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FREDERICK K. COX INTERNATIONAL LAW CENTER Founder/Advisor |
War Crimes Prosecution Watch
Volume 12 – Issue 10 |
Editor-in-Chief James Prowse Technical Editor-in-Chief Managing Editors |
War Crimes Prosecution Watch is a bi-weekly e-newsletter that compiles official documents and articles from major news sources detailing and analyzing salient issues pertaining to the investigation and prosecution of war crimes throughout the world. To subscribe, please email warcrimeswatch@pilpg.org and type “subscribe” in the subject line.
Opinions expressed in the articles herein represent the views of their authors and are not necessarily those of the War Crimes Prosecution Watch staff, the Case Western Reserve University School of Law or Public International Law & Policy Group.
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Lake Chad Region — Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon
Rwanda (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda)
Court of Bosnia & Herzegovina, War Crimes Chamber
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Domestic Prosecutions In The Former Yugoslavia
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal
War Crimes Investigations in Burma
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
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With the raspy barking of a US President in the background trying to “Make America Great Again,” the world shrinks away in surprise and confusion. As the light begins to wane on that bright and shining experiment on the hill called “America”, the international community faces the yawning maw of a retrenching America, once again looking inward, shrinking away from a leadership position it has held since World War II. Unprepared for any of this, the West is losing its way uncertain and weakened. They look for any indication of someone to lead.
It will not be America. From the environment to trade, the US has chosen to step away from not only legal but also moral obligations. This past week another indication of further retrenchment was manifest when US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that he was closing the Office of Global Criminal Justice (OGCJ), the office where the US asserts leadership and support for international justice and holding accountable those who feed upon their own citizens. Like much else this new US administration has done, this is wrong!
The United States has been the cornerstone for the creation of modern international criminal law. It played the leading role at the International Criminal Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945, the subsequent Council 10 trials, up to and including the establishment of the tribunals and courts for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, as well as the International Criminal Court. BUT FOR the support of the United States, most of these justice mechanisms would not have come into existence or would have had existential and overwhelming challenges at the beginning. The United States has always been at the forefront in creating justice mechanisms.
Past administrations have had policy differences with the world community on the administration of international justice, but, at the end of the day, they did not waiver in the perception that the rule of law is important for a more stable world. This administration, a newly forming kleptocracy, is facing the rule of law with almost a blatant disregard, certainly a jaw-dropping disrespect not seen in the history of the republic. Ruefully, commentators have said that in Washington “nothing matters.”
The reasons for the closure of the OGCJ appears to be couched in the devastating cuts that must come from a 30% reduction in the State Department’s budget this fiscal year causing necessary cuts throughout the department. Efficiencies need to be made, but closure of the OGCJ will actually bring greater cost in the end. A small office with no operating budget other than the few personnel costs and the like, really does not cost the department much at all. Yet their global footprint is much larger than the numbers assigned to the OGCJ, almost equal to the more expensive bureaus.
The office travels the world, sits at all of the key meetings, conferences and other efforts putting the moral force of the world’s leading liberal democracy forcefully on the table of justice to ensure that reasonable outcomes and solutions are had as the world deals with unprecedented challenges related to atrocity, unrest and instability around the world.
Closing the OGCJ removes the United States from efforts to take on these challenges resulting in further insecurities that will challenge the national security of the United States. The small cost savings in closing this influential office will cost much more as the State Department, as well as other national security agencies, like the Department of Defense are drawn into future unrest because we no longer have the ability to prevent the destabilizing effects of atrocity, civil war and conflict. The OGCJ helped through dialog to settle disputes, unrest and the like before they developed into threats to our national security. If there were atrocities to prevent, the OGCJ contributed in the establishment of mechanisms to hold accountable those who commit those atrocities. In closing we would use the analogy that the United States built the house that we now call international criminal justice. With the closure of the OGCJ, the United States is walking out the front door and throwing the keys to the dictators, thugs and warlords who kill their own citizens.
The authors are the founding Chief Prosecutors of the international tribunals for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.
Suggested citation: David M. Crane and Richard Goldstone, A Step Backward: The Closure of the Office of Global Criminal Justice, JURIST – Academic Commentary, July 21, 2017, http://jurist.org/forum/2017/07/Crane-Goldstone-a-step-backward.php.
This article was prepared for publication by Dave Rodkey, Managing Editor for JURIST. Please direct any questions or comments to him at commentary@jurist.org<hrheight=’1′>.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) accomplished an incredible feat in convicting those most responsible for the atrocities of the Civil War (1990-2002). Their Court decisions did not bring back the many innocents who died or repair the trauma so many endured amidst the fighting, but from what I’ve read it did provide some sense of closure for a country committed to a peaceful future. According to a 2013 survey, 91% of Sierra Leoneans believed the SCSL had contributed to sustained peace in the region.
The Court tried and convicted nine people, including leaders from the RUF, the CDF, the AFRC, and even the President of Liberia, Charles Taylor. No special court tribunal had ever indicted a sitting head of state, so the SCSL set an important precedent that even presidents cannot commit war crimes with impunity. They were also the first court to convict people for the use of child soldiers, for forced marriages as a form of sexual slavery, and for attacks on UN peacekeepers. According to SCSL materials, the Court was the first international criminal tribunal to achieve their mandate since the Nuremberg trials regarding crimes by Nazi leaders during WWII.
But the legacy and implications of the SCSL goes far beyond the borders of this country. Their judicial approaches and established precedents remain a model for future criminal tribunes to follow, which might happen sooner than I thought.
Calls from human rights groups and governments across the world are growing to create a criminal tribunal for war crimes committed in Syria. Their government, lead by autocrat Bashar al-Assad, has waged a brutal war campaign against rebel groups throughout the country. It is estimated that almost half a million people have died in the six-year civil war, which shows no signs of slowing.
Early this year, Assad used the chemical weapon Sarin gas against innocent civilians killing almost 100. Many of the dead were children. The use of Sarin gas is banned throughout the world and any use of this deadly nerve agent is categorically defined as a war crime. Evidence of countless other war crimes have been levied against the Assad regime – extrajudicial killings, torture, aiding terror campaigns – and international organizations are busy gathering and protecting evidence of these atrocities.
The Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) has already collected 700,000 pages of Syrian intelligence documents including 55,000 photographs of the bodies of dead prisoners that a former forensic investigator smuggled out of the country. The UN recently established an independent organization to collect evidence that will assist in the future prosecution of those most responsible for crimes during the Syrian Civil War.
International law experts have already started to think about what that tribunal might look like. In the final months of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, international experts drafted a blueprint for the future special court to prosecute atrocity crimes during the Syrian Civil War. The committee included two former SCSL prosecutors and drew influence from the founding documents of Sierra Leone’s criminal tribunal. I can only hope that any Syrian tribunal will be as successful at the SCSL, but some experts have doubts a judicial system like the SCSL’s could be implemented in a post-war Syria.
The SCSL was hybrid system where the court was comprised of both local and international judges. Sierra Leone’s government, at the end of the war in 2002, was eager to hold war criminals accountable, so they partnered with the UN to do just that. The two entities both contributed funding, judges, and expertise to their joint goal of convicting rebel leaders and President Taylor.
That approach won’t work in Syria while Assad is still in power. He runs the government and has no interest in allowing UN prosecutors into his country to bring him and his advisors to court. The SCSL’s hybrid model will only work after Assad has been ousted from Syrian leadership. Until then, Syrian won’t know the closure Sierra Leone felt after Charles Taylor and the rebel leaders were sent to jail. Without accountability, they won’t enjoy the lasting peace that has endured in this country for the last 15 years.
Timothy’s Take
Wednesday July 19, 2017.
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