IJCentral: International Justice Central

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan arrived in Kenya on Friday to participate in a ceremony inaugurating the country’s newly minted constitution, flouting international demands for his arrest on genocide charges.

Mr. Bashir faces two arrest warrants: one issued in July by the International Criminal Court in The Hague on three counts of genocide and one from March 2009 for war crimes and crime against humanity. In theory the warrants could be enforced by any of the court’s member countries, which include Kenya.

The charges relate to the conflict in the western Darfur region of Sudan, where an estimated 300,000 people have died and more than two million have been uprooted by almost a decade of fighting between the government and rebels. Mr. Bashir denies the charges.

News reports said Mr. Bashir was escorted into Uhuru Park in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, by the minister of tourism, Najib Balala, to attend the ceremony marking the adoption of the new constitution, supposed to hasten democratic reform in Kenya, a nation generally depicted as pro-Western.

The role of the international court is particularly sensitive in Kenya because last April its judges authorized formal criminal investigations of the political leaders who organized the violence that convulsed the country after its disputed election in 2007.

Kenya’s political leaders had earlier refused to set up a special tribunal to prosecute those responsible for the killings, saying Kenya’s existing courts could handle the cases.

Under the Rome Statute establishing the court in 2002, which Kenya has ratified, member states are supposed to cooperate with the court, which has no means of enforcing its warrants. Nonetheless, Mr. Bashir traveled last month to Chad — also a member state of the international court — without being arrested.

The African Union, the continent’s main representative group, has criticized the warrant and urged that it be suspended.

The readiness of President Mwai Kibaki to receive Mr. Bashir drew strong criticism from Human Rights Watch, a rights advocacy group based in New York.

“Kenya will forever tarnish the celebration of its long-awaited constitution if it welcomes an international fugitive to the festivities,” said Elise Keppler, senior counsel in the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch in a statement on Thursday. “Even worse, hosting al-Bashir would throw into question Kenya’s commitment to cooperate with the I.C.C. in its Kenyan investigation.”

“Whether Kenya allows a suspected war criminal into Kenya is a test of the government’s commitment to a new chapter in ensuring justice for atrocities,” Ms. Keppler said. “The Kenyan government should stand with victims, not those accused of horrible crimes, by barring al-Bashir from Kenya or arresting him.”

The international warrants for his arrest have largely restricted Mr. Bashir’s travels to friendly countries in Africa and the Middle East that have resisted Western pressure to do the court’s bidding.

The celebration of Kenya’s new constitution, written to alleviate longstanding problems hindering good government for years, came after voters approved the document with overwhelming enthusiasm in a referendum earlier this month. It has been billed a potential turning point Kenya’s postcolonial history, addressing issues that have haunted the country since independence from Britain in 1963.

The constitution was drawn up after disputed elections in 2007 led to ethnically driven clashes that killed more than 1,000 people.

source: New York Times

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

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

On Thursday, the Great Lakes Policy Forum hosted a talk, “The ICC in Africa: Impartial Judge or Neo-Colonial Project?” featuring speakers Ruth Wedgwood, Director of the International Law and Organizations Program at Johns Hopkins University, Suliman Baldo, Africa Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice, and Charles Villa-Vicencio, Ph.D., former Executive Director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Discussion focused on why frustrations towards the ICC have emerged, what the appropriate role for the organization is, and whether its involvement as an outsider can truly provide the reconciliation needed at the local level.

According to its founding treaty, the ICC would only get involved in cases when states are unwilling or genuinely unable to carry out their own investigations and prosecutions. Wedgwood noted that the language, particularly the use of “genuinely,” was prone to subjectivity and led to unprecedented actions, such as the warrant issued for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir.

The African Union has been a vocal opponent of the ICC’s move to issue an arrest warrant for al-Bashir,.Villa-Vicencio said he sees this reaction as part of a growing antagonism in Africa towards international institutions. In this particular case, the AU had requested from both the ICC and the United Nations Security Council for more time to act before the warrant was issued. Despite these overtures, the ICC went ahead with the warrant, which, according to Villa-Vicencio, undermined the AU’s efforts in Darfur and role in the region’s peace process. Baldo, who spoke at length about the growing frustrations in the Democratic Republic of Congo towards the ICC’s prosecutions in the Ituri region, said that the AU rejection of al-Bashir’ indictment was not a dismissal of the war crimes committed, but an assertion that the AU should be at the center of the region’s security and peace efforts.

Not all of the ICC’s efforts were criticized. The panel agreed that the ICC indictment of Joseph Kony and top commanders of the Lord’s Resistance Army was essential for bringing the rebel group to the negotiating table. Baldo added that the international pressure led Ugandan civil society leaders to create their own set of ideas for seeking reconciliation and accountability—ideas that were incorporated in the Juba Agreement.

Villa-Vicencio suggested that in order for the ICC to achieve both justice and peace, it must increase dialogue with the AU and redirect its focus to building local and regional structures that can do the work of reconciliation themselves. Without local engagement, the ICC risks disconnecting from the very population for whom it seeks justice. He said, “Is there justice when the ICC comes in and local people do not understand, see, or feel the justice?”

As the event’s title suggests, the ICC often evokes impassioned debates, and Thursday’s event was no exception. To read more about the Court, check out Enough’s special page.

originally posted @ Enough Project

U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan retired Maj. General Scott Gration briefed bloggers at a round table Friday claiming there was overall “agreement on the overall broad framework on what we call incentives and pressures.” Asked about the SudanNow campaign he said “if anybody wants to come and help us, come on down.”

He also said he did not rule out meeting with Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. “I’ve not met with Bashir, nor do I have plans to meet with him. But I’m not ruling it out if we have to do it to move the process forward., Gration told bloggers.

Gration claimed “the president is totally behind me and is very interested.”

Enough Project Co-founder John Prendergast told ForeignPolicy.com:

[I]f the U.S. collapsed under the weight of perceived expediency and sold its moral authority for some belief that meeting the big man, the strong man, would actually be dispositive in moving the peace process forward, I think it would be a tragic mistake. It would undermine what leverage the United States has, which is rooted in part in moral authority and in part in its advocacy for those victims and survivors of the wars in Southern Sudan and Darfur.”

[We believe that U.S. policy, implemented by Gration, is] heading into dangerous territory in both Darfur and in the North-South process…[On the North-South issue,] a dangerous mistake that’s being made is to allow the U.S. government to be part of a process that includes the [ruling] National Congress Party, [Southern] SPLM, and United States talking about renegotiating elements of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. This allows us to be perceived as willing to renegotiate certains things that have already been agreed upon…instead of renegotiating things that are hard, we need to demand strict implementation [of the peace process] and work to build a multilateral coalition that is willing to impose consequences for non-implemention.”

For more reports on the Gration briefing go here.

originally posted @ Enough Project

This is recent post from our friend Bec Hamilton after recently returning from a month in Sudan.

Hi everyone

As many of you know I spent August in Sudan. Unfortunately this blog was a casualty of my time there - with the GOS having blocked this site inside Sudan I couldn’t access even the back-end of it to post updates. In many ways it was a blessing in disguise, both because I was so busy with interviews, and because I would have been too paranoid on the security front to write freely anyway.

On the outskirts of Kalma camp, South Darfur

I have so much to share, I’m at a bit of a loss where to start. . .

In Khartoum I did over 30 interviews, almost all of multi-hour length with people including (leader of the Janjaweed), Minni Minawi ( the one rebel who signed the DPA), Lam Akol (Sudan’s foreign minister for most of the period I am
writing on), Hassan al Turabi (hand behind the Bashir coup in 1989), Dr Ghazi (now head of the Darfur file),Rodolphe Adada (outgoing Head on UN-AU in Darfur)  - in addition to many others in government and civil society. I also caught up briefly with Scott Gration before he headed to Juba. I attended the second court appearance of Lubna Hussein - the journalist who faces flogging for the “crime” of wearing trousers, and got sprayed with tear gas following a football match.

After 16 days of being told by External Information, “come back tomorrow”, and right at the point I had decided I needed to head back to Nairobi because didn’t have enough money left to stay in Khartoum any longer, I was given a travel permit to go to Darfur the next day.

Cookers of recycled USAID tins: Sudanese ingenuity at El Fasher market

In El Fasher and then in Nyala I did interviews with all aspects of UNAMID, the few aid workers who were not too scared to speak, and of course with the people I care about most - the IDPs themselves. I also experienced the all-encompassing warmth of close-knit Darfur family life, staying at the home of a Darfuri friend. From 7 months to 70 years, we had grandmother, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters, all living together. We ate dinner off one plate together each evening and slept under the bright stars of the Darfur sky each night. I’m not sure I have ever felt so much love concentrated in one place.

At 4am on Saturday August 22, I was woken by the street band of drummers, serving as an alarm to wake everyone up for sahur (meal before sun rises and fasting starts), on the first day of Ramadan. Like so many I met, I hoped that the holy month of Ramadan would bring peace in Darfur.

In the coming week, I’m likely to be posting a mish-mash of things - from photos, to ‘travelogues’ that I wrote up while practicing the fine Sudanese art of waiting (waiting, waiting), and summaries of the key issues raised in my interviews. As always, time in Sudan puts me through emotions of despair and hope, rage and joy, like no other place on earth seems to be capable of.

Thanks for your continuing readership,

Bec

I urge you to read Justice Richard Goldstone’s wonderful and concise overview of the state of international justice, published on the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times. It provides an encouraging assessment of the remarkable progress that has been made on the international justice front, a reminder that all the efforts to cultivate international respect for the rule of law, spearheaded by a “mature global network of human rights organizations”, are bearing fruit and reining in the culture of impunity enjoyed by the most powerful violators of human rights.  Perpetrators of mass atrocities used to living by the rule of force and negotiating amnesties and personal benefits in exchange for peace are finding out that that route to retirement is no longer open for them - Charles Taylor is a stark example.  And the arrogance of Fujimori’s ploy to return to Peru for a presidential run, even though he was a fugitive from justice, led to his landmark trial that ended in a conviction and 25-year sentence for human rights violations.

Justice Goldstone is right to remind us all about the progress made in the quest for a world where justice and human dignity prevail.  Human rights activists and concerned citizens, often feeling beleaguered and powerless in the face of myriad conflicts, unbridled violence, and oppressive regimes, need to see that if we persevere there is light at the end of the tunnel.  Justice Goldstone was just awarded the MacArthur Award for International Justice, a well deserved recognition of his incredible career and accomplishments in advancing international justice, a list too long to enumerate in this post.  Skylight Pictures made a short film that honors Justice Goldstone’s role in the creation of an effective international justice system - it was shown at the MacArthur-sponsored award ceremony in The Hague on May 25, and you can see it here.

Now we have to get down to the business of bringing accountability for the abuses of rule of law and human dignity perpetrated during the Bush administration - No One Above the Law! And that includes President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan…

What was the UN Security Council (UNSC) thinking when it issued Resolution 1593 in 2005, referring the ongoing situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC)?  Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo took the case, conducted a 20-month investigation, came back with evidence, and requested arrest warrants - he did his job, in accordance with the justice mandate of the ICC.  At briefings he has subsequently given every 6 months, he has updated the UNSC on the progress of the investigation.  After obtaining arrest warrants from the ICC judges for Sudanese government Minister Ahmad Haroun, Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb, and President Omar al-Bashir, he has consistently urged the UNSC and the international community represented at the UN, to execute the warrants. Instead the UNSC has balked at following through, and the African Union and the Arab League have rallied to support al-Bashir. 

Now there is even the possibility that the Obama administration might consider appeasing al-Bashir, a disgraceful approach if it happens (I suspect that Obama’s desire for dialogue with Iran, with its ties to Sudan, would have something to do with a rapprochement with al-Bashir).  So what did the UNSC and the international community expect when they asked the Prosecutor to investigate?  Did they have any plan for what to do if he came back with evidence of crimes against humanity?  They don’t seem to have thought that far ahead, or simply issued Resolution 1593 for political expediency.  But now they must act - we as global citizens must pressure our leaders to uphold the rule of law.  If you live in the U.S., write to your congressperson and President Obama and let them know you want the ICC warrants to be acted upon!  And citizens around the world, IJCentral members, send an email to your Minister of Foreign Affairs urging them to support global rule of law!

At a recent post-screening discussion of documentary film “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court”, a Darfuri journalist said that amongst Darfuris, the surprise is not that the ICC issued an arrest warrant for President al-Bashir charging him with crimes against humanity in Darfur, or that al-Bashir expelled 13 humanitarian groups from the Darfur Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. The real surprise for Darfuris was that humanitarian organizations and the international community seemed taken by surprise by al-Bashir’s actions after the warrant was issued. As the Darfuri journalist, Tajeldin Abdalla Adam from Radio Dabanga said, ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo publicly requested the warrants; al-Bashir publicly said he would retaliate; so why wasn’t the international community making preparations to respond to this and to preemptively pressure the Sudanese regime to curtail its actions? Al-Bashir and his National Congress Party have been at it for 20 years, presiding over the tragedy of southern Sudan (2 million victims), arming and giving safe haven to the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda (20,000 victims, 1.5 million displaced), and now Darfur (200,000 victims, over 2 million displaced). How long are we supposed to wait? It is time for the international community to definitively isolate President al-Bashir, and make it clear to any of his potential successors that the rogue state tactics of the National Congress Party regime will no longer be tolerated.

Accountability is not something a constituency should have to beg from its government.  A lack of transparency and a paper trail of secrets is not something that people who fight for their country and defend their democracy deserve. Alas, these types of abuses of power and abstractions of the law have become so commonplace over the last eight years that it’s hard to remember where we started and how we got into this mess.

With the recent release of the Bush administration terrorism memos we are beginning to learn first-hand what many Americans and people around the world suspected had terribly gone wrong with this manipulation of governance.  During the aftermath of (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) the Bush administration decided it would be a opportune moment enact a complete deconstruction of social liberties and give itself the type of impunity only sought after by the types of despots and dictators that the American government has long vowed to dethrone and displace. 

In 1998 we saw the indictment of Augusto Pinochet by the Spanish Magistrate Baltasar Garzón for crimes against humanity. On April 7, 2009 the world saw former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori found guilty of human right abuses and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Finally, on March 4th 2009 the ICC issued an unprecedented arrest warrant for sitting head of state Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir on counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Obviously there is a strong trend afoot in the international community to stop the egregious abuses of power and the murder of innocent civilian populations under the threat of war. We are witnessing a gradual acceptance of an international rule of law, but there is still much momentum to be built.  Not that there hasn’t been an acceptance since the Nuremberg trials as a result of World War II or after the signing of the Rome Statue, but I mean the active and engaged acceptance that brings crimes to the surface of public opinion and furthermore its criminals to court.

In March a Spanish court has moved forward into opening an official criminal investigation against top administration officials in the former Bush administration including former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and former Justice Department Lawyer John C. Yoo for allegedly violating international law “by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba”.  This bold step is led by none other than Baltasar Garzón, and is a necessary beginning towards accountability for the United States. Although it may be unnecessary for the United States to have to export its alleged criminals, it does seem imminent that something must be done about them. The past eight years of American involvement in foreign and domestic politics has not only been an embarrassment but a potentially ruthless and criminal interpretation of the law and must not go unpunished.

Spain’s Attorney General has already encouraged Garzón to drop his investigation into the Bush administration and President Barack Obama has assured C.I.A. operatives involved in the torture described in the terrorism memo’s “that they would not be prosecuted for actions that their superiors told them were legal.”  Are the people of the United States going to step-up and make sure its leaders are accountable for their actions?  Are they going to vow against impunity and support a global rule of law? 

“We haven’t waited 17 years to get justice…we’ve fought 17 years to get justice.”  This quote from Eduardo Gonzalez of the International Center for Transitional Justice is in reference to the victims and members of Peruvian civil society that have been struggling since 1992, without pause, to have Peru’s ex-President Alberto Fujimori face justice for the human rights violations perpetrated during his 10-year regime. We met Eduardo in 2002 when he was working with the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission, and Pamela Yates and I were scouting to make “State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism”, the Skylight Pictures documentary about Peru’s 20-year “war on terror” with Shining Path, which covers the role that Fujimori played in gutting his country’s democracy in the name of security, committing the crimes that led to today’s guilty verdict and 25-year sentence.  Today is a big day for all Peruvians that want their country to be ruled by law, but Fujimori’s supporters will surely retaliate as they are a violent cohort.
It’s the first time a democratically elected Latin American president was found guilty in his own country of rights abuses, and Gisela Ortiz and Raida Condor (pictured here) deserve a lot of the credit for it, as they battled tirelessly for 17 years to see Fujimori face justice for ordering their brother and son killed in the La Cantuta massacre.  In Q&As for “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court” I often point to the example that Latin American civil society presents to the world: since the 60s and 70s, when the majority of the region was ruled by dictatorships, we have come to a present ruled by democracies.  It’s a remarkable achievement of what was considered to be an impossible task: namely, to have military leaders and politicians face justice for abuses committed against their own citizens.  To those who criticize the ICC arrest warrants charging Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with crimes against humanity and war crimes, saying that it will be a setback for peace, I say look at Latin America and the role that the rule of law played in the continent’s transformation to democracy.