Tagged: Syria

The Humanitarian Crisis in Syria

POST WRITTEN BYProf. Peter Widulski, Assistant Director of the First Year Legal Skills Program and the Coach of International Criminal Moot Court Team at Pace Law School.

An article in the New York Times on October 6, 2015 on the conflict in Syria states that the conflict “has left 250,000 people dead and displaced half the country’s population since it started in 2011.”

This horrifying statement is contained in a dependent clause in a sentence in the sixth paragraph of an article on Russia’s intervention in the Syrian conflict. This placement unfortunately may reflect that the massive human suffering in Syria is becoming an afterthought to the quarrels among world powers regarding Syria.

What is happening to the people of Syria is difficult for most people to imagine. Americans will remember that thousands of their fellow citizens were displaced from their homes when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005. Most of these have returned home, but many have been unable to do so because what were their homes no longer exists.

The forced evacuation of a city like New Orleans is a frightening event. The present writer was one of those who experienced it. On the morning before the hurricane struck, I learned from radio reports that Katrina was not veering off, would hit the city in about 24 hours with great destruction, and all should evacuate. Not having a car, I stuffed some things in a kit bag, left my apartment in the Uptown District, and started walking toward downtown – not knowing where in particular I was going or what was going to happen to me. I managed to make my way to the Superdome, where about 25,000 others and I took shelter in harsh conditions for five days, before being evacuated.

The difficulties that my fellow refugees and I experienced at that time were as nothing compared to the terror and extreme hardships now being experienced by the people of Syria. We were evacuating our city, not our country. And our displacement was caused by a natural disaster, whose effects, for the most part, were temporary. It is a very different thing to be forced to flee not only your home, but also your country, because vicious people are more than willing to kill you and your family because of your political sympathies or because of your religious beliefs or because you just happen to be in the way.

The horrendous numbers of dead and displaced in Syria strongly support a conclusion that such massive suffering could not have happened without the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity by participants in the conflict. Whether there will ever be investigation or prosecution of such crimes by the International Criminal Court is far from clear. The U.N. Security Council has authority under the ICC’s Statute and Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter to refer the Syrian situation to the ICC, but such referral is unlikely because of the veto power of one or more of the Council’s permanent members.

The Preamble of the ICC’s Statute articulates its ratifiers’ “[d]etermin[ation] to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators” of “grave crimes [that] threaten the peace, security and well being of the world.” It seems that regarding what is happening in Syria, this goal will remain for the moment a mere aspiration, and, as the quarrel among world powers intensifies, the suffering of the Syrian people will remain an afterthought.

Related Readings:

ICC Prosecutor Responds to Criticism Regarding the Court and Gaza

POST WRITTEN BY: Prof. Peter Widulski, Assistant Director of the First Year Legal Skills Program and the Coach of International Criminal Moot Court Team at Pace Law School.

On September 2, 2014, the ICC Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, issued a public statement in which she rejected as “baseless” criticisms in “[r]ecent media reports and commentaries,” which she said “have erroneously suggested that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has persistently avoided opening an investigation into alleged war crimes in Gaza due to political pressure.”

The Prosecutor stated that these criticisms were without merit because of the Rome Statute’s jurisdictional requirements. The Prosecutor did not (and could not, without investigation) argue that any alleged crimes committed by any participant in the conflict failed to meet the Statute’s subject matter requirements for genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. The problem, rather, was the Statute’s other jurisdictional requirements that authorize the ICC to open an investigation only with respect to crimes alleged to have occurred on the territory of a State or by nationals of a State that has ratified the Rome Statute or has accepted ICC jurisdiction by an ad hoc declaration pursuant to Article 12(3) of the Statute. At this time, neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority is a State Party to the Rome Statute, nor has either as yet filed an Article 12(3) declaration. (Palestine did file such a declaration in 2009, but it was found invalid for lack of standing.)

The Prosecutor noted that her Office after examination has concluded that because of UN General Assembly Res. 67/19 issued on November 29, 2012 upgrading Palestine’s status to a “non-member observer State,” Palestine could now accede to the Rome Statute or lodge an Article 12(3) declaration conferring jurisdiction to the ICC over the situation in Gaza. But it has not yet done so.

The Prosecutor in her statement referred to an additional mechanism through which the ICC could obtain authorization to investigate the situation in Gaza. Pursuant to Article 13(b) of the Rome Statute, the UN Security Council can act under its Chapter VII powers to authorize an ICC investigation, even if the alleged crimes were not committed on the territory of a State Party or by a national of a State Party. The Security Council has not taken such action as yet with respect to Gaza (nor has it done so with respect to the violence in Syria).

Amnesty International, a non-governmental organization whose mission is to protect human rights internationally, has called for the UN Security Council, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel to provide the ICC with jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute any persons responsible for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the current and past Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.

The Prosecutor concluded her September 2 statement by saying,

It is my firm belief that recourse to justice should never be compromised by political expediency. The failure to uphold this sacrosanct requirement will not only pervert the cause of justice and weaken public confidence in it, but also exacerbate the immense suffering of the victims of mass atrocities. This, we will never allow.

The ICC has been the target of many political criticisms and challenges, starting from its foundational conferences in the 1990s, and these challenges will, no doubt, continue for years to come. The ICC Prosecutor is to be commended for being proactive in addressing these challenges in an effort to support the credibility of the Court.