has been the bloodiest in human history with hundreds of millions of casualties of mass rape, forced expulsion, disappearances, torture, slavery and other assaults on human dignity. A permanent deterrent to these crimes was created on 1 July 2002 when the jurisdiction of the ICC began. The ICC is the first permanent and independent international judicial institution capable of trying individuals accused of the most serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, including the crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

How: For further information about the fifith anniversary of the Rome Statute’s entry into force, please contact Anaga Dalal, Head of Information and Communications at the Coalition for the International Criminal Court through the contact details listed above. To learn more about the history of the Court, please visit us online at http://www.iccnow.org/?mod=icchistory.

Yemen: Amnesty International condemns killing of civilians
Amnesty International
July 3, 2007

Amnesty International unreservedly condemns yesterday's suicide attack that killed nine civilians at a tourist site in Ma'rib, north-eastern Yemen.

Seven Spanish tourists and two Yemeni civilians were killed when a bomber reportedly exploded a car near the temple of the Queen of Sheba. A number of other civilians were also said to have been injured. According to press reports, the Yemeni government blamed al-Qa'idafor the attack. Amnesty International has no information as to who is responsible for the attack, but stresses that deliberate killing of civilians is a serious violations of international law regardless of who the perpetrator is.

Amnesty International calls for those responsible for planning this crime to be brought to justice in accordance with international standards.

Background:

Amnesty International has called on armed groups in Yemen to uphold international law and standards which prohibit the targeting of civilians.

It has also raised serious concerns about the Yemeni government's pursuit of the so-called "war on terror", which has been conducted with disturbing disregard for the rule of law and international human rights standards and resulted in multiple human rights violations.

In October 2006, Fawaz Yahya al-Rabi'ee and Mohamed al- Dailami, who escaped in February 2006 from the Political Security prison in Sana'a, were killed when Yemeni security forces reportedly fired at two locations in which the men were hiding. It appeared that the security forces made little or no effort to apprehend the two men or to offer them an opportunity to surrender.

AI Index: MDE 31/007/2007 (Public)
News Service No: 126

In Rare Move, Supreme Court Reverses Self, Agrees to Hear Appeal of Guantanamo Detainees
Human Rights First
July 3, 2007

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the appeal of Guantanamo detainees on whether they have a right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court. This decision was a rare reversal of a previous order by the Court, which had decided in April against hearing the appeal.

“The Supreme Court’s stunning reversal gives hope that the flawed policy that has denied detainees the fundamental right to challenge their imprisonment may finally be exposed for what it is: a sham and a shame,” said Maureen Byrnes, Executive Director of Human Rights First. “Restoring the right to habeas will put the United States on a path to repairing its reputation as a nation that prizes justice and aspires to leadership in the world.”

The case will be set down for oral arguments in the Court’s October term.

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