International Criminal Law Roundup

It's been a while since we've had one of these, so here's the news from the tribunals:

• ICTY: Remember last month when Radovan Karadžić argued that he couldn't be tried because U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke offered him immunity as part of the peace deal, and then U.S. diplomats were like "oh yeah, that totally happened"? (Holbrooke continues to deny it.) Well, yesterday the Appeals Chamber came back with a resounding "nobody cares." Sorry, dude.


• ICC: Bashir says international community can stop fretting, he'll sort out this Darfur war crimes business himself. His own name probably won't be appearing on any indictee lists, though.


• Special Court for Sierra Leone: Earlier today the SCSL handed down sentences of 52, 39, and 25 years prison time in the cases (respectively) of RUF leaders Issa Hassan Sesay, Morris Kallon and Augustine Gbao. Last month the three were found guilty on a variety of counts, including the new and exciting forced marriage charge. Also, Charles Taylor's defense lawyers opened their case on Monday by filing a motion for acquittal, claiming that the prosecution did not present evidence linking Taylor to the planning or execution of the alleged crimes. If the motion succeeds, the prosecutors and their 91 person witness list are going to have some serious explaining to do...


• Khmer Rouge Tribunal: It's business as usual over in Cambodia where accusations have surfaced that local staff members were forced to pay kickbacks to the government in order to get their Tribunal jobs. (Totally out of character for the Cambodian government, right?) Meanwhile, apologetic former S-21 prison boss Duch has been testifying up a storm since he took the witness stand last week.


• Bangladesh: United Nations legal experts will assist the Bangladeshi government with trials of those accused of war crimes during the 1971 independence struggle.


• Peru: Oh, and getting back to our extrajudicial killings theme, Peru's Supreme Court found former president Alberto Fujimori guilty of authorizing death squad murders and kidnappings in 1991-1992. Fujimori's daughter Keiko, a candidate in the 2011 presidential election, promises to pardon him if elected. (Aww...)
  

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While We Wait...

As long as we're all waiting with bated breath for this afternoon's (or this morning's, if you're in the U.S.) ICC press conference revealing Pre-Trial I's decision on the Bashir warrant, I thought I'd do a quick update on what else has been going on in the wonderful world of international criminal law.

• From the Khmer Rouge Tribunal: The Phnom Penh Post reports that the Office of the Co-Investigating Judges (OCIJ) has ordered Ieng Sary's defense team to take down its website, which the OCIJ alleges contains confidential material. Lawyers for Ieng and other defendants have countered that the Tribunal is needlessly secretive, failing in its obligation to keep the public informed, and that the posted documents weren't confidential anyway. (Given that the Tribunal's website has been down the last several times I've tried to access it, I feel like there may be some truth to those charges.) In other news from the KRT, last week Ieng Sary's wife, Ieng Thirith, threw a fit and cursed the Tribunal, and earlier this week Judge Kong Srim announced that there are no funds available to pay local staff salaries this month. So it sounds like things are going well there.


• From the ICTY: Yesterday Radovan Karadžić refused to plead to the prosecution's once-again amended indictment (third time's the charm guys!); an automatic not-guilty plea was (again) entered on his behalf. It's nice that he seems to be settling into a routine, isn't it? Oh, and former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic was found not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1999 conflict in Kosovo. The other five high-ranking Serb officials on trial were not so lucky; everyone got prison sentences.
  
  
• From the Special Court for Sierra Leone: Trial Chamber I returned a verdict last week in the case of three RUF commanders. Not only were all three found guilty on an impressive array of charges, but "forced marriage of captured women" made its debut as a crime distinct from your run-of-the-mill sexual violence charges. So congratulations to the prosecution for the first (and second and third) ever conviction for forced marriage under international criminal law!


• From the Special Tribunal for Lebanon: Not much to report yet other than yes, we have a new tribunal on the scene in the Hague. (Good thing, too, because the ratio of Dutch people to international lawyers was getting perilously close to 1:1 around here.) Its purpose is to "try all those who are alleged responsible for the attack of 14 February 2005 in Beirut that killed the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others."

So that's the news for now. See you in a few hours...

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October War Crimes Roundup

So, with all the Congo-related excitement, we missed reporting on a bunch of war crimes trial news last month. Check it out:

1. Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, target of an indictment requested by ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, announced that allegations of mass rape by Sudanese government-aligned forces in Darfur are false. What makes him so sure, you ask? Well, apparently, "The Darfurian society does not have rape. It's not in their tradition." Big relief, huh?
2. Meanwhile, Khartoum claims that it will prosecute government-allied Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb, who has been charged with crimes against humanity by the ICC. So far, the international community seems profoundly unmoved by the Sudanese government's claims that this is absolutely, totally, 100% not about blocking the ICC's complementary jurisdiction with a domestic show trial.
3. Down the street (from me, not from Khartoum) at the ICTY, Pre-Trial Chamber judge Iain Bonomy got a bit cranky about the slow pace of Radovan Karadžić's trial. When Karadžić complained that things were moving too fast for him to mount an effective defense, Judge Bonomy pointed out that this was his own damn fault for insisting on representing himself. The prosecution then narrowly escaped a spanking when it was inexplicably unable to tell the Judge how many pages of evidence still needed to be given to Karadžić in translation. Hearings will reconvene on January 20; Karadžić is testifying today at former ally Momčilo Krajišnik's trial.
4. The ICC Appeals Chamber affirmed the suspension of Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga's trial but disagreed with the trial chamber's holding that he should be released back into the wild. So he'll get to hang out at the Scheveningen penitentiary a while longer, and maybe fit in a few games of foosball with Karadzic. (Probably not though, given the strict "No Cross-Pollination of War Crimes Tribunals" rules keeping the ICTY and ICC prisoners separate.)
5. Lawyers for Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr (of "Hells yeah, the U.S. will torture and prosecute a child soldier" and "Canada, for the love of god, just ask to have him repatriated already" fame) brought a habeas petition challenging the military commission's authority to try juveniles and requesting to have him moved to a rehabilitation facilty. Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was captured in 2002, is the only detainee from a NATO country left at Guantanamo. The Canadian Supreme Court has held that the Canadian government violated its obligations under international law by providing assistance to the U.S. government's efforts to build a case against Khadr. The trial has now been delayed until January 26, 2009, after the inauguration of Barack Obama (hooray!!!), who has vowed to close the Guantanamo camp.

Consider yourselves updated.

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Misery Tourism Steps It Up a Notch

A rare travel opportunity for those of you who may be visiting the Balkans: Take Vekol tours' Radovan Karadžić themed tour of Belgrade. Have a drink in the bar where he hung out while in hiding, purchase copies of the articles he authored as faith healer Dragan Dabić, and, for a small additional fee, visit Srebrenica, where forces acting under his command slaughtered 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. Then go home and lord it over fellow cocktail party attendees who've only ever been to Auschwitz. You can thank me later.

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Adventures in Defense Lawyering - How to Use an Ineffective Postal System to Your Client's Advantage

Belgrade court officials reported today that they have received no appeal of the extradition of war criminal/poet-turned-miracle-healer Radovan Karadzic.

Friday was the last day to appeal the order shipping Karadzic off to meet the fate (translation: incredibly expensive trial in accordance with an incompletely fleshed-out body of law) he so richly deserves. However, Serbia apparently allows court filings by mail, making Friday a postmark deadline rather than a receipt deadline.

In a bid to delay the extradition, lawyer Svetozar Vujacic has led everyone to believe that he snuck off to the remotest post office he could find at the last possible minute on Friday. No one knows if he actually mailed the appeal, though, so they're stuck waiting around to see if it shows up. Great system, right?

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Justice: 1; Culture of Impunity: Infinity minus 1

So, you heard it here (or possibly on the CNN news crawler) first: Super-star fugitive from international justice Radovan Karadzic was arrested by Serbian authorities yesterday, thirteen years after his initial indictment on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He is currently being held in Belgrade and has three days to appeal a pending transfer to the ICTY in the Hague.

Karadzic, who was the first president of the Bosnian Serb adminstration following the breakup of Yugoslavia, was first indicted in July 1995 for authorizing the slaughter of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo. The ICTY issued a second indictment a few months later on genocide charges in connection with the Srebenica massacre.

He went into hiding in 1997, allegedly masquerading as a monk and moving from monastery to monastery. The Serbian populace helped him evade capture and bought up all 1000 copies of "The Miraculous Chronicle of the Night," a novel he wrote while on the run. (Seriously. It was nominated for Serbia's top book award.)

At the time of his capture, Karadzic had apparently returned to his previous profession of medicine (abandoned when he discovered his vocation for mass atrocity, I guess). He was working as a psychologist and alternative medicine practitioner, secure in the anonymity conferred by the alias "Dragan Dabic" and a really bad hairdo. He was even a frequent contributor to a local health magazine.

No word yet on allocation of state resources to therapeutic intervention for those who've just discovered they've been getting psychiatric treatment from the "Butcher of Bosnia."

Yesterday's arrest (which, along with Ratko Mladic's capture, is a prerequisite for Serbian accession to the European Union) occurred just weeks after a new, pro-Western government took power. In a spectacular example of getting-it-in-just-under-the-wire, Serbian journalist Dejan Anastasijevic wrote in an op-ed about the ICTY in Sunday's Washington Post that: "Mladic and Karadzic, for example, are still at large because no one has ever seriously gone after them." In fact, international justice activists have long suspected that the Serbian authorities knew exactly where Karadzic and Mladic were hiding and blamed the government and NATO forces for neglecting their duty to bring the two men to justice. Consequently, many commentators expect that, now that someone finally bothered to pick up Karadzic, an announcement of Mladic's arrest is imminent.

Shall we start a pool on when we'll see Mladic rolling into the Belgrade war crimes court chambers? I pick Wednesday, July 30th. Anyone else?

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Lots of Stuff Happens on Same Day, Blogger Completely Overwhelmed

I mean, wow, yesterday was a BIG news day. I'm holding down the fort alone this week, so here's a quick "news in brief" covering the highlights (in addition to the stunning Karadzic arrest), in case I don't get to everything.

• Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai entered the same room, came into physical contact; hell did not freeze over, protonium was not created.
  
  
• The U.S. opened the first war crimes trial since WWII, the military judge excluded evidence obtained under coercion from defendant Salim Hamdan; hell did not freeze over, protonium was not created.
  
  
• The African Union petitioned the UN Security Council to delay the ICC from indicting al-Bashir. (It can do this under Art. 16 of the Rome Statute, which authorizes a mandatory renewable 12 month postponement of any investigation or prosecution where the Security Council passes a resolution requesting such action.) This one didn't run such a big risk of tearing the fabric of the universe, but it's still interesting.
  

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OMG, They Got Karadzic!!!!

Breaking news: Bosnian war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic has been arrested by Serbian authorities after over a decade on the lam! He will eventually appear before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on charges of war crimes and genocide. Along with fellow Bosnian Serb Ratko Mladic, he was the highest ranking war crimes suspect still at large. (Mladic remains free of justice's icy grasp.)

Details to follow...

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