Making use of Focused Sanctions to Provide ICC Fugitives to Justice

By Alix Hirsh and Adam Keith

Specific sanctions can assist the diplomatic, political, and law enforcement do the job that is frequently vital to maintain critical human rights abusers accountable. Sanctions against the Congolese fugitive Bosco Ntaganda, for instance, were section of a broader effort that led to his surrender to the Global Legal Court docket (ICC) in 2013 for trial on prices of war crimes. But governments have been inconsistent in working with sanctions and other equipment to enable ensure that the ICC’s defendants are brought to courtroom.

To help illustrate how and when sanctions have been used this way, Human Legal rights First is protecting a tracker of the ICC’s conditions throughout the 17 unique cases (that is, certain crises or conflicts) exactly where the court has investigated, noting which of the court’s defendants have been sanctioned and by whom.

The tracker now handles sanctions imposed by the U.N. Stability Council, whose sanctions will have to be executed by all U.N. users as properly as sanctions imposed by selected jurisdictions (the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union) that act autonomously.

Each and every situation is different, but qualified sanctions can support guide to judicial accountability for fugitive war criminals in many ways:

• The stigma of sanctions can make it much less attractive for defendants’ allies to protect or offer with them and can consequently enable to politically weaken them.
• Even if defendants have no assets overseas, sanctions that ban transactions with them can enable disrupt their networks and raise the financial prices and dangers of supporting the sanctioned folks.
• Sanctions that ban fugitives from entering certain nations around the world can pin them in position and reduce them from accessing assets or burnishing their picture overseas.
• Sanctioning defendants also demonstrates governments’ assist for precise ICC investigations and can enable the court docket endure political attacks on its function.

Our tracker reveals some appealing styles. Of the 52 distinctive defendants the ICC has publicly billed, 21 have been sanctioned by at minimum a person of the jurisdictions we are monitoring. Most of the sanctioned defendants – 15 of the 21 – ended up sanctioned in four circumstances in which the U.N. Safety Council had enacted state-focused sanctions programs: the Central African Republic, Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the two latter situations, all of the court’s defendants had been sanctioned.

In various other ICC investigations, while, number of or none of the defendants have seen sanctions. Only a person defendant in just about every of the Darfur and Uganda cases has been sanctioned by any of the jurisdictions, and none have been sanctioned in the Ga, Mali, and Kenya predicaments.  Although the ICC has billed a combination of defendants who were and had been not already sanctioned, governments have seldom – on only 3 instances – appear along driving a new ICC arrest warrant to sanction a defendant who was earlier unsanctioned. Russian President Vladimir Putin and the other Russian formal billed by the ICC on March 17, for illustration, ended up sanctioned effectively right before the court docket issued arrest warrants against them.

Occasionally there are great causes for a disconnect among sanctions and ICC investigations.  Sanctions ended up unneeded to secure some defendants’ presence in The Hague, for the reason that countrywide authorities promptly arrested them or they voluntarily arrived to the court docket. Sanctions also could not remain ideal about time some former ICC defendants are however sanctioned lengthy soon after the costs towards them ended up dropped, and they must be delisted unless of course there are other ongoing bases for the sanctions.

On the other hand, 6 of the court’s defendants – three charged with atrocities in Darfur and three in Georgia – stay outside of ICC custody and unsanctioned even with seeming to be suitable targets for at minimum some sanctions. The lack of a suitable sanctions software is no excuse, given that the governments we are monitoring now have Magnitsky-style programs that permit them to goal human legal rights abusers anyplace in the entire world. For case in point, the U.S. government utilized its World wide Magnitsky method to sanction one particular of the ICC’s Libya fugitives in 2019.

Without a doubt, the jurisdiction that has sanctioned the most ICC defendants is not an ICC member condition, but rather the U.S. authorities. In addition to all those people sanctioned by the UN Protection Council, the U.S. has additional 6 extra: two billed with crimes in Libya, one in Darfur, 1 in the Central African Republic, and two Russians in the Ukraine investigation. The E.U. has sanctioned two added defendants, and the U.K. governing administration has sanctioned 3.

Our tracker also covers an additional foreign plan resource to support advertise accountability: the U.S. Section of State’s “War Crimes Rewards System,” which features dollars for facts on particular fugitives’ whereabouts if that information and facts sales opportunities to their arrests or convictions. This method created potential customers that served arrest fugitives from the UN’s tribunals for Rwanda and the previous Yugoslavia. It has publicly made available benefits for ICC defendants as well – but only the moment, masking a established of 5 defendants in 2013.

U.S. officials just lately stated they intend to reinvigorate the benefits application. Outside experts really encourage the ICC’s member states to create their personal rewards method, which would help the court docket stay away from dependent on fickle U.S. guidance, but they have not carried out so.

Just before the ICC issued arrest warrants towards President Putin and yet another Russian official, the court’s most new warrants had been issued past summer season, when it billed 3 adult men with war crimes similar to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. The victims of atrocities in that conflict have seen tiny development in pursuing justice, and governments have not used sanctions, benefits, or other applications to help this investigation.

In Ga, as very well as in the ICC’s steadily advancing Ukraine investigation and other scenarios all around the globe, Human Legal rights 1st will check the use of these resources and continue on advocating for required motion.