Author: Maggie Fick

Anyone and everyone talking about the International Criminal Court today is talking the issuance of an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. However, the warrant is not the only big event for the Court this week. Here’s a roundup of a few other key recent ICC-related developments: Via UN Dispatch: John Boonstra reports: “Indicted Bosnian Serb war criminal (and noted soda-drinker)” Radovan Karadzic pled not guilty on charges of genocide and war crimes. As Boonstra notes, Karadzic followed the lead of his fellow Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and refused to plead, thus forcing the presiding ICC judge to ...

In the couple of hours that have passed since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, a number of key actors have responded to the arrest warrant. Here’s what they’re saying and doing so far: The State Department issued a statement saying, “The United States believes those who have committed atrocities should be brought to justice.” See this Reuters article for reactions from governments and organizations. In Khartoum yesterday, President Bashir made some defiant statements to a crowd of thousands about the then-looming ...

The newswires are buzzing, rumors are flying, and capitals will soon be rushing out statements on the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant issuance this morning. Humanitarian organizations in Darfur and embassies in Khartoum have been bracing for the ICC’s decision for some time now. The sky is not going to fall today in Sudan, but as Enough’s John Prendergast and Omer Ismail note in a recent opinion-editorial, the sands will be shifting in Sudan as the international community adapts to the reality of having an indicted war criminal as president. Here at the Enough Project (and right here on our ...

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is on a tour of Africa this week. His trip has included stops in South Africa and Tanzania. Visits to Rwanda, Congo, and Egypt are still to come. The Secretary is scheduled to meet with Congolese president Joseph Kabila and Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kinshasa and Kigali, respectively. There is no shortage of topics to discuss in these meetings. Secretary Ban will also be visiting the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, or MONUC, no doubt attempting to drum up support from troop contributing countries for the mission (our blog has noted the current dilapidated ...

Talk about adding insult to injury. The U.N. Secretary General’s third report on Children and Armed Conflict in Sudan noted that: children continue to be recruited and used by all parties to the conflict, that rape and sexual violence continue to be systematic and widespread and that children and women in and around refugee camps and internally displaced persons’ settlements are especially vulnerable. Unfortunately, these findings are no surprise. Women and children are the most vulnerable populations and bear the brunt of suffering in conflicts all over the world. The recent U.N. report notes that, in Darfur, the abduction of ...

On a recent Friday afternoon, I discovered a fantastic (and temporarily free) service on the Harper’s magazine website: In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Harper’s Index, all 12,058 lines of the Index are free for searching and browsing. I highly recommend taking a look through the easy-to-navigate index yourself. Here are some of the interesting statistics I came across while I was word-searching some of Enough’s topics. Click on the statistic to go to the Harper’s site and find each source: $25,000,000: Signing bonus that two oil companies paid Chad in April 2000 in order to join an ...

Secretary Clinton took a lot of heat during her recent trip to China about her relative emphasis, or lack thereof, on human rights. However, her comments while speaking to journalists in Jakarta, Indonesia touched on how the Obama administration plans to approach conflict resolution efforts: SECRETARY CLINTON: Philip, your question, as I understand it, is will we play a more active role in trying to resolve conflicts. QUESTION: Yes. SECRETARY CLINTON: And the answer is we are going to try. We believe strongly that the United States does have such a role to play. A number of people in my ...

Human Rights Watch recently posted a letter on their website signed by more than fifty Congolese non-governmental organizations operating in eastern Congo. The letter was addressed to Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, and was an impassioned and forceful call to the Congolese government to take a stand for peace and justice: Since there can be no sustainable peace and security without justice, we urge you to respect your international commitments and to deliver the war criminal Bosco Ntaganda to The Hague, where he is sought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes in the Ituri District of eastern DRC ...

File this story in the “I’ll believe it when we see it” category: AP reports that Congolese Lieutenant General John Numbi, chief of staff for the Congo-Rwanda joint military operation against the Rwandan Hutu militia known as the FDLR, claimed yesterday that the operation has “achieved 95 percent of its objectives” and that: A farewell ceremony will take place Feb. 25 or 26 and we are going to escort all the Rwandan troops to the border without any exception. This begs the question, what precisely were the objectives of the anti-FDLR operation? In principle, between 3,000-7,000 Rwandan soldiers entered eastern ...

With all of the recent news and rumors about the looming International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, you may have missed developments in the landmark International Criminal Court trial of Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga. As you might have read, the trial got off to a very rocky start when the first witness recanted his testimony after appearing shaken by the experience of testifying behind a screen while Lubanga glared at him from several feet away. During the second week of the trial, ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told reporters that judges were considering new measures ...