Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, has asked for a three-month postponement in the trial for the case against the president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta. The trial, already postponed several times, was to have started on Feb. 5, 2014. Kenyatta was accused of being an indirect co-perpetrator … Read more
Almost four decades after the ideologically crazed communist movement known as the Khmer Rouge fought its way to power in Cambodia, vowing to create a new society but instead leaving up to two million people dead in its wake, arguments in the cases of two top leaders have closed. The verdict of the court will … Read more
One question about women’s rights that may never go away is how to ensure that women are represented fairly in large organizations, like the United Nations. For now, work on “gender mainstreaming” may suffice by concentrating on small steps as opposed to devising wholesale solutions. As one expert has described the process, it is an … Read more
The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor – Fatou Bensouda – was busy in New York this week, rallying support for the court on the sidelines of the 68th United Nations General Assembly annual debate. The Gambia native, who succeeded Luis Moreno-Ocampo, an Argentine, to head the prosecutor’s office, talked exclusively to PassBlue about her work … Read more
Radislav Krstic was indicted on Oct. 30, 1998, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for his role in the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Krstic was the deputy commander and chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb Army from October 1994 to July 1995, when he was promoted to major general … Read more
The International Criminal Court has just acquired a huge trove of nearly all the unrestricted records of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and is now making them available to the public. The records include more than 2,240 documents, totaling about 22,000 pages of meeting minutes, working documents, research documents and war crimes trial reports … Read more
The newest United Nations Security Council resolution that continues to build a stronger framework to prevent and end sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict situations sends a strong signal that such offenses will be punished as war crimes under international law. The resolution, agreed by a unanimous vote after difficult negotiations, passed on June 24 … Read more
Ieng Sary, a co-founder and the third-highest official in the murderous Khmer Rouge movement that decimated Cambodian society in the 1970s, died in a Phnom Penh hospital on March 14 at age 87. The death of Ieng Sary, who became the public face of the Khmer Rouge as the regime’s foreign minister, robs the already … Read more
The president of the International Criminal Court, Judge Sang-Hyun Song, told a Columbia University audience recently that a major challenge facing the court is what he called a steady lack of political support from the United Nations Security Council and UN member states. “We need a far more consistent and vigilant approach by the … Read more
KANDY, Sri Lanka — As the focus of global political and economic power shifts to the Asia-Pacific region and the United States feels compelled to pivot its strategic forces from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the relationship among major East Asian countries acquires critical importance. Residual cold war disputes across the Atlantic are likely to … Read more
One of Fatou Bensouda‘s missions as the new chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is to make rape during conflicts a thing of the past. Until 20 years ago, she said in a speech at the United Nations recently, sexual violence and other sexual attacks were “all but ignored and dismissed as regrettable but … Read more
The conclusion of the International Criminal Court’s first trial this summer was duly noted in global media and political circles. Yet little attention was paid to the equally landmark move by the court mandating reparations for victims of the atrocities committed by the man who was sentenced for the war crimes case, Thomas Lubanga of … Read more
Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in April for acts committed during a civil war in the 1990s in the West African country of Sierra Leone, was sentenced today to 50 years’ imprisonment. Taylor, 64, was found guilty of all 11 counts against him, including … Read more
The International Criminal Court‘s judgment against the warlord Thomas Lubanga for conscripting child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo has confirmed that “a permanent international criminal court is on the job,” Stephen Rapp, ambassador at large for the US State Department, said at Columbia University Law School this month. The Lubanga guilty verdict in … Read more
No American diplomat or scholar of international law has been more deeply involved than David Scheffer in the creation of virtually every war crimes court from the catastrophic implosion of Yugoslavia to the long-overdue reckoning for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Now, in a new book, “All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the … Read more
People who deal professionally with victims of physical and psychological torture want to not only heal their patients but also stop torture dead in its tracks. So they were pleased to learn that like other individuals or groups, they could submit evidence they had gathered to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, says … Read more
Government suppression of revolts in several Arab nations and violence and rights abuses in some parts of Africa have drawn increased attention to the International Criminal Court, the first such permanent tribunal created to try individuals for war crimes, genocide and other gross violations. Less attention is paid to another permanent court in The Hague, … Read more
Do you want know what happens to news reports in parts of the world after they seemingly drop from the front page? Do you get frustrated by constant coverage of certain stories at the expense of others? Do you think that the US media and the US foreign policy establishment should pay some attention to … Read more
The International Criminal Court has released the names of four candidates short-listed for the December 2011 election of the chief prosecutor to replace Luis Moreno-Ocampo, an Argentine whose nonrenewable term is expiring in June 2012. The court is the first and only permanent international court that tries people accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and … Read more
[This essay was updated on Nov. 23, 2011] The United Nations sent its top legal official to Cambodia this week in a belated effort to deal directly with the threatened implosion of a war crimes tribunal charged with bringing to trial leaders of the apocalyptic Communist regime that presided over the deaths of at least … Read more
