CBC – CP file photo

The Canadian International Council recently organized an interesting public event with Louise Arbour on her role in speaking “truth to power.” The talk is available on line at Open Canada.org. (starts around 22min mark, after the introductions) and is constructed as a dialogue with Stephen Toope, President of the University of British Columbia and notable international law scholar.

Madam Arbour is known for being outspoken on the ICC’s prosecutorial strategy, shortcomings in the human rights regime, and advocacy on the Responsibility to Protect and especially the case of Sri Lanka. Arbour’s authoritative voice on these issues stems from her professional credentials and experience: former Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and presently the President of International Crisis Group.

It’s worth a listen. But for those interested in just the human rights and international justice stuff here are my selective highlights on the issues mentioned above.
(Note: these are not exact quotes as i’m a sloppy transcriber).

Human Rights
There is a need for adequate institutions, specifically an international human rights court. As long as the protection of human rights is in the hands of the duty bearers – the states – not surprisingly we’re not going to get very far.

Peace vs. Justice
The timing (of the Milosevic trial) was dictated exclusively by prosecutorial considerations. Some were concerned that a peace deal would put him out of reach…What it did to the peace process was not part of my brief.

The indictment of Gaddafi was very precipitous…it’s not an unfair assumption that it might have contributed to closing some doors to a negotiated settlement….The same actors in the Security Council that referred the Libya case to the ICC have not moved on Syria…The tensions between peace and justice are very present and will remain so until and unless we segregate the justice agenda from the political one.

Joseph Kony…probably accurate that the fact that he was indicted, at the end of the day, made it impossible for him to participate in peace talks…Political negotiators cannot deliver on that. The ICC process is a parallel track. It is not negotiable in peace talks.

What we need to do is what we do in domestic systems – we make it very clear that politicians don’t run indictments.

ICC and Africa
It would have been imminently predictable that the docket of the ICC would be heavily African. Apart from the cases of Security Council referral, all the other cases have come from countries that have ratified the Rome Treaty….That is the fundamental premise…The ICC was not engaged when there was, in my opinion and with lots of evidence, massive slaughter of civilians on the beaches of Sri Lanka. Well, Sri Lanka has not ratified the Rome Treaty.

The ICC might have been better advised, rather than try to downplay (the African bias) to really embrace it and engage with African governments – open offices, be there, be very present. As opposed to staying in The Hague and be very defensive that it’s only engaged in African issues.

Cooperation of authorities in the DRC with the International Criminal Court has been problematic from the beginning. It’s very unfortunate that the ICC only has jurisdiction in the Congo since the Court was created in 2002 when in fact the most catastrophic loss of life in the Congo took place in the decade before, from 1993-2003. When I was High Commissioner (for Human Rights) I launched what we called the “mapping exercise” to try to document that decade where between 3-5 million people were killed in the east of the Congo and there’s no legal regime to deal with it. The ICC has no jurisdiction so the idea was to hand this over to the Congolese authorities to try to encourage them to launch some kind of mechanism.

Accountability there (DRC), even with the ICC in place, it’s not almost ten years since the ICC has been in place and what? There are five, six people charged?….The ICC has a long way to go before it can be reflective of its mission in that environment

War on Terror and Sri Lanka
One of the most tangible and perverse effects of the War on Terror is the treatment of the war in Sri Lanka. The last few months, in 2009, of the thirty year old war whereby the government of Sri Lanka finally eradicated the LTTE was achieved at an unconscionable cost to civilian lives, which generated virtually no adverse response because it was under the agenda of the War on Terror. The LTTE had been depicted, quite accurately I might add, as a terrorist organization which had preyed on its own population. There’s not much to be said very positively about its methodology. And a lot of casualties in the last few months of the war are attributable to the LTTE itself – it’s not just government forces. But the way this was achieved would not have been tolerable if it had not been under the umbrella of one of the few so-called success stories of the War on Terror.