Last Tuesday, Rwanda’s high court sentenced Victoire Ingabire to eight years in prison for conspiring to harm the country through war and terror and minimizing the 1995 genocide. Some of the evidence used against her include questioning why no Hutu victims were...
Ante GotovinaLast week I wrote about targeting and mentioned the Gotovina Case. This case has become interesting for those interested in international law and post-conflict justice because of the...
If you find the argument that famine is man-made to be credible, then famine is not just an inevitable outcome of the structural conditions of "failed states" but rather it is purposeful,...
(see first post in this series: Mind the Impunity Gaps)There is increasing pressure for justice in Sri Lanka for crimes committed in the long civil war between the Government and secessionist Tamil...
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1970 is a pretty amazing document. Over the last few days I’ve found myself trying to decide if this a rare example of the UN Security Council doing what it was originally designed to do – or an example of an international organization working because there is a relatively powerless state with no allies involved. I suspect it’s probably both. Still, I’ve been following The Multilateralist blog over at Foreign Policy and I think David Bosco has it just about right: Last night, the UN Security Council passed unanimously a resolution imposing an asset...
Early this year, an improvement in French-Rwandan relations led to the French government finally beginning to take note that many of the most serious war criminals in the 1994 Rwandan genocide were living in France without having been tried or punished for their crimes. The French government's previous apathy towards these suspects was part of a long list o problems with accountability for the genocide in other states, internationally (in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), and within Rwandan courts.The last couple of days, a particular (accused) participant in the genocide has...
When Foreign Policy's Morning Brief hit my inbox today, the top story was the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for President Omar Bashir of the Sudan.FP's header gets the charges wrong, however - Bashir is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not with genocide. The distinction is legally and politically significant - crimes against humanity include a host of horrible acts, when widespread and/or carried out systematically against a civilian population. Genocide, however, is a crime not against individual civilians but against certain groups and...