Our press statement about ‘Why do the International Criminal Court (ICC) stay quite about the death of civilians in Syria’ has been released to public by Mustafa Demiral, legal director of UHIM.
The civil war and chaos in Syria since 2011 has resulted in death of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and de-facto disintegration of the country has turned millions of people into refugees.
This painful process has been continuing ever increasing and becoming more and more perilous each and every day.
A number of weapons of war crime and the ones considered to be crime against humanity including chemical weapons have been used in the recent operations conducted by the U. S., Russia, France and Britain and this has caused death of hundreds of civilians everyday.
The operations conducted on the grounds that the armed groups have been targeted has caused death of thousands of Syrian civilian women and children until today.
On the one side these painful process has been continuing, on the other the internationally responsible institutions’ attitude towards this process is controversial.
Apart from the United Nations (UN) whose attitude towards the tragedy in Syria is unable to go beyond warnings and wishes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) which takes resolutions about the problems all over the world has not taken any remarkable steps for Syria yet.
As it is known, there are three ways of application for sueing in the ICC. These are:
1. Any demand from any state which is a party to ICC.
2. An application by the UN Security Council.
3. An applicarion by the Attorney Generalship of the ICC.
It is seen that the 123 states parties to the Statute of the ICC are indifferent to operate the first option regarding the crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes committed in the operations which come under the ICC.
The second option in the direction of UN’s application demand dies out since the countries which have the veto power of the UN’s Security Council (Russia, the U. S., France, Britain) are the countries themselves which conduct air operaions in Syria.
The structural feature of the ICC leaves the operation of the legal processes regarding the Syrian issue in the hands of these permanent members of the UN Security Council.
It is interesting that the countries except the permanent members (Angola, Chad, Chile Jordan, Lithuania, Malaysia New Zealand, Nigeria, Spain and Venezuela) do not take any actions to bring this issue to the Security Council.
The Attorney General of ICC did not take actions directly about the developments whose details were broadcasted live every day by media institutions and this removes the possibility to apply the third and last option. These attitude of the Attorney General of ICC inevitably leads the questioning the functionality of the ICC and creates new question marks in public opinion about the precision of the investigations in future.
As UHIM, we advise the ICC to break its silence about the death of the civilians in military operations in Syria carried out by countries such as Russia, the U. S., France, Britain and Assad regime and to take judicial resolutions about the implementers and policy makers of these operations, especially Bashar al-Assad.
PRESS RELEASE / Monday, December 1, 2016
International Center for Watching Violation of Rights