IJCentral: International Justice Central

Do you have a burning question for the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC)?

Now you can ask him directly. We’re pleased to announce that in honor of July 17, International Justice Day, IJCentral (an outreach initiative of Skylight Pictures) will launch a new section on the site called “Ask the Prosecutor”, where Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo will answer your questions about the ICC on camera. In this same section the Prosecutor will also be posting monthly video updates on the cases and investigations moving their way through the ICC.

Don’t hold back, ask your question now by logging in at: http://community.ijcentral.org/group/asktheprosecutor

And if you haven’t already seen “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court”, or would like to see it again, the 1-hour version can be streamed free online at: http://skylightpictures.com/watch-films/

If you need any help, please feel free to contact the IJCentral team at: (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Ask the Prosecutor Introduction from Skylight Pictures on Vimeo.

 

KHARTOUM — Darfur’s rebel Justice and Equality Movement said Tuesday it was locked in fresh fighting with Sudan’s army, a day after the International Criminal Court charged President Omar al-Beshir with genocide.

“Early this morning… 60 four-wheel drive vehicles of Sudan’s army and militia obstructed JEM patrols near Kuma, North Darfur, JEM spokesman Ali Alwafi told AFP.

“The genocidal forces lost the battle and fled to Kuma. Our forces pursued them into the town and destroyed their military camp and captured 34 well-equipped vehicles,” he said.

The United Nations and African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur, or UNAMID, said it was aware of reports that clashes had broken out between JEM and the Sudanese army.

“UNAMID has received as-yet unconfirmed reports of clashes between government forces and the Justice and Equality Movement in North Darfur. Verification missions are planned to confirm these reports,” it said.

The Sudanese army could not be reached to confirm or deny the reports.

On Monday, the army reported clashes involving JEM, one of the most militarised groups in Darfur, and its soldiers in the strategic Adula region between South Darfur, North Darfur and nearby North Kordofan province.

The fighting came as the International Criminal Court announced it has decided to add genocide to the charges against Beshir, who is already wanted since March 2009 for war crimes and crimes against humanity over his role in Darfur’s war.

Darfur, an arid desert region the size of France, has been gripped by a civil war since 2003 that has killed 300,000 people and displaced another 2.7 million, according to UN figures. Khartoum says 10,000 people have died.

source: AFP

Alex Whiting, an assistant clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, will join the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the investigation coordinator this December. Serving as the deputy to the chief of investigations, he will be responsible for managing and providing legal guidance and direction to all of the ICC’s investigations in this new post.

Said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow: “This is a superb appointment for the ICC, as well as an unparalleled opportunity for Alex Whiting, whose impressive track record in international and domestic prosecutions and investigations is matched only by his excellent judgment and tenacity.  As his co-teacher in the course in the International Criminal Court’s prosecution efforts, I have had the privilege of working closely with Alex. We look forward to learning about his experiences and we are glad he can bring his talents to this challenging and important effort.”

Whiting will take on existing ICC investigations in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Kenya, among other countries.

“I am enormously excited and honored to have this opportunity to work at the ICC,” said Whiting. “The court faces staggering challenges in its mission to investigate and prosecute atrocities occurring around the world. I look forward to contributing to the work of this important institution as it seeks to bring perpetrators to justice.”

Since joining the HLS faculty in 2007, Whiting has led the Law School’s clinical offerings on domestic and international prosecution, teaching Government Lawyer and the War Crimes Prosecution Workshop.

Prior to coming to HLS, Whiting was a senior trial attorney in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In 2007, he successfully prosecuted a case against Serbian rebel leader Milan Martic, who was sentenced to 35 years in jail by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague for atrocities carried out in Croatia in the early 1990s.

Whiting also served domestically as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts and as a trial attorney in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. He holds a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale.

source: Harvard Law School

The International Criminal Court’s judges on Monday charged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with orchestrating a bloody campaign of genocide against Darfur’s three main ethnic groups, the first time the Hague-based court has accused a sitting head of state of committing the most egregious international crime.

The three-judge pretrial chamber issued a formal arrest warrant for Bashir—the second time it has done so—on three counts of genocide. They include the crime of targeted mass killing, the causing of serious bodily or mental harm to members of a target group, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction. “There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. al-Bashir acted with specific intent to destroy in part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups,” the judges concluded.

The decision provided a degree of vindication to the United States, which has stood largely alone in characterizing the killing in Darfur as genocide. It also gave a boost to the court’s Argentine prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, whose pursuit of the Sudanese leader has generated intense opposition from other African and Arab leaders. Moreno-Ocampo suffered a setback this month when his case against another alleged war criminal, the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, was suspended for a second time.

Sudan’s U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, dismissed Monday’s ruling as a politically motivated effort to undercut prospects for peace in Sudan and vowed never to surrender Bashir. “We condemn this in this strongest terms; it will only harden our resolve,” he said in an interview. “This court’s objective is to destroy chances for peace in Sudan; we’re not going to be bothered by it.”

Moreno-Ocampo said he welcomed the decision, which essentially reverses a previous ruling by the pretrial chamber to reject the genocide charges. He said the new ruling honors the victims of the mass killing in Darfur, a vast region in western Sudan. It may impose new obligations on states that have signed the Genocide Convention, including the United States, to cooperate with the court in its effort to arrest Bashir, Moreno-Ocampo added.

The court issued a previous arrest warrant against Bashir in March 2009, on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Sudan, which has never ratified the treaty establishing the criminal court, has refused to surrender Bashir, who was reelected this year in a U.N.-backed election to a five-year term.

The violence in Darfur began in early 2003 when two rebel groups took up arms against Sudan’s Islamic government, citing a legacy of bias against Darfur’s ethnic tribes. In response, Khartoum organized local Arab militias, the Janjaweed, to help crush the resistance and its followers. The United Nations estimates that as many as 300,000 civilians died as a result of violence or hardships brought on by the forced displacement of nearly 2 million Darfurians.

source: The Washington Post

THE HAGUE — The International Criminal Court rejected Monday an appeal by former Congolese militiaman Germain Katanga to have his detention declared unlawful and his war crimes trial stopped.
Judge Daniel Nsereko said the appeals chamber had found no error in a court decision in November that dismissed on procedural grounds an earlier bid by Katanga to halt the case.

The 32-year-old is on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity in a conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeastern Ituri region said to have cost tens of thousands of lives.

He and co-accused Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui have pleaded not guilty.

They are accused of murder and rape in an attack on the village of Bogoro on February 23, 2003 during which more than 200 civilians were killed.

Non-governmental bodies say that inter-ethnic and militia violence in Ituri is about control of the area’s rich mineral resources and has claimed 60,000 lives since 1999.

Katanga claims he was unlawfully arrested by DRC authorities in 2005. He was surrendered by the DR Congo government to the ICC in October 2007.

The trial is the ICC’s first for murder since opening as the world’s first permanent and independent war crimes tribunal in 2002.

source: AFP

A prominent Colombian journalist, who had been awarded a prestigious fellowship at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation to study conflict negotiation strategies and international criminal court procedures, has been barred from entering the United States to attend the program.

According to Nieman Foundation curator Bob Giles, Hollman Morris Rincón was told by an official at the US Embassy in Bogota that he has been ruled permanently ineligible for a visa under the “terrorist activities” section of the Patriot Act.

“We were very surprised. This has never happened before,” Giles commented. “And Hollman has traveled previously in the United States to give speeches and receive awards.”

Giles has asked the State Department to reconsider its decision, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has also expressed its concern. “We’re frankly shocked,” CPJ executive director Joel Simon stated. “We feel it’s outrageous.” He said the State Department claimed to have discussed the issue with Morris but “that’s just not true.”

Morris, whose independent TV news program Contravia has been critical of the ties between outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and illegal far-right militias, has served at times as an intermediary in hostage negotiations with the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On the basis of those connections, he has been accused by Uribe of being “an accomplice of terrorism” and has been described as “close to the guerrillas” by Colombia’s Minister of Defense—and now president-elect—Juan Manuel Santos.

Uribe has been a close ally for the last eight years of both the Bush and Obama administrations, and the US State Department lists FARC as an international terrorist organization.

Emptywheel at Firedoglake suggests a connection between the denial of a visa to Morris and the recent Supreme Court ruling that “groups trying to teach terrorist organizations to engage peacefully might be judged to be materially supporting terrorists.”

“While I don’t think that’s precisely what is going on here,” she writes, “the logical next step after treating counseling on conflict negotiations as material support for terrorism is to treat reporting on conflict negotiations as material support for terrorism.”

When contacted by the Associated Press, Morris refused to either confirm or deny that he had been refused a visa, but he did refer to a document he had obtained which describes a campaign by the Colombian state security agency, DAS, to discredit him internationally.

According to Colombia Reports, “In April, Morris was given files by the prosecutor general which allegedly belong to the DAS. The files include Morris’ photograph and address, and instructions such as ‘Initiate a smear campaign at the international level, through the following activities ... inclusion in FARC video,’ and ‘Request the suspension of visa.’”

Last year, the Center for Investigative Reporting issue a report on the activities of Morris and his brother. It explained that “while the violent tactics of the left-wing guerilla movement, the FARC, have generated considerable press attention ... a major component of that violence, by right-wing paramilitary groups, has gone largely unreported. Founded some twenty years ago by landowners to combat the guerillas, the paramilitary groups have transformed into violent criminal enterprises financed through cocaine exports and kidnappings—much like the FARC itself.”

“Contravia has uncovered links between paramilitary leaders and high officials in Colombian politics and finance,” the report continues. “Thirty senators and representatives in the Colombian Congress have been imprisoned because of their ties to the paramilitary death squads; another sixty have been investigated. That’s a third of Colombia’s 268 member Congress, giving rise to a new term—‘para-politica’—to describe the ongoing crisis as one top politician after another is accused of complicity with the para-military squads. Most of those accused represent political parties that are part of the governing coalition led by President Alvaro Uribe.”

This video is from the Center for Investigive Reporting, posted March 26, 2009.

source: The Raw Story

Sylvia Dzbo, a cousin to Thomas Lubanga says the ICC has no evidence to justify Lubanga’s continued detention at the Hague

A family member of former Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga is calling for his immediate release from further detention.

This comes after the International Criminal Court (ICC) Thursday suspended Mr. Lubanga’s trial, citing the prosecutor’s refusal to turn over relevant information to the defense.

Sylvia Dzbo, a cousin to Mr. Lubanga said the ICC has no evidence to justify Mr. Lubanga’s continued detention.

“The last time that Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo was at Bunia he talked with one of my cousins. He was there to make sure all the proof against Thomas Lubanga was wrong. The last word to from him was that Thomas Lubanga will be released soon. Then we heard there will be a trial. But now they say no it’s suspended. But we don’t understand because they know everything that was said against him was wrong,” she said.

Dzbo appealed to the international media to help the family disprove the allegations against Mr. Lubanga.

“I hope you guys will help us to know the truth about everything. If our brother is guilty we will understand why he’s there. But if he’s not, why are they keeping him there? And from my side, I believe he’s not guilty,” Dzbe said.

Lubanga is charged with war crimes for allegedly using children under 15 years old to fight in his Union of Congolese Patriots armed group during the five-year civil war which ended in 2002 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Dzbo said Lubanga was only trying to protect his Hema ethnic group from their rival Lendu in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Imagine if people coming to your house to kill you. The only thing you can do is to protect yourself and to protect us because our ethnic group was attacked. This is what Thomas Lubanga was doing to protect himself and to protect us. Our ethnic group is Hema and the other ethnic group is lendu. For long time Hema and Lendu were manipulated to kill each other. By whom, we don’t know,” Dzbo said.

Lubanga is also being accused of being driven by a desire to maintain his control over Congo’s eastern Ituri region, one of the world’s most lucrative gold-mining regions.
Dzbo said the allegations are untrue because Lubanga and his family remain poor.

“I can ask you something, please, send people to Bunia and try to know if Thomas Lubanga has anything. Why is he poor? Why his family is poor if he was controlling all gold stuff?” Dzbo said

source: VOA News

THE HAGUE (AFP) – The International Criminal Court has suspended Congolese militia chief Thomas Lubanga’s trial and rapped prosecutors for abusing court processes and ignoring judges’ orders.

“The prosecutor has elected to act unilaterally in the present circumstances and he declines to be ‘checked’ by the (trial) chamber,” said Thursday’s judgment suspending Lubanga’s trail which started in January 2009.

“In these overall circumstances, it is necessary to stay these proceedings as an abuse of the process of the court.”

Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s office responded: “We will appeal in the coming days.”

The court said that as long as the prosecutor refused to implement judges’ orders, “the fair trial of the accused is no longer possible and justice cannot be done”.

Lubanga, 49, is charged with war crimes for using children under the age of 15 to fight for his militia during the 1997-2002 civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The judgment said the judges had ordered the prosecutor to disclose to Lubanga’s defence team the name of an “intermediary”, but he had refused.

“No criminal court can operate on the basis that whenever it makes an order in a particular area, it is for the prosecutor to elect whether or not to implement it,” said the judgment.

“He cannot be allowed to continue with this prosecution if he seeks to reserve to himself the right to avoid the court’s orders whenever he decides that they are inconsistent with his interpretation of his other obligations.

The court will hear submissions next Thursday on Lubanga’s continued detention. He had surrendered to the ICC in March 2006.

The defence claims that false evidence had been fabricated with the assistance of intermediaries used by the prosecutor to find witnesses, and that individuals were paid to give false testimony.

“We are satisfied with the chamber’s decision that the prosecutor cannot hold himself above the judges,” Lubanga’s lawyer Catherine Mabille told AFP Thursday.
Lubanga’s trial, the ICC’s first, was initially to have started in June 2008 but was stalled when the court ruled that prosecutors had wrongly withheld evidence that was potentially favourable to his defence.

Prosecutors allege that Lubanga’s militia abducted children as young as 11 from their homes, schools and football fields and took them to military training camps where they were beaten and drugged. The girls among them were used as sex slaves.

The child soldiers were allegedly deployed in combat between September 2002 and August 2003.

Lubanga is accused of being driven by a desire to maintain and expand his control over the Congo’s eastern Ituri region, one of the world’s most lucrative gold-mining areas, where rights groups say inter-ethnic fighting has claimed 60,000 lives over the last decade.

Fifty years ago this week, the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, joined a small but growing band of African countries that faced the challenging task of building a new independent nation.

“Your task is immense and you are the first to realise it,” warned Belgium’s King Baudouin, according to media reports at the time, as he symbolically handed over the running of the country to Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected prime minister of the DRC, on June 30, 1960.

The Belgian king highlighted what he saw as the principal dangers of self-governance: the inexperience of the new administration; persistent tribal rivalries; and greedy foreign powers eager to take advantage of the country’s vast mineral resources.

Half a century on, dozens of foreign dignatories and heads of state this week arrived in the DRC to join the Africam nation in celebrating this major milestone.

Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame and United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon were just some of the high-profile invitees who flew into Kinshasa to witness a lavish display of military parades put on by the Congolese army.

But many ordinary Congolese, both inside and outside the country, feel that there’s not much to celebrate, given that war, torture and corruption have, for many, become a part of everyday life in the country.

“The assessment [of the last 50 years] has largely been negative,” pronounced Nkuba Luletsi, a teacher in the eastern town of Goma, the capital of North Kivu. “We have not had a credible leader in the last 50 years. People’s mentality must change and they must vote for change in the forthcoming elections.”

Over the last 15 years, Goma has seen some of the worst fighting in the country, as dozens of rival militias clashed in a bitter struggle for control over the region’s mineral resources.

Although a semblance of peace has now returned to the area, the spectre of violence is fresh in the minds of many.

Goma has traditionally been a stronghold of the government, with the incumbent president, Joseph Kabila, winning more than 90 per cent of the vote there in the 2006 elections.

But since then, support for Kabila has slowly started to give way to frustration over how the country is being run.

Many ordinary people are concerned about government inefficiency and mismanagement.

Civil servants are rarely paid in DRC and many are thought to engage in corrupt practices in order to get by.

The government has been criticised for spending tax money on free beers during the independence celebrations, while primary school teachers go without a regular income.

“The government has not spent anything on my education. Why should I go to a government rally and engage in celebrations when I have nothing for myself?” said one local.

Today, two-thirds of the 60 million Congolese live on less than 1.25 US dollars a day, according to the UN.

Recent human rights abuses in the country have also overshadowed the festivities. On June 2, celebrated activist Floribert Chebeya was found dead in Kinshasa, in murky circumstances, prompting the Movement for the Liberation of Congo, MLC, an opposition party, to announce that it would not participate in the commemorations.

Despite widespread disappointment with Kabila’s government, Goma residents recognise that there have been important improvements in the region. Today, Goma is the safest it has been in years, and infrastructure and businesses are starting to develop.

“I have just created an association for hoteliers in Goma, in order for us to develop our businesses in the coming years,” said Katembo Kikandau, a hotel manager. “These days, there are lots of NGOs working in the town. Our hope is that, soon, it will be tourism that brings us clients.”

Ban Ki-moon recently told Radio Okapi, the UN radio station in the country, that much has been accomplished since the arrival in 1999 of the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, “especially the pacification of a large part of the territory, democratic elections, and the creation of state institutions.

“The country has now entered a phase of consolidation and stabilisation.”

Such sentiments, however, overlook Kabila’s attempt to force MONUC out of the country altogether, which has been viewed by some an attempt to keep foreign observers from the country’s elections next year.

MONUC will stay for now, but a symbolic 2,000 troops – out of the total 20,000 – left on June 26, just four days before the anniversary celebrations began.

Nonetheless, Goma’s mayor, Roger Rachid, is optimistic about the future of his town.

“Our mind is not set on looking back at what we could not do,” he said. “Our goal is to look forward with force, courage, and objectivity. Our challenge is to find peace, cohabitation and love for one other. Once we do this, we will have the most beautiful town in the DRC.”

Six thousand kilometres away from the dusty streets of Goma – in Brussels, the capital of the former colonial power that once administered the day-to-day running of the African country – a group of Congolese expatriats gathered to protest at the participation of Prince Albert II at the independence celebrations.

The protesters said that it was wrong for Belgium’s constitutional monarch to attend the event, since this only served to legitamise what they describe as the corrupt and repressive DRC government.

“Since Kabila’s power was legitimised in the election in 2006, he’s become more arrogant,” said Henry Muke, one of the organisers of the protest and president of the campaign group the High Counsel for the Liberation of the Congo. “No one can speak in the country, journalists are being assassinated.”

Two years ago, Jean-Pierre Bemba, the head of the MLC opposition party, was arrested in Belgium and sent off to The Hague, a two-hour train ride, to stand trial before the International Criminal Court, ICC, for war crimes allegedly committed in the Central African Republic. Bemba’s trial is expected to start on July 14.

This week, the protesters in Brussels said they want to current Congolese officials in court next.

“We are stunned to see [Bemba] at the Hague, while the others are in Kinshasa continuing to commit crimes,” said Samson Cibayi, president of Dynamique du Combat, a Congolese association in Brussels.

An anti-Rwandan sentiment permeated the small protest, attended by about 150 people, with banners suggesting that the DRC is under Rwandan control.

There is widespread speculation that support from Rwanda was instrumental in helping Laurent Kabila, the father of the incumbent president, wrest power away from Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.

But many lament the division between Rwanda and the DRC.

“I wish we could have a more objective reading of this, and think that not all Rwandans are bad, just like not all Congolese are good,” said Dunia Sendwe, one of the protest organisers.

There are an estimated 16,000 people of Congolese origin in Belgium, a community which has turned its back on Kabila because of his perceived failure to provide for his people.

Muke estimates there has been one anti-Kabila protest every two months in the past few years in Belgium.

“It’s the Congolese community here that feeds part of the country’s population,” said Muke. “We send money to our families.”

Melanie Gouby is an IWPR journalist in Goma and Tiffany Stecker is an IWPR intern.

source: Institute for War and Peace Reporting

 

Former International Criminal Court president Philippe Kirsch to head committee investigating deaths of nine Turkish citizens in clash with Israeli naval commandos.

NEW YORK - A former president of the International Criminal Court, Canadian Philippe Kirsch, will head the committee investigating the deaths of nine Turkish citizens aboard the Gaza-bound flotilla, on behalf of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Kirsch, well known in the community of international law, has been involved in international investigations of war crimes and maritime terrorism in the past.

The committee will begin its work today after the its full membership is announced.

The decision to set up the committee was made by the Human Rights Council in a lightning-quick process, 48 hours after news broke that the Israel Navy intercepted the Gaza-bound flotilla and on-board clashes led to the deaths.

Diplomatic sources in New York expressed criticism and reservations at the timing for the start of the committee’s work.

The U.S. is opposed to an international probe into the events, and had welcomed the formation of an independent committee of inquiry in Israel under former justice Jacob Turkel. France and Britain share Washington’s view on the issue.

Diplomats describe the relationship between the UN headquarters in New York and the Human Rights Council in Geneva as one “short on trust.”

The UN’s media site did not announce Kirsch’s appointment as the head of the committee and ignored any reports of the start of the committee’s work.

“As far as the U.S. administration is concerned, at a time when it is trying to resume the peace process, the investigation into the events of the flotilla at this time could not have come at a worst time,” a diplomat in New York said yesterday.

The flotilla raid earned Israel international condemnation, with the harshest criticism coming from Turkey, which cut some ties with Jerusalem and has adamantly demanded an apology and compensation for the killed activists.

Turks blast ‘irrational’ Israel

The Turkish foreign minister renewed that demand yesterday and criticized his Israeli counterpart’s approach to the issue.

“What Avigdor Lieberman says has no value for us,” Ahmet Davutoglu said in an interview with Turkish television network TGRT. The foreign minister said he did not view his Israeli counterpart as a proper go-between “owing to his rhetoric and attitude.”

Lieberman has ruled out any chance of an official apology.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul said yesterday that Israel was acting outside its interests in not repairing ties with Ankara.

Gul said Israel’s apparent readiness to become more isolated by ditching relations with a country that had been its only Muslim ally was irrational.

“They don’t have many friends in the region, ” Gul said. “Now it seems they want to get rid of the relationship with Turkey.”

The United States, a mutual ally of Israel and NATO-member Turkey, has quietly encouraged the two governments to overcome their differences.

source: Haaretz