A Matter of Justice, Not Immigration: What to do with War Criminals posing as Refugees

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Mark Kersten

Life jackets from refugees escaping violence in Syria and elsewhere lay strewn on the shores of Lesbos, Greece. (Photo: EPA)

Life jackets from refugees escaping violence in Syria and elsewhere lay strewn on the shores of Lesbos, Greece. (Photo: EPA)

Rumours that terrorists have been hiding themselves among Syrian refugees and asylum seekers embarking for the shores and capitals Europe are nothing new. Especially in the wake of the Paris attacks last year, it was widely reported that groups like ISIS, or Daesh, as it’s increasingly called, were infiltrating European communities to perpetrate acts of terror. Now too, there is evidence that war criminals have followed suit.

According a report from the Guardian, Dutch authorities have identified thirty war criminals among last year’s influx of refugees into The Netherlands:

Dutch officials have identified 30 war crimes suspects, including 10 Syrians, among tens of thousands of asylum seekers who arrived in the country last year, the justice ministry said Monday.

Immigration authorities found them after investigating 170 people, Deputy Justice Minister Klaas Dijkhoff told parliament in a letter following questions from members of parliament.

Ten of them were from Syria, while the others are from Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Georgia, he said.

Under the Geneva Convention, refugees can be refused asylum “when serious grounds exist to believe that they are guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or other non-political serious crimes”, Dijkhoff said.

But 20 of them could not be sent back because of ongoing wars or fears of inhumane treatment.

If the numbers are accurate, the number of refugee claimants found to be war criminals is a tiny fraction of those seeking asylum — approximately 5 in every 10,000 applicants. Still, this is not the first time that war criminals have been found among migrants — in The Netherlands or elsewhere. A 2006 CMI report on the subject attributed the growth in war criminals cloaking themselves as refugees to the global war on terror, poignantly asking how states could “guarantee fair procedures and humane treatment of all asylum seekers and simultaneously prevent human rights violators or terrorists from wrongfully being granted refugee status?”

Today, the severity of, and popular response to, the refugee “crisis” in Europe could make this issue even graver and more pressing than it otherwise would be. Of course, the flushing out and identification of war criminals can be seen as a positive development. These individuals would otherwise live with impunity and, given the complete absence of any justice for human rights violations in Syria, the detention of 10 Syrian war criminals is the closest thing to accountability for mass atrocities in the five years since the Syrian civil war erupted. Even if these are “small fry”, low-level perpetrators, they could help build cases for more senior-level war criminals.

But the revelation that so many war criminals made it into The Netherlands could also exacerbate and fuel regional racism and xenophobia among those communities and political parties already suspicious of foreigners. Responsible governments and human rights groups thus have a difficult task on their hands. They must needle a particularly tricky thread: demonstrate the need to continue supporting a generous and compassionate refugee policy whilst quelling fears that war criminals pose a threat by assuring communities that perpetrators will be brought to justice. But will they be brought to account? It isn’t entirely clear. Continue reading →

Posted in Canada, Europe, International Criminal Justice, Refugees, Syria, The Netherlands | 11 Comments

Prosecuting the Destruction of Shrines at the ICC – A Clash of Civilizations?

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Mark Kersten
al Mahdi ICC

Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi during his confirmation of charges hearing at the International Criminal Court (Photo: ICC)

The potential trial of Ahmed Al Faqi Al Mahdi marks a series of firsts for global justice. Al Mahdi, who faced confirmation of charges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) this week, is the first individual from Mali to face the prospect of prosecution at the ICC. More pertinently, he is the first Islamic extremist to face charges at the Court and the first individual to be prosecuted at the ICC for the destruction of cultural sites as a war crime. ICC prosecutors insist that al Mahdi, a rebel leader in northern Mali and a member of Ansar Dine, is responsible for the destruction of religious shrines and mausoleums in Timbuktu in 2012. So how will the self-professed teacher and scholar defend himself against the charges against him and what could his trial mean for the global fight against extremism and terrorism?

Notably and somewhat unusually, al Mahdi and the team of lawyers defending him have decided not to present details of their defence. According to Tom Maliti, this suggests al Mahdi’s counsel believe that the charges against him will be confirmed and are simply waiting for the trial to begin.

While some ICC insiders believed al Mahdi was a prime candidate for a guilty plea when he first came into the Court’s custody, that certainly doesn’t appear to be the case. It also appears that he will respect the authority of the Court. But his team appears poised to eschew any direct defence of their client. Al Mahdi’s counsel are likely cognizant of the fact that it would be virtually pointless, given the prosecution’s evidence, to argue that al Mahdi was not involved in the destruction of mausoleums and historic sites in Timbuktu. Moreover, it seems entirely possible that al Mahdi revels in his role in destroying shrines in northern Mali. This is, as his lawyers implied, part of his religious philosophy. Indeed, rather than dealing with the specific allegations, al Mahdi’s defence counsel seem more inclined to pit his radical, Islamic worldview against that which underpins the ICC. As Geoffrey York put it,

[al Mahdi’s] defence lawyers are seeking to turn the trial into a battle over “the definition of the divine.”

The landmark case in The Hague, focused on the destruction of ancient shrines in Timbuktu, is emerging as a clash between two world views, part of a broader global struggle over the meaning of Islam. While prosecutors portray the cultural destruction as an attempt to annihilate a civilization, the defence sees it instead as simply a different “vision” of “good over evil.”

While his lawyers did argue that only the “covers”, and not the tombs, of shrines in Timbuktu had been destroyed, it is evident that al Mahdi’s defence is primarily concerned with demonstrating that what he did was right, rather than arguing that he didn’t do it. One of al Mahdi’s lawyers, Jean-Louis Gilissen, insisted that his client’s decisions were made in line with “a new possibility for Mali.” He stressed that his client’s views were political rather than criminal: “Fundamentalism is a political plan or project and, let’s be clear on this, a political project that is not a crime. This is important and should be stressed.” In this context, al Mahdi was “doing what is right” and “seeking the means to allow his conception of good over evil to prevail.” Rather ominously, Gilissen added: “We’re talking about two visions of the world that are in contradiction.” Continue reading →

Posted in International Criminal Court (ICC), International Criminal Justice, Mali, Terrorism | Tagged | 5 Comments

Event: Prospects of Justice, Avenues for Accountability – Investigating War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Syria

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Mark Kersten

For any and all readers in the Toronto area, I am thrilled to announce that I have organized my first event at the Munk School of Global Affairs: ‘Prospects of Justice, Avenues for Accountability – Investigating War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Syria’. The event will feature Bill Wiley and Nerma Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability and Stephen Toope, Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, discussing the prospects of accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria. The event will take place in the Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility on 8 March from 6 – 7:30pm. Please make sure to RSVP by following the links here.

If you’re in the area, please do join us and make sure to say hi! If you can’t make it, fear not – I will be sure to write an analysis of the event in the coming days. 

Munk EventNow entering its fifth year, the Syrian civil war has been characterized by the perpetration of mass atrocities and human rights violations committed by all parties to the conflict. Will justice ever be served for the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria? Can all sides — the Syrian regime, rebel militants, ISIS,— be held accountable for the rights violations they have wrought upon civilians in the region? How can and should evidence of such abuses be collected? Will such evidence ever be used in a courtroom? The Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) has been on the front lines collecting and protecting evidence of mass atrocities committed during the Syria civil war. Join CIJA’s William Wiley and Nerma Jelacic in a conversation with Munk School Director Stephen Toope on international accountability, international criminal investigations, and the remarkable work being undertaken by CIJA investigators.

William Wiley is the Founder and Director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). William formerly worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as well as the International Criminal Court, was an infantry officer in the Canadian military and worked on war crimes investigations in the Department of Justice.

Nerma Jelacic is the Director of External Relations and Communications at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. Prior to joining CIJA, Nerma was the Head of Communications for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Director and co-founder of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), as well as an editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

Stephen Toope is the Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Stephen has previously been the president of the President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia as well as the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. He has also served as President of the Canadian Council on International Law and member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.

The Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is an innovative, non-profit organisation committed to establishing the individual criminal responsibility of high-level perpetrators implicated in violations of International Criminal and Humanitarian Law (ICHL) in conflict and post-conflict areas where public bodies, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) or domestic prosecutorial authorities, are unable to intervene due to physical risk, insufficient expertise or in the absence of jurisdiction. Its intervention in Syria has already resulted with the completion of three internationally-acclaimed case files inculpating 23 of the highest ranking regime officials.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

6:00PM – 7:30PM

The Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place

Please RSVP here.

 

Posted in JiC News, Syria | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

How Long Can the ICC Keep States in the Purgatory of Preliminary Examinations?

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Mark Kersten
Children walk along a street in a heavily damaged neighbourhood in Gaza (Photo: AP)

Children walk along a street in a heavily damaged neighbourhood in Gaza (Photo: AP)

The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) recently told journalists that she would not provide a time-frame for the ICC’s preliminary examination into alleged war crimes perpetrated in Palestine during the 2014 war in Gaza. Officials in Israel may derive some comfort in knowing that ICC action against the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) isn’t coming any time soon. But Tel Aviv will certainly take little-to-no comfort in knowing that an official investigation and the issuance of arrest warrants could come at any time — and likely with little warning. At the same time, it may be a decade or more before victims and survivors in Israel and Palestine know whether or not they’ll ever get ICC justice for the crimes perpetrated against them. This brings forward an important question: is it fair to keep states in the potential purgatory that is the preliminary examination stage of an ICC intervention?

It stands that states under preliminary examination want to have some idea of what that entails — including how long they might be under the microscope of ICC investigators. Without a doubt, one of the most potentially combustable interventions by the Court would be in Palestine. Both opponents and champions of a role for the ICC in Palestine can agree on that. Predictably, then, observers want to know if and when such an intervention might come. According to The Jerusalem Post, ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda wasn’t about to divulge that information and would not even say whether the preliminary examination would be concluded by the time her tenure ran out in 2021 – over five years from now. Bensouda insisted there was no time-frame for her office’s examination:

I cannot sit here and say that it will take seven years, or it will take ten years or it will take any number of years…all of this depends on the facts and the circumstances. The preliminary examination cannot be given a timeline.

Interestingly, if somewhat puzzlingly, on a visit to the Palestine’s Mission to The Netherlands last year, Ambassador Nabil Abuznaid responded to my students by declaring he believed the ICC would not act or come to any significant decision in “less than ten years.”

Legally, Bensouda is on solid ground. The Rome Statute says nothing about how long a preliminary examination should take. While the yearly Preliminary Examination reports released by the Office of the Prosecutor indicate that the institution views increased transparency in its activities as useful and important, the Office is under no legal obligation to be forthright about its preliminary examinations. Some would argue that not divulging timelines is politically astute. After all, no prosecutor would voluntarily pigeon-hole themselves by declaring a cut-off date for a decision.

But is it fair? Should preliminary examinations be allowed to persist indefinitely? The domestic analogy leaves one dumbfounded. Imagine someone being informed by legal authorities that they were under investigation for murder and that they would be seen as a potential suspect indefinitely. At some point, an arrest warrant might be issued for the individual in question. But it also might not. The individual has no ability, let alone right, to know. In this scenario, neither does the victim or survivor. For a potentially indefinite period of time, they are told that justice is on the horizon. Or it might not be.

Of course, using a domestic analogy to measure or illustrate international phenomena is limited and problematic. But still, it seems troublesome to potential targets of prosecution, affected communities in general, as well as the victims and survivors of international crimes, to let preliminary examinations drag on indefinitely. Granted, the ICC has closed some preliminary examinations, most recently in Honduras. However, of its long-lasting examinations like Afghanistan and Colombia, it has often been said that they are left on the ‘low-heat’ of preliminary examination status as a means for the Court to be able to say it is interested and active in those situations and not because it actually is. Continue reading →

Posted in Gaza, International Criminal Court (ICC), International Criminal Justice, International Law, Israel, Preliminary Examinations | 12 Comments

JiC Turns Five – Some Thoughts on Half a Decade of Writing

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Mark Kersten

highfive_1x

It’s hard to believe, but five years ago today, the first-ever post at Justice in Conflict was published. The occasion and anniversary spurred me to reflect on writing at JiC over the last half-decade and to share a bit of the story behind the blog.

I decided to create JiC in late February 2011, during the first year of my PhD in the International Relations Department at the LSE. The push to set up the site came from numerous sources, including a moment of failure. In late 2010, two close friends and I lost an election to become the editor’s of the LSE’s Millennium Journal of International Studies. Our failed bid was to be a blessing in disguise in that it left me with both the time and space to create and maintain the blog. At the same time, my father, Gregory Kersten, an esteemed academic in his own right, had been encouraging me to use my excess energy to create a website. Sometimes, it seems, fathers really do know best. My sister, Marta Kersten, a researcher in image-guided surgery/medical imaging at the McGill University, helped come up with the name of the site. I immediately embraced the idea of calling the blog Justice in Conflict for its double meaning — the pursuit of justice in the midst of active conflict as well as conflicting perspectives on the nature of justice itself.

In creating the blog, I didn’t have any expectations of what I — or the site— could achieve. Of course, I wanted an audience, but I was also largely happy to write for myself. Writing helped me put my thoughts in order — as well as spur new ones. As one American novelist once put it: “I write to know what I think.” Writing on JiC helped me to access, trigger, and string together thoughts and theories that were otherwise obscured or inaccessible.

After it’s launch (if it can even be called that), the blog started to take off rather quickly. Within the first few days, Kevin Jon Heller, whom I did not know at the time but who has since become a close friend, was gracious enough to welcome JiC to the blogosphere on Opinio Juris. I still recall not only my own excitement but the e-mails and comments of people saying: “Did you see? You’re on Opinio Juris!”

With time, more people began subscribing to the site. Today, JiC is closing in on 1.3 million visits and 15,000 subscribers across various platforms. Dozens of both regular and periodic contributors have enriched the discussions and debates we’ve had at JiC (with a special shout-out to Elke Schwarz and Patrick Wegner, both indispensable in the early years of the blog). These are bewildering and humbling numbers and I can’t thank readers for their interest enough.

In subsequent years, there have been other significant achievements for the site. Two stand out: in particular first, my critique of Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 documentary that went viral and ultimately garnered the site some 420,000 hits in two days; and second, when a source gave me permission to publish a draft UN Security Council resolution referring Syria to the ICC, making JiC the first and only place where the full text of the referral was available.

Of course, writing takes time and, as I tell anyone who asks for advice in creating a sustainable blog, new content has to be published on a regular basis. Capturing the interest of readers is one thing — maybe even the easy part; retaining their attention over time is another matter altogether. Looking back at the first-ever comment on the site, Xavier Rauscher wrote: “Very nice, Mark. Good luck with this blog. Whatever you do, don’t stop writing!” And he was right. The trick is to never lapse in producing new content. Thus the single achievement I am most proud of is the consistency of new and original material the blog has been able to put out since it was established. On average, JiC has published just under 100 articles per year since its inception.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say the consistency that the blog achieved wouldn’t have been possible without support from my two PhD supervisors, Kirsten Ainley and Mark Hoffman. Not once did they suggest that I put my blogging aside in order to focus on the thesis or more ‘academic’ pursuits. The end result was, perhaps for some, counter-intuitive. Rather than the thesis being delayed, it took less time because of my engagement with the blog; when I did finally submit the thesis, it was well before its due-date. Writing for JiC kept me constantly involved and interested in ongoing developments. I can’t recall a moment during my research when I wasn’t fascinated by what was happening at the ICC and in the world of international criminal justice more broadly. JiC helped me maintain that fascination and also made me feel like a part of that world. Rather act as a distraction from my research and thesis writing, JiC kept me engaged and allowed me to streamline certain arguments that I worked through on the blog. Writing was also something I could always rely on. I take great pleasure and indeed comfort in crafting posts and doing the necessary research for each piece I publish. Writing gives me what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call “flow” — a state of mind so focused that everything else seems to melt away. Continue reading →

Posted in JiC News | 8 Comments

Concessions from the Half-Way House – Leveraging Membership in the ICC

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Mark Kersten

(Illustration: Robert Neubecker)

In the world of the International Criminal Court (ICC), there are two types of states: the member-states who accept the jurisdiction of the Court and the non-member states who don’t. The ultimate goal of the international criminal justice project, beyond making itself irrelevant by eradicating mass atrocities altogether, is to move as many states from the latter camp into the former. But the relationship of African states, as well as that of the United States, with the ICC, should give us pause. The categories of member states and non-member states may make sense in the black-and-white of legalese, but they occlude the existence of a spectrum states that engage differentially with the Court. We need a new category that encompasses a half-way house of states that fall somewhere between being member-states and non-member states.

In recent months and years, threats — empty or not — of African states withdrawing from the ICC have proliferated. In just the last month, it was widely, if incorrectly, reported that the African Union was establishing some sort of ‘roadmap’ for states withdrawing from the Court. In a Presidential debate in Uganda, current head of state Yoweri Museveni reiterated his view that Uganda should pull out of the “partisan” institution. Observers can debate and discern the validity of such threats but it is undeniable that they currently dominate perceptions of the role and impact of the Court on the continent. But beyond determining whether any state’s intentions to withdraw membership is real, there is a clear need to understand a simultaneous and underlying trend: the leveraging of membership within the ICC for political gain by states occupying the middle ground between member and non-member state status.

Consider recent events across the African continent. In Uganda, Museveni has masterfully employed a schizophrenic policy on the ICC. Going full-throttle janus-faced, Museveni has decried the Court as unfair and racist whilst ensuring that Uganda cooperates with the institution’s investigators, poses for photo-ops with Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and, most importantly, plays hot potato with the fate of Dominic Ongwen rather than having him prosecuted in the able and functional Ugandan courts. The result is an admittedly brilliant ploy: the only ‘leader’ Uganda has enjoyed in thirty years poses as the rally boy for anti-ICC sentiment on the continent whilst ensuring that the Court remains dependent on him for cooperation and that he enjoys de facto immunity from the institution.

In Kenya, the government famously responded to the charges against current President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto with a fully-fledged and devastating attack on the ICC and encouraged a handful of other states to threaten withdrawal from the Court. Moreover, not only have Nairobi’s efforts managed to have most, and at some point likely all, of the charges against its politicians dropped, they have also managed to achieve the appeasement of ICC member-states in the process. In short, Kenya has leveraged its membership, as well as that of others on the continent, in exchange for various ‘victories’ at the ICC. Continue reading →

Posted in International Criminal Court (ICC), International Criminal Justice, Kenya, Kenya and the ICC, South Africa, Uganda, United States | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

A Threat to Justice – Ruto Decision a Cautionary Tale on ICC Independence

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Mark Kersten

Elizabeth Evenson joins JiC for this take on recent developments in the cases against Kenya’s William Ruto and Joshua Arap Sang as well as the political appeasement of Kenya by states at the International Criminal Court. Elizabeth is senior international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch.

William Ruto and Joshua Arap Sang (Photo: ICC)

William Ruto and Joshua Arap Sang (Photo: ICC)

Last week, appeals judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) threw out prosecution evidence in the crimes against humanity case against Kenya’s deputy president, William Ruto, and his co-defendant, Joshua Arap Sang. The decision is significant, and the loss of prosecution evidence casts a shadow on the case’s future. But while the focus has been on Ruto’s co-called “big win,” the background to this decision should be a cautionary tale about the importance of protecting the ICC’s independence, a task its member countries seem at risk of failing.

The ICC’s Assembly of States Parties meets once a year to make decisions that should bolster the court’s work. Last November, however, the vast majority of the meetings were devoted to addressing demands from an out-sized Kenyan government delegation. The government wanted the Assembly to declare that a revised rule used by the Ruto trial court and adopted by the Assembly in 2013 was never intended to apply to the case, because it began before the rule was changed.

The use of the revised rule was the subject of last week’s appeals decision. The Ruto trial court had used the rule to admit evidence—essentially written statements or transcripts of statements recanted by four witnesses when they took the stand—because they found that the witnesses had been improperly influenced to recant, part of a systematic effort to interfere with witnesses in the case, they said. Statements from a fifth witness who disappeared altogether were also accepted. On appeal, however, the judges found that use of the evidence was incompatible with fair trial rights.

Whether the rule could be used in the Ruto case clearly was a legitimate question, as evidenced by the outcome on appeal. But it was squarely before the ICC judges at the time of the Assembly meeting. Putting this issue before the Assembly was a clear attempt by Kenya to apply political pressure on the judges’ decision-making, part and parcel of the government’s long-running campaign against the ICC.

That campaign, unfortunately, is not surprising. Until last year, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta himself faced charges before the ICC. Neither his government nor the previous one have taken any real steps to bring to justice those responsible for atrocities committed during Kenya’s 2007-2008 post-election violence. As a court of last resort for the gravest international crimes, the ICC will inevitably rub up against powerful political figures who have everything to fear from accountability.

But what is perhaps most surprising is how anemic and cowed many other ICC members have been in the face of Kenyan pressure.

At the Assembly, member countries were dragged into days of closed-door negotiations over Kenya’s request. They agreed, in the end, to include a paragraph responding to Kenya’s request in the meeting’s report. The language is best described as a dodge on substance, but one that gave Kenya enough room to claim that the Assembly had backed their version of events regarding the rule’s history.

In their ruling last week, the appeals judges were not persuaded that member countries never intended for the rule to apply to pending cases, and based their decision, instead, on treaty law regarding the application of amended rules. They dismissed the language from November’s Assembly meeting as irrelevant. Nonetheless, the decision risks being seen as tainted by political pressure — and acquiescence. Continue reading →

Posted in Assembly of States Parties, Guest Posts, International Criminal Court (ICC), International Criminal Justice, Kenya, Kenya and the ICC | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Why is the International Criminal Court stepping out of Africa and into Georgia?

Posted on February 6, 2016 by Mark Kersten
(Photo: Osinform Information agency)

Georgian soldiers leaving South Ossetia during the 2008 war (Photo: Osinform Information agency)

After three months of deliberations, judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) have finally approved the opening of an official investigation into the 2008 war in Georgia. Prosecutors will focus on the ethnic cleansing of Georgians from the breakaway region of South Ossetia, as well as an attack by Georgian forces on a Russian peacekeeping base. The ICC’s intervention into the conflict between Georgia, Russia and Moscow-backed belligerents in South Ossetia represents the court’s first investigation into a situation outside the African continent. It also marks the first time that the alleged crimes of a major power, Russia, will be placed under official investigation by the court’s prosecutors.

This raises a number of questions: Why did the court decide to open an investigation outside Africa now? Who will be targeted for prosecution? And what could be the fallout for the states involved in the 2008 war?

The ICC continues to suffer from the widespread perception that it is biased against African states. Prior to its intervention in Georgia, every official investigation launched by the court was in Africa. Despite the fact that African states themselves have requested the majority of these interventions, African leaders have labeled the ICC a “race hunting” institution and a “tool of Western imperialism.” African states and the African Union have consistently — and increasingly — threatened to withdraw from the court. Even its most traditionally staunch supporters, like South Africa, are reconsidering their relationship with the ICC. It may be tempting to conclude that the ICC opened an official investigation in Georgia to combat perceptions that it is biased against Africa. That, however, would be wrong.

Only the most cynical observer would suggest that the ICC identified Georgia as its road out of Africa. Not only would such a strategy be too risky and brazen for a generally cautious court and a prosecutor, but it would also make very little sense given the timeline of decisions made at the court. As Alex Whiting, a former member of the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor and currently a professor of practice at Harvard Law School, writes: “If the Prosecutor simply wanted to use the Georgia case to get out of Africa or to take on a major power, she could have done so years ago. … A prosecution strategy that simply tried to respond to criticisms from the outside, many of which are politically motivated, would be doomed to fail.” So why Georgia — and why now?

The decision to intervene in Georgia is likely due to a confluence of factors. First, the court had the 2008 war under preliminary examination for nearly half a decade. Had Georgia demonstrated that it was willing to investigate, and potentially prosecute, the crimes itself, it could have foreclosed any ICC intervention. However, when Tbilisi ended its investigations into the alleged crimes perpetrated in 2008, it became untenable for the ICC to simply keep those crimes under examination indefinitely. Second, for an institution that seeks to command relevancy in international politics, it certainly does not hurt that there is a broader narrative vilifying Moscow and its role in the region. Whether or not the court targets Russian officials, investigating Russian conduct captures that broader, if not always helpful, international narrative condemning Russian aggression. Continue reading →

Posted in Georgia, International Criminal Court (ICC), International Criminal Justice, Justice, Russia, South Ossetia | 4 Comments

Spies at the International Criminal Court?

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Mark Kersten
(Image: Julian Hibbard)

(Image: Julian Hibbard)

Is international criminal justice worth spying on? Do states invest in penetrating the halls of international criminal tribunals with their intelligence officers? While these aren’t exactly questions that one typically encounters, a recent article by Julian Borger sheds light on how one intelligence agency, Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB), infiltrated the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in order to protect Ratko Mladić, a Bosnian Serb general accused of genocide and war crimes who was a fugitive of the ICTY for a remarkable fourteen years.

According to Borger, Russia viewed Mladić as a former ally unjustly hunted by Western states seeking to expand their influence in Serbia, a historically close ally of Moscow’s. At the same time, Russia feared that Mladić’s arrest or surrender would lead to embarrassing revelations about Moscow’s support for the Republika Srpska during Mladić’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. Borger describes how Miodrag Rakić, the lead investigator in the hunt for Mladić, was consistently frustrated in his efforts. Anyone who could potentially cooperate in the search for the former Bosnian Serb general was intimidated by FSB agents. And then this bombshell:

Rakić also felt the unmistakable presence of the FSB looking over his shoulder. In 2008, he and a colleague made a clandestine trip to the Hague tribunal to discuss the Mladić case. They flew a roundabout route and Dutch protection officers drove them straight into the tribunal’s underground car park. On his return, however, Rakić received a visit from one of Mladić’s supporters in the security services, warning him that his family would be in peril if he continued to cooperate with the court. Lest there be any doubt over the seriousness of the threat, he recited details of Rakić’s young son’s daily routine.

Shocked at the threat, Rakić angrily denied he was collaborating with the court, insisting he had never even been to The Hague. Without a word, the visitor took a piece of paper and drew a diagram of a conference table. Then he wrote out the name of every person who had attended his meeting in The Hague, indicating precisely where each of them had been sitting. Rakić described it as the most chilling moment of his life. From that moment on, until his death from cancer in 2014, he travelled with a two-man protection team.

There was little doubt in his mind that only the FSB had the sophistication to penetrate the Hague Tribunal so thoroughly.

This raises the question: if spies could infiltrate the ICTY, what about the International Criminal Court (ICC)?

The issue of spying has been raised on a handful occasions at the ICC. In Darfur, where no ICC official has ever stepped foot, the Court’s intervention into the alleged genocide has been met with regular accusations by the Sudanese government that civil society organizations and human rights advocates are “spying” for the Court. More recently, during the 2011 Libyan civil war, the ICC indicted Abdullah al-Senussi, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s notorious “spy chief”. Months later, four members of the Court’s staff were detained and accused of espionage after attempting to meet and consult with Gaddafi’s son and Senussi’s fellow ICC-indictee, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. According to Benjamin Dürr, there have also been allegations that some states, including Germany, have spied on the ICC. Continue reading →

Posted in ICTY, International Criminal Court (ICC), International Criminal Justice, Russia | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Please Stop Bean-Counting Syrian refugees

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Mark Kersten

For months, the international community has been clamouring to find an appropriate response to address the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing violence and terror in Syria. But much of the debate about what states can and should do has been framed as a ‘numbers game’, as a matter of the volume of refugees any given state accepts. In this article, a version of which was first published at Open Canada, I argue that our moral responsibility to refugees cannot solely be measured by the number we take in. The piece focuses on the current debate in Canada but, hopefully, will also resonate with readers in communities facing similar situations.

A Syrian man holds his son at a refugee camp (Photo: Muhammed Muheisen / Associated Press

A Syrian man holds his son at a refugee camp (Photo: Muhammed Muheisen / Associated Press

Numbers have power. They determine both politics and policies. We are comforted when we are told that hundreds of billions of dollars will go towards combating climate change — even if few know what that amount of money actually buys. We are shocked and appalled when we hear that 300,000 people, and counting, have perished during the Syrian civil war. We are concerned when confronted with the disparity in wealth and opportunity between the wealthiest one percent and the other 99 percent.

Numbers underpin the decisions we make, the ideas we propagate and the rationales we employ to support both. But numbers don’t always add up. And in some instances, they obfuscate more than they elucidate. The current debate over the acceptance of Syrian refugees to Canada is a case in point.

Since the harrowing images of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach captured the world’s attention, there has been a welcome, if belated, debate about what Canada can do to help the plight of refugees fleeing violence and atrocity in Syria. In part because this debate emerged so powerfully in the midst of last October’s federal election, politicians distilled it into a numbers game. The Conservatives, then under Stephen Harper, promised to bring in and settle 10,000 Syrian refugees by September 2016. The Liberals, led by now-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, countered that they would accommodate 25,000 refugees from the region by the end of 2015. The question of who would promise to do the most for Syrian refugees thus became a matter of who would offer to accept the most Syrian refugees. But these are not one and the same.

The current Liberal government came under fire for being over-confident, perhaps even naive, in declaring that it could settle 25,000 refugees within three months of assuming power. Subsequently, it revised its target to 10,000 by Dec. 31, 2015, extending the deadline for 25,000 until March.

Now, well into the New Year, the government has reached approximately 25 percent of its target. Are they to blame? Have they failed? Some would certainly claim so. NDP MP Jenny Kwan declared that not only did Immigration Minister John McCallum “irrefutably fail to live up to the promise Liberals made to Canadians in the last election, but he even failed to meet his own lowered expectations.” In a recent op-ed, columnist John Ibbitson has added that, based on the numbers, “the Conservative goal is looking more realistic than what the Liberals promised.”

There is no doubt that the government should be held to account for the promises it makes and breaks. But basing our judgment of appropriate political and moral action to help Syrian refugees should not be a numbers game. The political challenge we face isn’t to ‘fit in’ as many refugees as the government promises in as short a period of time as possible. Bean-counting people and families fleeing terror cannot meet the moral test we are confronting. To do so misses the point: that what we need is a nation-wide conversation about how we can create and maintain a coherent, comprehensive and, above all, compassionate program that not only brings refugees, along with their immense energy and courage, into the country, but ensures that they are adequately supported once they arrive.

Such a program could also serve as an example for how to handle future refugee crises, or, better yet, lead into a debate around the effectiveness of Canada’s process on the whole, considering the many refugees worldwide who are waiting in camps or have been put on years-long waiting lists to be provided entry into Canada. Unless there is a declared global emergency or politically driven attention on their plight, those others are clearly not being served under our current system.

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Posted in Canada, Refugees, Syria | 3 Comments