Geneva Solutions’s monthly “war criminal hunt” in collaboration with the Geneva-based NGO Civitas Maxima.
This month, a Belgian court sent a strong message to perpetrators of international crimes in its conviction and sentencing of five Guatemalan former military and political officials, all of whom were tried in absentia.
During Guatemala’s decades-long civil war in which over 200,000 people are estimated to have lost their lives or been forcibly disappeared at the hands of the country’s leaders, four Belgian missionaries were targeted by the officials. Three were killed, while the one surviving victim was kidnapped and tortured.
In 2001, the victims’ families used Belgium’s genocide law to bring a criminal case to court. This case is the first time that Guatemalan state officials have had to answer for the atrocities committed during the conflict before a foreign court. The trial lasted two weeks and was held in absentia: three of the defendants are currently imprisoned in a military facility in Guatemala on other charges while the two others are fugitives and subject to international arrest warrants. On 15 November, a court in Louvain sentenced them to life imprisonment on 19 charges of crimes against humanity.
As a growing number of national jurisdictions endeavour to seek justice for victims of international crimes committed outside their territories, one recurrent obstacle to proceedings is the absence of the suspected perpetrator in the country seeking to prosecute them. Authorities prefer to have their suspect within their reach, on their own territory or in a state which can be relied on to execute an international arrest warrant. Cases otherwise often end before they can even begin.
Belgian authorities, however, decided that seeking justice for the victims of these atrocities was too important to forgo. They have thus been able to provide answers to the victims and their families, and have sent a strong message to other perpetrators of atrocities that their physical absence does not prevent their guilt from being proven in a court of law.
Last month, the International Criminal Court, which does not allow for its trials to be held in absentia, allowed for the hearing of charges against Joseph Kony, the Ugandan founder of the War’s Resistance Army, designated as a terrorist organisation by United Nations peacekeepers, to be held while he remains at large. Time will only tell if the same will apply in its case against President Vladimir Putin and his child’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for charges relating to the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Here’s what else happened this month
– International court upholds Indigenous rights. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights held that Guatemala violated the rights of Indigenous Q’eqchi’ people by allowing a nickel mine to be built on tribal grounds. In this historic decision, the court ordered an immediate halt to all mining activities and gave Guatemala six months to begin awarding land rights to the community. It also ordered the creation of a development fund and held that no further mining can take place without the community’s consent.
– Yazidi-Americans sue multinational. A group of over 400 Yazidi-Americans filed a federal lawsuit in the United States against French cement giant Lafarge, which pleaded guilty in 2022 of involvement in ‘providing material support to a terrorist organisation’. The company, now part of the Swiss conglomerate Holcim, was found to have paid nearly $6 million to ISIS and Al-Nusra Front groups, designated by the United States as terrorist organisations. The company was ordered to pay punitive damages, which the latest lawsuit holds should be redirected to Yazidi victims**.**
– Argentinian authorities launch investigation into former Colombian President. Álvaro Uribe Vélez is suspected of permitting, authorising, inciting and promoting war crimes and crimes against humanity committed between 2002 and 2008 through a practice known as ‘false positives’, where civilians were killed or forcibly disappeared and then falsely identified as guerrilla fighters.
– Dutch court dismisses Israel-Gaza weapons case. A court in The Hague dismissed a case brought to it by human rights groups, including Oxfam, to block the sale of weapons to Israel by the Netherlands. While the claim stated that the export of F-35 fighter jet parts enabled war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip, the court held that it could not intervene in matters of foreign policy.
– National courts hand down universal jurisdiction convictions. A number of cases in Europe in December employed the principle of universal jurisdiction, allowing states to prosecute international crimes committed outside of their territories. In Sweden, an appeals court upheld a guilty verdict and handed down a life sentence to Hamid Noury, a former Iranian official, for his role in the mass execution of political prisoners in a prison in Karaj in 1988. Meanwhile, a Belgian criminal court found Séraphin Twahirwa and Pierre Basabosé, two former high level Rwandan officials close to former president Juvénal Habyarimana and his wife, guilty of genocide and war crimes for murders, attempted murders and rapes committed during the 1994 genocide. In France, Sosthene Munyemana, a former gynecologist, ruled to have been part of a group that ‘prepared, organised and steered the genocide of the Tutsis’, was sentenced to 24 years in prison for genocide, crimes against humanity, and participation in a conspiracy to commit such crimes.
– Firsts in Russia-Ukraine war crimes cases. US authorities invoked its war crimes prosecution legislation for the first time by charging four Russian soldiers with war crimes committed against an American citizen living in southern Ukraine in 2022. Meanwhile, a former Wagner officer is set to be the first Russian senior officer to report to the ICC in its case against Putin after presenting himself to the court. Also, Finnish authorities arrested and remanded in custody two Russian men for war crimes that they are suspected to have committed in Ukraine as mercenaries for neo-Nazi group Rusich in 2022 and 2014.
– Two Syrian arrests in Europe. A Syrian national thought to have been the head of the interrogation department of the National Defence Force, a pro-government militia, was arrested in the Netherlands on suspicion of committing acts of torture and sexual violence against civilians. In Germany, a man, alleged to be a member of Hezbollah, was arrested on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in the southern Syrian city of Daraa between 2012 and 2013.
– Former Peruvian president released from prison. Alberto Fujimori was serving a 25-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity committed during his presidency in the 1990s. He has been linked to killings, kidnappings, corruption and the mass forced sterilisation of poor, mostly Indigenous, women. On 6 December, Peru’s constitutional court ordered his immediate humanitarian release on health grounds, defying his critics and an order handed down by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Picture: Politie Nationaal Defilé 2018. Wikimedia Commons.
