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EU calls for war crimes tribunal over Ukraine mass graves | Russia-Ukraine war News
The European Union has called for a war crimes tribunal as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said new evidence of torture has been found as more bodies are exhumed from a mass burial site in a town re-taken from Russian forces.
Jan Lipvasky, foreign minister of the Czech Republic which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said on Saturday that Russia’s attacks “against the civilian population are unthinkable and abhorrent” in the 21st century.
“We must not overlook it. We stand for the punishment of all war criminals,” he wrote in a message on Twitter. “I call for the speedy establishment of a special international tribunal that will prosecute the crime of aggression.”
The appeal follows the discovery by Ukrainian authorities of about 450 graves outside the formerly Russian-occupied city of Izyum, with some of the exhumed bodies showing signs of torture.
Zelenskyy, in his daily evening address, said “new evidence of torture was obtained” from the bodies buried there.
“More than 10 torture chambers have already been found in various cities and towns liberated in Kharkiv region,” he added, describing the discovery of electrical implements for torture.
“That’s what the Nazis did. This is what Ruscists do. And they will be held accountable in the same way – both on the battlefield and in courtrooms,” he said, using the term “Ruscists” for “Russian fascists”.
Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from Kharkiv, said the situation in Izyum looks “gruesome on many levels”.
“Izyum is now a desolate city, completely destroyed. There’s barely a building that hasn’t been at least partially damaged, and I’m talking about civilian targets here – apartment blocks, schools, pharmacies, the church – a very desolate picture,” Abdel-Hamid said.
“It’s a place where you see the real toll of this war. It’s a city that has been besieged, that has been bitterly fought between the two sides. It’s now firmly under Ukrainian control. You see the soldiers roaming the streets, but there’s barely any sign of life.”
‘Probably 1,000 tortured and killed’
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the mass graves likely provided more evidence that Russia is committing war crimes in its pro-Western neighbouring country. French President Emmanuel Macron described what had happened in Izyum as atrocities.
The Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said there were “probably more than 1,000 Ukrainian citizens tortured and killed in the liberated territories of the Kharkiv region”.
The United Nations in Geneva has said it hopes to send a team to determine the circumstances of the deaths.
The macabre discoveries came a little more than five months after the Russian army, driven out of Bucha near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, left behind hundreds of corpses of civilians, many of whom had signs of torture and summary executions.
On Thursday, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said she wanted Russian President Vladimir Putin to face the International Criminal Court over war crimes in Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden meanwhile warned his Russian counterpart against using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons in the wake of serious losses in his war in Ukraine.
“Don’t. Don’t. Don’t,” Biden said, in an excerpt from an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes aired on Friday evening.
“You would change the face of war unlike anything since World War II,” Biden said.
The US response would be “consequential,” he said, but declined to give detail. Russia “would become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been,” he added. “Depending on the extent of what they do will determine what response would occur.”
Russian government officials have dismissed Western suggestions that Moscow would use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but it remains a worry for some in the West.
Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, said the “director of the CIA in April warned Congress that there’s a possibility that President Putin could deploy nuclear devices”.
“It’s also important to note that President Putin in 2020 signed a Russian military doctrine, which states clearly that Russia will use nuclear devices if other countries utilise nuclear devices against them, but then – and this is the key point – it could also respond with nuclear weapons to the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is threatened,” Hanna said. “Many military experts do not see a possibility of Putin using a nuclear weapon. However, many say that this does not rule out the fact that he may threaten the use, in other words, to escalate, to de-escalate, to get out the parties to the negotiating table.”
‘Pushing them back’
On the ground, Ukrainian forces have recaptured thousands of square kilometres in recent weeks, thanks to a counteroffensive in the northeast, and now threaten enemy positions in the south, as the fighting and bombings continue.
The Russians “are angry because our army is pushing them back in its counteroffensive”, said Svitlana Shpuk, a 42-year-old worker in Kryvyi Rih, a southern town, and Zelenskyy’s hometown, which was flooded after a dam was destroyed by Russian missiles.
Synegubov said an 11-year-old girl had been killed by missile fire in the region.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine which has been partially controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014, said on social media that a thermal power plant was “shelled by Russian invaders” on Saturday morning in Mykolaivka.
Ukrainian firefighters were battling the blaze, he said, adding that the Russian shelling had led to interruptions to drinking water supply.
“The occupiers are deliberately targeting infrastructure in the area to try to inflict as much damage as possible, primarily on the civilian population,” he charged.
He had earlier reported that two civilians had been killed and 11 wounded in the past 24 hours by Russian fire.
Uyghur tribunal rules that China ‘committed genocide’ against the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities
“The tribunal is satisfied that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] has affected a deliberate, systematic and concerted policy with the object of so-called ‘optimizing’ the population in Xinjiang by the means of a long-term reduction of Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations to be achieved through limiting and reducing Uyghur births,” Geoffrey Nice, who chaired the tribunal, said on Thursday as he read out the verdict.
He added that the tribunal was “satisfied that President Xi Jinping, Chen Quanguo and other very senior officials in the PRC and CCP [Chinese Communist Party] bear primary responsibility for acts in Xinjiang.”
While the “perpetration of individual criminal acts that may have occurred, rape or torture, may not have been carried out with the detailed knowledge of the President and others, but the tribunal is satisfied that they have occurred as a direct result of politics, language and speeches promoted by President Xi and others and furthermore these policies could not have happened in a country with such rigid hierarchies as the PRC without implicit and explicit authority from the very top,” he said.
The judgment follows a series of tribunal hearings in London this year, during which a panel of jurors reviewed evidence and testimony.
The non-governmental independent Uyghur Tribunal was founded in 2020 by Nice, a British barrister and international human rights lawyer, at the urging of Uyghur activists.
Nice was among several British individuals and entities sanctioned by the Chinese government in March this year in retaliation for British sanctions on Chinese officials over human rights violations in Xinjiang.
The tribunal has no powers of sanction or enforcement, but vows to “act wholly independently” and “confine itself to reviewing evidence in order to reach an impartial and considered judgment on whether international crimes are proved to have been committed” by China, according to its website.
China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Zheng Zeguang, has called the Uyghur Tribunal a “political manipulation aimed at discrediting China.”
“The organization has been designed to tarnish the image of China, mislead the public here, spoil the goodwill between the Chinese people and the British people and disrupt the smooth development of the China-UK relationship,” Zheng said at a news conference in September.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, has called the tribunal a “pure anti-China farce.”
On Thursday, the Chinese Embassy in London called the tribunal “a political tool used by a few anti-China elements to deceive and mislead the public. It is not a legal institution. Nor does it have any legal authority.”
It added that the Xinjiang region “now enjoys economic progress, social stability and ethnic solidarity. China will remain focused on doing the right thing and following the path that suits its national reality.”
The United States State Department estimates up to 2 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have passed through a sprawling network of detention centers across Xinjiang, where former detainees allege they were subjected to intense political indoctrination, forced labor, torture, and even sexual abuse.
Human rights groups and overseas Uyghur activists have also accused the Chinese government of forced cultural assimilation and coerced birth control and sterilization against Uyghurs.
The US government has accused China of committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, as have lawmakers and rights groups in the UK and Canada.
Beijing vehemently denies allegations of human rights abuses, insisting the camps are voluntary “vocational training centers” designed to stamp out religious extremism and terrorism.
In March, the US along with the European Union, Canada and the UK announced sanctions on Chinese officials over human rights violations in Xinjiang. China responded almost immediately by imposing a raft of tit-for-tat sanctions, as well as travel and business bans.
As the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics approaches, international pressure over China’s treatment of Uyghurs has been building, with activists calling for a boycott of the Games.
On Monday, the Biden administration said it would not send an official US delegation to the Games as a statement against China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang” — though American athletes will still be allowed to compete in Beijing.
Since then, Australia, the UK and Canada have joined the US in the diplomatic boycott.
At a news conference Wednesday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said “human rights abuses and issues in Xinjiang” were some of the concerns raised by the Australian government with Beijing.
Also on Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban the importation of goods from Xinjiang over concerns about forced labor. The “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” was passed by an overwhelming 428-1. It must also pass the Senate and be signed by US President Joe Biden to become law.
Restaurant worker awarded $30K by Canadian tribunal after pronoun spat
Don’t call them “sweetie.”
A restaurant worker who uses “they/them” pronouns was awarded $30,000 by a government tribunal after complaining about a manager who refused to abide by the request.
Instead of using Jesse Nelson’s preferred pronouns, the bar manager at Buono Osteria in Gibsons, Canada, repeatedly called Nelson “she,” “sweetheart,” “sweetie,” and “honey,” according to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Nelson worked at the restaurant for about four weeks, according to the Vancouver Sun.
Devyn Cousineau, a tribunal member, found Nelson was “fired after their attempt to address this conduct led to a heated encounter,” according to the tribunal decision.
Cousineau found Nelson had been discriminated against, fully awarding the $30,000 sought, with the bar manager individually liable for $10,000 of that.
Tribunal Convicts Former Serbian Officials of Crimes in Balkan Wars
A war-crimes tribunal in The Hague convicted two former Serbian officials on Wednesday of aiding and abetting war crimes committed in the 1990s wars that ravaged the Balkans, the first time that prosecutors tied high-ranking officials from the wartime government in Belgrade to involvement in atrocities in neighboring countries.
It was the final case to be heard by the international criminal tribunal established by the United Nations to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Balkan wars. The verdict capped dozens of trials that followed the breakup of the six federations that made up Yugoslavia, a conflict that unleashed waves of sectarian and ethnic bloodletting.
The case, coming nearly three decades after the tribunal was established, was also a coda for the protracted legal struggle to hold to account the architects and perpetrators of the worst bloodletting in Europe since the end of World War II. It was the last chance for prosecutors to tie officials from the Serbian state to atrocities in neighboring Bosnia and Croatia.
Few Serbian officials played as critical a role during the conflicts as the defendants Jovica Stanisic, the former head of Serbia’s state security, and Franko Simatovic, his deputy.
The presiding judge, Burton Hall, announced the findings on Wednesday afternoon, saying the court found that the defendants were guilty of running a “joint criminal enterprise” to remove non-Serbs from areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In so doing, the court found, they created “an atmosphere of terror, arbitrary detentions and forced labor.”
However, the findings were limited in scope, focusing on one Bosnian municipality, and rejected a vast majority of the prosecution’s charges. The sentences also fell far short of what prosecutors wanted: Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic were both sentenced to 12 years in prison, including time served.
Despite that, Wayne Jordash, Mr. Stanisic’s lawyer, said he would appeal the conviction and called the sentences “manifestly excessive.”
‘’The tribunal should be ashamed of itself for taking 18 years and holding two trials for such a weak case,” he said.
Kada Hotic, a representative for a Bosnian war victims association, told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network that she was satisfied with the verdict even if disappointed by what she said was a light sentence.
“All in all, they are guilty,” she said. And Serbia, she said, had finally been shown to be involved in the crimes.
Prosecutors said Mr. Stanisic was the second most powerful man in Serbia from 1992 to 1995, when Slobodan Milosevic was president. He was a trusted consigliere and keen strategist who was nicknamed “Ledeni” — Serbian for “ice man.”
Known for his sharp suits and dark sunglasses, Mr. Stanisic presented an image of calm. By contrast, Mr. Simatovic, the head of special operations, was a more effusive man who preferred camouflage uniforms and, according to evidence presented during the trials, could be heard bragging about attacks on villages.
Prosecutors accused the pair of organizing hit squads, permitting the killing of prisoners and signing off on covert weapons shipments. Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic were charged with creating and running a series of covert operations using brutal paramilitary groups and acting on the orders of Mr. Milosevic.
Prosecutors said that they were part of a criminal conspiracy to force non-Serbs out of large sections of Croatia and Bosnia — a campaign that brought a new term to the grim lexicon of warfare: “ethnic cleansing.”
The tribunal, despite criticism over the length of the trials, has set many important precedents in international criminal law and has provided victims a chance to give voice to what they witnessed and experienced.
The tribunal expanded on the body of international law established at the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II. And as other courts followed it, dealing with Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Cambodia, many believe the tribunal provided the momentum for the founding of the permanent International Criminal Court.
In all, the tribunal has conducted more than 80 trials, many with multiple defendants. It has convicted 91 people and acquitted 18, while others have died while in custody in The Hague, at least three by suicide.
More than 100,000 people died during the conflagrations from 1991 to 1995, and about two million people were displaced from their homes.
The tribunal was founded in 1993 in response to the mass atrocities unfolding at the time in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. From the outset, it has faced criticism, skepticism and political pushback.
In Serbia, it has effectively been branded as anti-Serb. Across the region, many of those who have been convicted of war crimes are still viewed as heroes. And in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the rulings have done little to repair the deep divisions still tearing at the seams of the divided society.
But the tribunal did establish a robust historical record and made clear that Bosnian Muslims made up by far the wars’ largest group of victims.
Mr. Milosevic, considered the main architect of the Balkan wars, faced a battery of charges. But he died in a tribunal cell in 2006, shortly before the end of his trial.
The trials and convictions of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the supreme political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, were widely viewed as rare victories for international justice.
They were convicted of the gravest crimes that have come under the purview of the court, and of those that had by far the largest number of victims, including the massacre of about 8,000 unarmed men and boys in Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Still, the leaders of Serbia itself — long accused as the main instigators of the wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia — have largely escaped prosecution. No officials of the Belgrade government during the war are serving time for the atrocities in Bosnia or Croatia.
Some senior Serbian officials have been convicted of crimes in the conflict over the independence of Kosovo in 1999.
Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, said that to end the work of the tribunal “without holding the Serbian enablers of the crimes accountable would have left the tribunal’s task incomplete.”
The closest the court came was in the conviction of Mr. Milosevic’s chief of staff, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, who was sentenced to 27 years for aiding and abetting war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia. But the verdict was overturned on appeal in 2013.
The judges did not dispute the evidence of Serbia’s wartime role, or of its continuous supply of weapons, money, fuel and personnel to its allies in Bosnia and Croatia. But the judges argued that there was no evidence that this extensive support was intended to be used for crimes, rather than for what they deemed to be legitimate war efforts.
Since that verdict was overturned, prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to establish the crucial link that legally tied many war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia to the Serbian State Security and by extension to its boss, Mr. Milosevic.
It has been more than three years since the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague closed, and the successor institution, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, was the official venue for the last trial.
Like many war crimes trials, the case against Mr. Stanisic and his deputy has been complex and drawn out, stretching back to their indictment in 2003. The two men were acquitted at a trial in 2013, but appeals judges, finding fundamental legal and factual errors, overturned that verdict two years later and ordered a full retrial.
The prosecution relied on dozens of witnesses, scores of videos and radio and telephone intercepts to try to establish that the two men were part of an organized conspiracy that orchestrated the forcible and permanent removal of the majority of non-Serbs from parts of Croatia and Bosnia.
Prosecutors introduced newly obtained records from Serbian secret police archives, which included details about the paramilitary recruits and payments to them. Payments to a group called the Red Berets were signed by Mr. Simatovic.
The secret records were provided by Belgrade, and prosecutors said that they showed that these groups — with names like Arkan’s Tigers, the Scorpions, the Gray Wolves and the White Eagles — were not informal bands of criminals or men who spontaneously took up arms, but well-trained, well-equipped and well-paid men in uniforms, directed by the secret police led by Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic.
Prosecutors said that these groups were tasked with doing the dirty work during ethnic cleansing operations.
Colombia tribunal reveals at least 6,402 people were killed by army to boost body count | Global development
A special peace tribunal in Colombia has found that at least 6,402 people were murdered by the country’s army and falsely declared combat kills in order to boost statistics in the civil war with leftist rebel groups. That number is nearly three times higher than the figure previously admitted by the attorney general’s office.
The killings, referred to in Colombia as the “false positives scandal”, took place between 2002 and 2008, when the government was waging war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc), a leftist guerrilla insurgency, which ultimately made peace with the government in 2016. Soldiers were rewarded for the manipulated kill statistics with perks, including time off and promotions.
Included in the 2016 deal was the creation of a special peace tribunal – known by its Spanish initials, JEP – to investigate and try crimes committed by all sides in the conflict. On Thursday, the JEP made public the preliminary results of its investigation into the “false positives” scandal, following the exhumation of mass graves across the country over the past two years.
A statement by the JEP confirmed that the investigation will continue, and will now focus on provinces in the country not yet prioritized in its probe.
Jackeline Castaño, whose brother was abducted and murdered by the military in 2008, felt that justice was closer to being served following Thursday’s announcement. While many rank-and-file soldiers have been sent to prison and dozens of senior officers have been fired, victims say that those who gave the orders still have not faced justice.
“We are grateful for the publication of the findings of the JEP’s investigations which show how widespread extrajudicial executions were during the period of [then-president] Álvaro Uribe, from 2002 to 2008,” said Castaño, who leads a victims’ group. “We hope that the truth will continue to come out.”
Movice, a collective of victims of crimes committed by the Colombian state, also welcomed the JEP’s findings. “The high figure of these crimes is not a surprise,” read a statement by the group, adding that it demonstrates “an internal policy” within the military “without any form of control or sanctions for those responsible”.