Just another nerd.
At the end of January the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court announced that the court would take on leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army in its first cases.
ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said that the court would collective evidence and issue arrest warrants against leaders of the Ugandan rebels who have kidnapped as many as 20,000 children during the last two decades.
Source:
First International Criminal Court Case Targets Uganda’s Rebels. UN Wire, January 30, 2004.
More than four years after his 1999 arrest, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted former minister of higher education Jean de Dieu Kamuhanda of both genocide and crimes against humanity. The 51-year old Kamhuanda personally led militias to a church and school to slaughter Tutsis who had sought protection there.
Kamuhanda was sentenced to life in prison. He is only the 17th person convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the eight years since it was established, though he is the fifth person convicted in the past two months.
In addition, thousands of people have been tried for genocide-related crimes in Rwanda where, unlike the International Tribune, defendants face the possiblity of the death sentence for their role in the genocide.
Source:
Genocide minister gets life term. The BBC, January 22, 2004.
The Bush administration has opposed the International Criminal Court on a number of grounds, including fears that the United States will get bogged down in everybody and their brother charging it with human rights violations right and left. Supporters of the ICC have generally dismissed that claim, saying that the court is only for the sort of violations of international law that would be difficult if not impossible to prosecute otherwise.
So now that the ICC has had its prosecutor and judges in place for a month, how does the world perceive the court’s role? The BBC ran an article last week on the court noting that so far it has received almost 500 complaints to be investigated. Of those,
. . . nearly 40 communications accused the United States and its allies of aggression against Iraq.
The crime of aggression is in the treaty but until there is international agreement on how to define it, the ICC can take no action.
So one month into the court’s existence, and 8 percent of the complaints received so far were directed at the U.S. war in Iraq (this despite the fact that neither the U.S. nor Iraq ratified the treaty creating the court and so are not included in its jurisdiction).
Source:
ICC to exclude many cases. Barnaby Mason, The BBC, July 16, 2003.
The United Nations has recently accused Rwanda of dragging its feet on approving visas for witnesses that the UN wants to testify at Rwandan genocide trials. According to an Associated Press story, “Two judges have cited the Rwandan government’s failure to issue travel documents “in a timely manner” for witnesses to appear. .. ”
Of course Rwanda has been skeptical of UN efforts since that body dragged its feet and failed to act “in a timely manner” to prevent the genocide in the first place, even though it had troops on the ground who wanted to intervene while the worst of the genocide was taking place. Kofi Annan told them to stand down instead.
And while Rwanda itself has tried and dealt with numerous genocide participants, the UN has taken the better part of a decade to try 8 individuals.
If anything, the Rwandan genocide and snails-pace U.N. genocide court shows the absurdity of relying on international efforts to prevent and punish crimes against humanity. The current government of Rwanda — which overthrew the regime that carried out the genocide — certainly has not been perfect, but it has been overwhelmingly more effective than the United Nations, which chose to ignore one of the worst acts of genocide since the Holocaust and then tried to step in later and try to take over prosecution of the these war criminals.
(Actually it’s even worse since the United Nations and other agencies actively protected the individuals responsible for the genocide after they were driven out of Rwanda.)
Source:
Rwanda rejects accusation that it hinders operations of the U.N. genocide tribunal. Rodrique Ngowi, The Associated Press, August 4, 2002.