International Justice Tribune: Planning for accountability in Syria – with Syrians or not

BY Karina Hof
The International Justice Tribune

http://www.justicetribune.com

A justice mechanism to deal with the Syrian conflict has seemed low on the world’s agenda. This week brought news of US government funding cuts for a widely commended NGO gathering Syrian war crimes evidence. The Russian and Chinese vetoes of a Syria referral by the UN Security Council to the International Criminal Court keep a trial in The Hague unlikely. And it is hard to focus on accountability when the YouTubed horror films of ISIS have all but upstaged Assad regime atrocities and the Syrian opposition seems locked in an endless cycle of reincarnation.

But accountability is not off the table. As put by Michael Scharf, managing director of the Public International Law & Policy Group, a pro bono global law firm: “While events related to ISIS have temporarily eclipsed the issue, there has been a lot of action behind the scenes in the past year related to establishing accountability for Syrian atrocities.”

In fact, the groundwork for possible indictments and prosecutions has already been laid out. Meanwhile, the barbarities continue to be documented almost in real time. “A determined push for accountability” is how Balkees Jarrah, a counsel who focuses on the Middle East for Human Rights Watch, summed up the situation.

Justice via New Jersey?

Former prosecutor-turned-academic David Crane, for one, is ready to take Syrian accountability to what he calls “its next logical step”. Best-known for indicting Charles Taylor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Crane has since become a vocal lobbyist for Syria. He leads the Syrian Accountability Project, which aims to document war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all sides in the conflict.

Last year, Crane, Scharf and 11 other heavy-hitting legal practitioners drafted a ‘Statute for a Syrian Extraordinary Tribunal to Prosecute Atrocity Crimes’, outlining possible mechanisms for trying war crimes in Syria. The Chautauqua Blueprint – as it came to be called, for the lake town in New York where it debuted – was signed on 27 August 2013, six days after the chemical attack in Ghouta that killed hundreds of Syrians and awoke the world’s conscience.

Crane expects to see progress at a meeting being chaired by Christian Wenaweser, Liechtenstein’s representative to the UN and the former president of the ICC’s ruling body, on 17 November in Princeton, New Jersey. “I believe it’ll probably result in an agreement to how we’re actually going to create these courts,” said Crane.

For his part, Wenaweser anticipates more modest outcomes, calling it a preliminary “mapping exercise” carried out by “people who are likeminded only in the sense that we all think accountability in Syria is crucial”.

“We want to discuss with each other informally what we think a good way forward is,” Wenaweser told IJT. “We will simply go through the different accountability options as they exist and discuss their implications, the pros or cons, what it required to get there and so on.”

Filing, piling

Besides Crane’s Syrian Accountability Project, a menagerie of other private groups, operating in and out of Syria, have made accountability their business. Two NGOs, both internationally funded and respected, working on documentation-driven accountability are the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC) and the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). SJAC, directed by exiled Syrian activist Mohammad Al Abdallah, has spearheaded digitally sophisticated methods to collect and catalogue videos, photos and witness testimonies from the conflict.

CIJA is run by William Wiley, a lawyer with plenty of war crimes investigation under his belt.  Known for its professional stealth, CIJA works in, literally, hands-on cooperation with the Syrian opposition to document regime atrocities. “With prosecution-ready case files and up to one million pages of documentary evidence analysed by military and command structure specialists – we are the guys to turn to,” said Nerma Jelacic, head of CIJA’s external relations and former spokesperson of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

However, the US State Department recently suggested it finds otherwise. It is pulling their $500,000 in yearly support for CIJA, with officials now citing plans to fund documentation of crimes by ISIS. Jelacic said her organization was informed of the decision last month. The cuts mean that for as long as CIJA cannot find a new donor to bridge the gap, they “will not be able to continue the planned document acquisition and operations planed for next year’s case files,” she explained.

The threat of fragmentation thus looms large over Syria war crimes investigations. No single overseeing authority exists. Concerns arise of spending overlap and duplicated work. “Frankly, when it comes to accountability a little bit of redundancy is actually OK,” said Beth van Schaack, former deputy US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues.

Still, all groups seem to be waiting in the wings, seeking leadership towards a feasible mechanism. “Momentum hasn’t yet been able to build around accountability in part because there’s been so many crisis points,” Van Schaack said. When IJT spoke with her, she was unaware of this month’s gathering in Princeton, but added: “It’s certainly worth exploring, right? And especially if there’s … a moving vehicle here we can get behind.”

Timing

Despite having organized several meetings that fed into the Chautauqua Blueprint, SJAC decided not to sign off on the statute, said Abdallah, its executive director. Even though Syrian lawyers, jurists and civil society were part of the document’s preparatory talks, he ultimately felt underrepresented. “It’s not about bringing 10 or 15 or even 100 Syrians to your workshop. We’re talking about wide public consultation, and it’s public, it’s not a closed group,” Abdallah said. “You need representation – and ethnic and religious and political representation – of everybody in that tribunal.”

The theme returns when asked about a closed-door event at the Netherlands mission to the UN last month. “I’m hopeful something concrete might come out of it,” he said with uncharacteristic softness, yet quickly acknowledged that, as with many of the “coordination meetings around Syria” he is invited to, “the donors need to coordinate more than the NGOs” and he was the only Syrian present.

Anyway, as Abdallah asks, is the timing right? “Even if you have basically the best model for the best tribunal for Syria, it’s not feasible to start now,” he maintained. “Before you stop the daily killing and have the people calm a little bit, it’s impossible to create a reasonable and sustainable justice mechanism.”

ISIS Tortures Child Hostages

By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Impunity Watch, Managing Editor

DAMASCUS, Syria – Kurdish children from the besieged town of Kobani were tortured and abused while detained by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) Human Rights Watch Reported on Tuesday. Four children gave detailed accounts of the suffering they endured while they were held hostage by ISIS for four months with about 100 other children. , the four boys described how they were repeatedly being beaten with a hose and electric cable, as well as being forced to watch videos of ISIS beheadings and attacks.

A young Syrian Kurdish refugee carries an infant after crossing the Syrian-Turkish border, near the southeastern town of Suruc in Sanliurfa province September 23, 2014. Kurdish boys have been targeted by ISIS which has abducted children throughout the areas it controls. (Photo courtesy of The International Business Times)

The four abducted children were between the ages of 14 and 16. They were among 153 Kurdish boys whom ISIS abducted on May 29, 2014, as they traveled home from Aleppo to the town of Kobani after finishing their middle school exams. According to Syrian Kurdish officials and media reports, ISIS released the last 25 of the children on October 29. “Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, children have suffered the horrors of detention and torture, first by the Assad government and now by ISIS,” said Fred Abrahams, special advisor for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch. “This evidence of torture and abuse of children by ISIS underlines why no one should support their criminal enterprise.”

ISIS reportedly allowed approximately 100 girls go home within hours of the May 29 abduction but the boys were kept as hostages. According to the four boys who shared their stories with Human Rights Watch the boys were kept at a school in Manbij, some 50 kilometers southwest of Kobani.

The boys said their living conditions were sparse: sleeping with blankets on the floor, bathing once every two weeks, eating twice a day. The boys said they were allowed occasional calls and visits from their parents. The boys talked about being forced to watch propaganda videos of ISIS beheadings and attacks, pray five times daily and memorize parts of the Quran.

If their captives decided they were not doing well enough with their religious lessons, if they tried to escape captivity or if they did anything that was construed as misbehaving they were beaten with hoses and even electric cables. According to a 15-year-old boy children who had relatives serving in the Kurdish militia known the People’s Protection Units (YPG) were treated the worst. According to the Human Rights Watch report the boys were often beaten for no reason at all. “They sometimes beat us for no reason,” a 16-year-old boy said.

According to one of the boys, ISIS threaten to kill the families of boys. “They told them to give them the addresses of their families, cousins, uncles, saying, ‘When we go to Kobani, we will get them and cut them up,'” the boy said.

The May 29th abduction was not an isolated incident. According to the Human Rights Watch Report, ISIS has abducted children in other villages as it has captured ground in Syria and Iraq.  In Minas village, also near Kobani, ISIS seized seven civilian men when it captured the village in the beginning of October. According to the Report,  A 40-year-old farmer from Ghassaniya village said ISIS had abducted four of his nephews, ages 16, 17, 18, and 27 or 28, in late February as they were driving through ISIS-controlled territory en route to Iraqi Kurdistan. The abductions have targeted children in Kurdish regions which have been under siege from the Islamic State militants.

For more information please see:

Al Arabiya – HRW: ISIS Abused Captive Kurdish Children – 4 November 2014
CNN International – Report: Children Say ISIS Captured, Beat Them On Way Home From Exams – 4 November 2014
Human Rights Watch – Syria: ISIS Tortured Kobani Child Hostages – 4 November 2014
International Business Times – ISIS Tortured, Abused Captive Kurdish Children: Human Rights Watch – 4 November 2014

E-Waste: Out Of Sight Out Of Mind and Into China’s Environment

By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Managing Editor, Impunity Watch

BEIJING, China – Every year the newest high-tech “must haves” hit the stores. From tablets to smartphones these devices are updated constantly. Manufacturers add new features, often barley changing the design or functions of the device itself, to make the new product more desirable and the model design somehow obsolete. Consumers come in droves to buy the newest smart-devices in developed countries often never seeing what will happen to their discarded devices when they trade in the old for the new. The undesired electronics are called E-waste. The process of recycling E-waste in developing countries like china is extremely hazardous, putting workers, local residents and the environment at risk in towns where E-waste recycling is being carried out.

Women work in a Guiyu warehouse stripping remote controls of their circuit boards. (Photo courtesy of The Khaleej times)

The town of Guiyu in China is perhaps the E-waste capital of the world. Mountains of discarded electronics, from remote controls and stereos to televisions sets and telephones, fill warehouses and spill out into alleyways. Workers strip the plastic devices of their circuitry to attempt to recycle the devices or retrieve the precious metals like gold and copper found within to resell. The industry comes at a high environmental cost for the community and the surrounding environment. Workers who burn circuit boards and plastic to attempt to retrieve precious metals suffer from a high degree of exposure to dangerous chemicals and heavy metals. Heavy metal contamination has turned the air and water toxic, and children have high lead levels in their blood, according to a study published in August by researchers at Shantou University Medical College. Plastic often ends up flooding the local watershed, polluting the water and destroying local ecosystems.

Over the past few decades, most of the e-waste entering Guiyu came from outside of china, often coming from developed countries in Europe and North America. However, in recent years western counties have been making a greater effort to recycle their own electronic waste. However, the Chinese domestic supply of e-waste is surging and much of it will continue to end up in Guiyu.

According to the United Nations University’s Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) Initiative China currently generates 6.1 million metric tonnes of e-waste a year, compared with 7.2 million for the United States and 48.8 million worldwide. E-waste production in the United States has increased by 13% over the past five years while China’s has nearly doubled, at that rate China will surpass the Unlisted States as the biggest producer of e-waste as early as 2017.

“Before, the waste was shipped from other parts of the world coming into China — that used to be the biggest source and the biggest problem,” said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, one of China’s foremost environmental NGOs. “But now, China has become a consuming power of its own,” Ma said. “We have I think 1.1 billion cell phones used, and the life of our gadgets has become shorter and shorter.” “I think the wave is coming,” he continued. “It’s going to be a bigger problem.”

The environmental and health concerns of e-waste processing largely go ignored by the Chinese government and the industry remains poorly regulated. “From the government’s perspective, e-waste gathering and processing is important for the local economy,” said Lai Yun, a Greenpeace researcher. “Research has shown that 80 percent of households are involved in this work. So, if they don’t expand this industry, these residents will need some other kind of employment.” An estimated 80,000 of 130,000 residents Guiyu work in the poorly regulated industry.

“People think this cannot be allowed to go on,” said Leo Chen, 28, a financial worker who grew up in the town of Guiyu. While he said the situation is better today than a decade ago, the long-lasting impacts of environmental degradation remain. “In my memory, in front of my house, there was a river. It was green, and the water was very nice and clear,” he said. “Now, it’s black.”

For more information please see:

Salon – Fast, Cheap And Out Of Control: How Hyper-Consumerism Drivezs Us Mad – 2 November 2014
Business Insider – E-Waste Inferno Burning Brighter In China’s Recycling Capital – 28 October 2014
The Japan Times – Chinese Capital Of Recycling Electronic Waste Is Booming, But At A Cost To The Environment And Locals’ Health – 28 October 2014
Khaleej Times – E-Waste Inferno Burning Brighter In China’s Recycling Capital – 28 October 2014

WAR CRIMES PROSECUTION WATCH Volume 9 – Issue 16 November 03, 2014

Continued Russian Air Incursions are Becoming Increasingly Threatening

By Kyle Herda

Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

LISBON, Portugal – Russian jets, bombers, and fueling planes continue to violate the airspaces of many NATO countries, and the severity of the violations is increasing in number and intensity.

A Russian TU-95 bomber after being intercepted by the RAF. (Photo courtesy of Business Insider)

On October 21, 2014, a Russian Ilyushin-20, a spy plane, flew for about a minute in Estonian airspace before fighters from Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden intercepted. On October 28, 2014, seven Russian combat aircraft flew over the Baltic Sea and were initially intercepted by German fighters near Finland. Instead of turning back, the Russian aircraft pushed further, and were additionally intercepted by Danish, Swedish, and Finnish aircraft.

On October 29, 19 Russian aircraft in 3 separate formations were intercepted over the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and North Sea leading a chase into the Atlantic Ocean. Portuguese fighter jets intercepted seven Russian jets over the Baltic Sea, and at the same time Turkish fighters intercepted two Russian bombers and two Russian fighter jets over the Black Sea. Later that day, eight Russian aircraft were initially intercepted by English RAF over the North Sea, at which point some of the Russian aircraft returned to Russia but two bombers pushed towards the Atlantic. The final two bombers were once again intercepted over the Atlantic by Portuguese aircraft.

Reports also came out recently about a simulated Russian attack in June 2014 of the Danish island Bornholm. This simulated attack occurred while 90,000 people were attending a political festival, and the Russian aircraft were equipped with live missiles. On March 29, 2013, a similar run was performed with two Tu-22M3 Backfire Russian heavy bombers and four SU-27 Flanker fighter jets around Sweden.

U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, the supreme allied commander in Europe, has called the more recent Russian incursions “a larger, more complex formation of aircraft carrying out a little deeper, … more provocative flight path.” Breedlove believes that these incursions have been a message from Russia to NATO that Russia is “a great power”.

As long as these incursions continue, and especially the more intense flight patterns and flight paths, relations with NATO and countries around the world will remain low with Russia and becoming increasingly pressed.

For more information, please see:

Business Insider – Here Are The ‘Complex’ Russian Air Incursions That NATO Is So Concerned About – 3 November 2014

Reuters – NATO commander: Russia’s incursions in European airspace ‘more provocative’ – 3 November 2014

The Examiner – World War 3 trial run: Russia simulates attack on Denmark, stimulates war fears – 2 November 2014

The Inquisitr – World War 3: Russia Simulated Attack On Denmark, Could Be Preparing European Invasion – 31 October 2014