Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

In its most damning report yet, a United Nations investigative team has flatly accused the government of Myanmar (ex-Burma) of perpetrating gross genocidal crimes against the ethnic minority known as the Rohingya people. The main focus of genocidal incidents has taken place in Rakhine State, where the largest Rohingya settlements have traditionally been located. But the UN study also drew on testimonies regarding criminal abuse in Kachin and Shan States. The Rohingya people claim that their roots in Myanmar go back at least a thousand years. Their name—which is also the name of the Indo-European language that they speak—means, literally, “the people of Rohing”. Rohing was the ancient name of the kingdom that would later be known in British colonial times are Arakan, and today is known as Rakhine State. The Rohingya, therefore, justly consider themselves indigenous to the region. The Myanmar government, for its part, brands the Rohingya as “foreigners”—refusing to term them...

Ratko Mladic Last month witnessed the final outcome of a six-year trial under international humanitarian law that examined charges brought against Yugoslav People’s Army General Ratko Mladic (known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”), including eleven counts of offenses fitting the definition of crimes against humanity—genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes—and described by the head of the tribunal that convicted him as “among the most heinous known to humankind.” The conviction handed down in the case (Prosecutor v. Mladic) on November 22, found the former general and ex-chief of staff of the Republika Srpska Army guilty of ten of those charges for which he was sentenced to life in prison. The most major crimes by far were the now infamous summary execution under his orders of between 7,000 and 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica, and his Army’s siege of Sarajevo in which 10,000 people perished. Mladic in the defendant's dock in The Hague The importance of this and other major...

This past week, the foreign ministers of African Union (AU) member countries of the International Criminal Court (ICC) publicly announced that they had decided to recommend withdrawal en masse from the court. Thirty-four of the African Union’s 54 member nations subscribe to the ICC under the provisions of the Rome Statute, the court’s founding charter. If leaders of the African States Parties to the Rome Statute all decide to accept the joint recommendation of their foreign ministers, it will be a major blow to the ICC, since their nations form the single largest regional group of countries subject to the jurisdiction of the court, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (27 States Parties), Western Europe and Others (25), and the Asian Group (19). Indeed, the Rome Statute does make provisions for withdrawal from the court’s jurisdiction. Article 27 provides that once a country formally notifies the United Nations of its decision to pull out, effective withdrawal from the ICC...