Putting War Crimes on the UN Agenda
SAMUELS, GERTRUDE
NUREMBERG REAFFIRMED Putting War Crimes on the UN Agenda BY GERTRUDE SAMUELS United Nations On February 22, the United Nations' 15-member Security Council made a historic decision. Acting...
...The paradox, nevertheless, is that certain "peace negotiators" of the warring factions are already on an unofficial "wanted list...
...The UN team will further be guided by an Italian model, and by a 52-nation document of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) that Sweden has formally introduced...
...It has been suggested that they might see the court as impeding their negotiations, because some parties to the conflict might say, 'Well, if we're faced with a possible war crimes tribunal in which we might be charged, why should we negotiate a peace agreement?' That's definitely not the case...
...That is why Foreign Minister Roland Dumas had a panel of distinguished legal experts give him a report on the feasibility and modalities of an international war crimes tribunal...
...Bosnia's UN Ambassador, 37-year-old Muhamed Sacirbey, a Sarajevo-born American banker, bitterly told waiting reporters when he emerged from the Council chamber on February 22 that "international law must now bear the responsibility of placing these criminals at the negotiating table, rather than at the defendant's table...
...Isn't it time to learn the lesson of Nuremberg?'' "Certainly Nuremberg was important, on a legal plane...
...The lesson that we are all accountable to international law Gertrude Samuels reports regularly on the United Nations for this magazine...
...What do you see with respect to a time frame once the second resolution is passed...
...It is also the first of its kind since the Nuremberg trials of 24 top Nazi leaders at the end of World War II...
...It's a very difficult, arduous task it's got...
...Secondly, we hope that by some method, which I can't at present describe, all of the war criminals will be punished...
...Madeleine K. Albright, newly-appointed U.S...
...We hope the Secretary General will present the Council with a plan that will enable us to adopt another resolution actually setting up the tribunal...
...That would take a long time, maybe four or five years, and the convention would then apply only to states that reg-istered for it...
...But while the situation is not mature for a permanent criminal court, we feel that an ad hoc tribunal could be an interesting way to proceed...
...In the Security Council, he noted, members had emphasized this atrocity as underlining the need for an ad hoc court...
...Former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger last year identified Bosnia's Serbian leader, Radovan Karadzic, and Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, now in control of roughly 70 per cent of former Yugoslavia, as responsible for the rapes, the mass murders, and the heinous actions of their prison camp commanders...
...At the French Mission, located on the 44th floor of a building near New York's Turtle Bay, I asked Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee what had prompted France to take the lead in pressing for a war crimes tribunal...
...But at the same impromptu briefing Ambassador David Hannay of the United Kingdom, in his patient professorial tone, told reporters: "Nobody's been named a war citminal...
...The French proposal envisages a 15-member court, plus a commission that would gather evidence of war crimes and assess its validity before cases were brought...
...And that was done very quickly—in three weeks...
...He also described the ethnic cleansing campaign as" basically genocide" that must be punished...
...Whether it will have a larger impact—whether it will serve as a psychological deterrent against war crimes being committed in those parts of the world that are beyond its narrow jurisdiction—remains an open question...
...The Ambassador added, "The goal we pursue is that justice should be done...
...If the international community tried to establish a permanent tribunal, well, we would have to embark on negotiating a convention among the member states...
...Our conscience revolts at the idea of passively accepting such brutality...
...If there are, it will try them...
...Council Resolution 808 requested that Secretary General Boutros Bou-tros-Ghali report to the Council in no more than "60 days" with a detailed plan for the court's structure and legal procedures...
...United Nations and CSCE investigators have indicated that the Serbs are chiefly responsible for systematic violations of human rights, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
...But there have been incidents of Bosnian Muslims killing civilian Serbs, too, and the French jurists have called for "the greatest guarantees of impartiality...
...The court will see whether there are sufficient grounds to proceed against them...
...We hope this formula will be a deterrent to future crimes, but our objective is to punish those now committing crimes against humanity...
...We look forward to this stupefying injustice being corrected soon as a result of this resolution...
...A commission set up by the Secretary General has been collecting evidence of crimes that no doubt points to suspects...
...The new tribunal would be empowered to hold trials—including those of accused persons to be tried in absentia—and hand down sentences, but not the death penalty, which is prohibited in France and Italy...
...What is the next step...
...Acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, it voted unanimously to establish an international war crimes tribunal "for the prosecution of persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991...
...Yet sometimes it is better to act alone if we want to act swiftly...
...And it will, no doubt, in the months ahead be preparing the ground that will enable legal action to be taken...
...Then Sills went on to stress another point: "The co-chairmen of the peace negotiations, Cyrus R. Vance, the Secretary General's representative, and Lord David Owen, representing the European Community, have from the very beginning endorsed a war crimes tribunal...
...The process should inject an element of respect for human rights in situations like that of former Yugoslavia, which have run completely out of control.' Once it begins to function, the international war crimes tribunal will at least give Bosnia's Muslim-led government some assurance that there will be no amnesty for war criminals, be they in high places or underlings who say they were merely following orders...
...The French, the Italians and the Swedish on behalf of CSCE have taken the lead," the white-haired diplomat continued...
...Of course, we knew that Italy and some British experts were working on the subject...
...This idea had previously been played with at the League of Nations in Geneva, and there are stacks about that in the library...
...It's not that we didn't want to cooperate with our allies, certainly not...
...For the answer to this as well as other questions, I sought out the representatives from France and Italy...
...So the response has been primarily European, because the crimes are in former Yugoslavia...
...That's an advantage—we can act quickly...
...We're talking in terms of weeks," Ambassador Merimee replied firmly...
...Much will depend on the mandate of the court, how it's going to operate...
...Shortly after the unanimous vote I talked with Joe B. Sills, the veteran UN Public Information Officer who is the popular spokesman for Boutros-Ghali...
...A tribunal set up by the Security Council is binding on all UN members...
...How will justice be achieved...
...lawyers and human rights experts...
...But the problem of the crimes committed is universal.' The Ambassador's legal adviser, Mauro Politi, who was present at our meeting, observed that the raping of women and girls would weigh heavily with the tribunal...
...He is expected to take into account proposals submitted by several member states—particularly that of France, whose mission drafted the resolution...
...At the Italian Mission, on the 24th floor of 2 UN Plaza, 65-year-old Ambassador Vieri Traxler agreed with his French colleague that the international community is not prepared for a permanent tribunal:" We have always been in favor of the creation of a permanent war crimes tribunal...
...What the Council has done today is to put in place a tribunal that could then try these cases...
...He wanted to act with celerity...
...That will take some time...
...But the Foreign Minister took an active part in World War II and was very much concerned about this question of the camps...
...The Nuremberg principles have been reaffirmed...
...The 56-year-old career diplomat responded unhesitatingly: "From the minute we heard of the prison camps, of massive rapes, of the atrocities against women especially, we felt we had to do something to assure that the perpetrators of these crimes would not go unpunished...
...seriously endeavor to establish a permanent international penal jurisdiction," the inevitable conclusion will be "that Nuremberg was 'for Germans only.'" (Italics mine...
...It's too early to theorize about this...
...While France did not specify a site for the proceedings, its diplomats speculate that the Secretary General might be inclined to suggest existing UN facilities in Geneva or New York...
...In their preparatory work, the Secretary General and his legal team are likely to be guided principally by a 69-page initiative that France's Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, had a specially convened Committee of French Jurists produce...
...NUREMBERG REAFFIRMED Putting War Crimes on the UN Agenda BY GERTRUDE SAMUELS United Nations On February 22, the United Nations' 15-member Security Council made a historic decision...
...The UN Commission of Experts that has been set up to look into the matter has begun its work...
...Shouldn't the implications of Taylor's warning finally be heeded in this era of increasingly ugly and expanding ethnic strife...
...Given the focus on fairness, one can hardly help wondering why the UN is now setting up an ad hoc court confined to meting out justice in "the territory of the former Yugoslavia...
...Why the specifically limited nature of the UN's war crimes tribunal...
...The tribunal is the first ever mandated by the World Organization to try crimes against humanity...
...The Sec-retary General and his legal experts were aware that this was coming, and they've been working on it...
...The commission would be comprised of members of several nationalities and various backgrounds—e.g...
...In his final report as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Brigadier General Telford Taylor wrote: "Unless the United States and the other governments...
...Ambassador to the UN, seemed to sum up the statements of those sitting around the large horseshoe shaped Security Council table when she said: "There is an echo in this chamber today...
...Nobody wants to accept the jurisdiction of such a court, since it could involve the security of a state...
...We'll have that report to the Council inlessthan60days," he said...
...In one of the worst to date, uncovered by an international team of forensic experts near Vu-kovar, patients were taken from their hospital beds, robbed and shot...
...Serbian' ethnic cleansing' has been pursued through mass murders, systematic beatings and the rapes of Muslims and others...
...That has nothing whatsoever to do with the peace process in direct terms, though of course it has important implications for it—namely, that the peace process is not something any member of the Council can accept as being a coverup for the crimes that have been committed, or wiping the slate clean...
...may have finally taken hold in our collective memory...
...All three plans advocate a multinational panel of judges to be drawn from such existing bodies of "undisputed legitimacy" as the World Court at The Hague, the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights...
Vol. 76 • March 1993 • No. 4
