Pádraig McAuliffe
Inevitably given the level of briefing, leaking and PR emanating from the ICC Prosecutor’s office in the past fortnight, Colonel Gaddafi and his intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi, have been indicted as suspects for crimes against humanity by Luis Moreno-Ocampo today. Less expectedly, the former’s son, Saif, has also been named. ICC judges must still decide whether or not to issue warrants for their arrest. Moreno-Ocampo said: “The evidence shows that Muammar Gaddafi personally ordered attacks on unarmed Libyan civilians. His forces attacked Libyan civilians in their homes and in the public space, shot demonstrators with live ammunition, used heavy weaponry against participants in funeral processions and placed snipers to kill those leaving mosques after the prayers.” Moreno-Ocampo made it clear that if the ICC approves his request for the three arrest warrants, he will not be asking NATO to enforce them. NATO is of course in no place to enforce the warrants, given that it appears no nearer to effecting regime change than it was a month ago. There is increasing evidence that the alliance has ran out of ideas on how to wage the campaign. Gen. David Richards, head of Britain’s armed forces, announced yesterday that he was concerned that the situation would reach a stalemate without increased NATO strikes. Read Full Post »
Pádraig McAuliffe
The past week has seen two neatly juxtaposed responses to mass atrocity, namely the extra-judicial execution of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden on Sunday/Monday and the announcement on Wednesday by the ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo that he would seek the authority to issue arrest warrants against three to five as-yet-unnamed Libyans, most likely including Muammar Gadafy himself (It may of course be argued that the latter occupies a mid-point on the spectrum between outright revenge at one pole and outright impunity on the other). The killing of Bin Laden has been criticised by the UN special rapporteur on counter terrorism measures, Martin Scheinin, and the rapporteur on extrajudicial and summary executions, Christof Heyns. A joint statement from both men stated
“Actions taken by States in combating terrorism, especially in high profile cases, set precedents for the way in which the right to life will be treated in future instances …………. In respect of the recent use of deadly force against Osama bin Laden, the United States of America should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards………For instance it will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture bin Laden.” Read Full Post »
Pádraig McAuliffe
Both The Times and The Guardian newspapers today report that plans are afoot to offer Muammar Gaddafi freedom to leave Libya as perhaps premature plans for the endgame in Tripoli develop. This could cause potential embarrassment for the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council after paragraph 4 of Resolution 1970, adopted unanimously on 26 February, referred the situation in Libya since 15 February 2011 to the former. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, announced that his investigation would target “Gaddafi, his inner circle including some of his sons who had de facto authority over the security forces…… The allegations are that peaceful demonstrators were attacked by security forces. During the coming weeks, the office will investigate who are the most responsible for the most serious incidents, for the most serious crimes committed in Libya.” he said. Leaving what appears to be a rather prominent hostage to fortune, he added that “There will be no impunity in Libya.” It is entirely possible that he will be proven wrong.
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Pádraig McAuliffe
Today being International Women’s Day, it is worth drawing attention to a recent ICLQ paper by Professors Christine Bell and Catherine O’Rourke (Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster) entitled ‘Peace Agreements or ‘Pieces of Paper’? The Impact of UNSC Resolution 1325 on Peace Processes and their Agreements’ (2010) 59 International & Comparative Law Quarterly 941-980, broken down into handier bite-size form in an opinion piece this month for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. Resolution 1325, adopted unanimously on October 31, 2000, called for the adoption of a gender perspective that included the special needs of women and girls during repatriation and resettlement, rehabilitation, reintegration and post-conflict reconstruction. It was the first formal and legal document from the United Nations Security Council that required parties in a conflict to respect women’s rights and to support their participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction.
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Pádraig McAuliffe
The cycle and counter-cycle of transition and human rights abuses in North in the past five weeks once more remind us that early theorising about geopolitical domino dynamics (whereby some change, small in itself, will cause a similar change nearby, which then will cause another similar change, and so on in linear sequence) can, in some circumstances, amount to more than the idle and self-interested speculations of US Cold War hawks and the Bush neo-Con administration. From Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya, the ongoing challenges to entrenched and repressive rules remind us that events can and do have exportable demonstration effects, if the lessons of post-Revolutionary France, the Latin American transitions in the 1980s and the almost continuous rush of East European regime changes in 1989 were not evidence enough. What is interesting in the current process is the potential for this democratisation trend (I am going to make the perhaps foolish presumption that the Egyptian, Tunisian and possibly Bahraini protests will lead to democratic transitions or at least considerably more liberal rule) to interact with a trend that existed only in embryonic form in the rush of Latin American and Eastern European transitions at the end of the 1980s, namely transitional justice “cascade”.
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Pádraig McAuliffe
A call for papers has gone out from the School of Law at the University of Dundee for the 2011 Scottish Young Legal Researchers Colloquium on Friday 22 April which, perhaps belying the name, attracted a number of very welcome submissions from Ireland last year. The purpose of this Colloquium is to provide young legal researchers with a platform to present a paper in an academic setting as well as discuss the themes involved with peers and receive feedback on their research. In particular, it is intended to offer the opportunity to researchers at Scottish universities to meet one another and to share expertise and research experience. The Colloquium will also include a research and academic careers session with advice on publishing, thesis completion and securing academic employment. The call for papers reads as follows: Read Full Post »
Pádraig McAuliffe
The Wikileaks cables have provided a fascinating insight into the politics of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and the complex interaction between legal obligation to combat impunity, national politics and accession to the EU in demonstrating how various states have approached the evasion by Ratko Mladić of arrest by Serbia, where he is widely believed to reside. Mladić was recognized as the top military general by the Court with command responsibility for the 1992–1995 Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre. There has been an outstanding international arrest warrant against Mladić following the Rule 61 of ICTY which concluded that there are reasonable grounds for believing that he has committed the crimes in question, including genocide. The Tribunal aims to complete all trials by the middle of 2011 and all appeals by 2013, with the exception of Radovan Karadžić whose trial is expected to end in 2012 and the appeal to be heard by February 2014. Because Mladić and Goran Hadžić are still at large, they do not fall within the Tribunal’s completion strategy
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Pádraig McAuliffe
This morning the world media’s attention was focussed quite poignantly on a piece of unused furniture when the head of the Nobel Committee placed the Peace Prize diploma and gold medal on an empty chair representing 2010’s absent laureate Liu Xiaobo. Mr Liu is an academic and human rights activist (a distinction many of us sadly fail to make) who called for democratic reforms and the end of communist one-party rule in China. In his writings, Liu has called for democratic elections, advocated values of freedom, supported separation of powers and urged the Beijing CCP to be accountable for its wrongdoings. Since 1989 he has been sentenced to prison and labour education camp four times for his political activities, notably beginning with his participation in the Tiananmen Square protests. His absence is due to the fact that he is currently serving an 11-year sentence for “incitement to overthrow state power”. When not imprisoned, he has generally been kept under house arrest. Indeed, even his relatives were prevented from leaving China – Liu’s wife is under house arrest; other family members are under police surveillance
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Pádraig McAuliffe
Saddam Hussein’s former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was today sentenced to death by the Iraqi Central Criminal Court in Baghdad for what it characterised as crimes against humanity. Aziz was appointed Iraqi foreign minister in 1983 and then deputy prime minister in 1991. Aziz may be one of the more familiar faces to those with an interest in the region – throughout the 1990s the Christian Aziz was the public face of the Baathist regime. His position of No. 25 on the US army’s deck of cards hitlist of regime figures who the invading US military had planned to kill or capture probably did a disservie to his seniority, as the trial revealed.
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Pádraig McAuliffe
The inexorable electoral march of the Tea Party in the US has been a cause of both mirth and eye-rolling for most observers of American politics in Europe, or at least those who can turn a blind eye to the ascension of the infinitely more sinister Sweden Democrats in Sweden or the Freedom Party in the Netherlands. It is no doubt a relief to many of us abroad that the influence of the Congress that will receive sizeable numbers of its members on American foreign policy is relatively limited, for all the damage it may wreak domestically. One thing the change in the House and Senate make-ups may guarantee is the death of any chance that the US might ratify UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the increasingly precarious lifetime of the current administration. While President Obama has previously described the failure to ratify the Convention as ‘embarrassing’ and has promised to review this (sentiments endorsed by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice), ratification has been subject the regrettable lethargy and dilatoriness that has defined the administration thus far on matters of human rights.
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