FYI
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*** 11-Dec-99 ***
RIGHTS: Rights Triumphs Over Sovereignty
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (IPS) - War criminals and other perpetrators of
crimes against humanity were finding life more difficult today as
a result of a string of human rights successes during 1999,
according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Not only must they be far more careful when going abroad, even
for medical treatment, they also may find themselves facing direct
intervention by international forces, said HRW's annual report,
released here Thursday on the eve of International Human Rights
Day.
''The price to be paid by those who commit human rights abuses
is substantially higher today than it was just a few years ago,''
declared HRW executive director, Kenneth Roth.
He said that the human-rights cause enjoyed a banner year in
1999, as sovereignty was forced to yield to international action
against governments accused of crimes against humanity.
Especially notable were the military intervention, on
humanitarian grounds, by NATO forces against the Yugoslav
government in Kosovo, and the international pressure marshalled
against Indonesia to force it to accept a multilateral peace-
keeping force in East Timor, according to 'World Report 2000'.
The first indictment for war crimes of a sitting head of state -
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic - and the judgement by the
highest British court that former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto
Pinochet could be extradited to Spain to stand trial for abuses
committed in Chile, also made 1999 a year of important
breakthroughs, the report said.
Ongoing progress by international criminal tribunals in
indicting and prosecuting war crimes and genocide cases in former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the increased willingness of
national courts - especially in Europe - to prosecute severe
abuses committed outside their borders, added to the inroads
against the traditional notion of national sovereignty, the report
said.
The fact that 91 nations had now signed the 1998 Rome Treaty
to establish a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) made
it likely that a ''fully-running ICC'' would be e created within
two to three years, according to Roth.
While only five of the 60 countries needed to ratify the treaty
had done so, he said many nations planned to ratify it next year,
despite opposition from the United States.
These events ''foretell an era in which the defense of human
rights can move from a paradigm of pressure based on international
human rights law to one of law enforcement,'' according to the 517-
page annual report.
The report stressed that the emerging trends remained 'halting
and replete with problems of consistency and potential misuse",
and paid special tribute to what it called the ''Annan Doctrine,''
named for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
In a controversial speech opening the General Assembly last
September, Annan insisted that sovereignty must give way to the
imperative of stopping crimes against humanity.
Less noticed, according to the HRW report, was his warning 10
days earlier that senior Indonesian officials could face
prosecution for such crimes if they did not either halt the
violence in East Timor which broke out after its inhabitants voted
for independence or permit a multinational force to do so.
''This was such an important pronouncement that it merits being
called the 'Annan doctrine','' according to the HRW report.
Annan's warning, while not binding, pointed to a new principle
that governments unable or unwilling to stop mass killing could
face criminal prosecution if they did not invite an international
force to intervene.
The report, analysing developments in 68 countries, appeared
designed to add to the growing debate over the balance between
national sovereignty and human rights.
That debate has grown steadily since the end of the Cold War as
the UN Security Council and western powers have used the emerging
doctrine of ''humanitarian intervention'' to justify intervention,
sometimes with military force, in the internal affairs of
countries where serious abuses were taking place.
The doctrine was first used after the Gulf War when so-called
''no-fly zones'' were declared over vast swathes of Iraq to
protect local populations from attacks by Baghdad's warplanes. In
the first half of the 1990s, it was also cited in interventions in
Somalia and Haiti.
The pace and growing audacity of these interventions reached
their peak in 1999 when western leaders explicitly invoked the
doctrine in connection with the crises in Kosovo and East Timor.
''We will remember 1999 as the year in which sovereignty gave
way in places where crimes against humanity were being
committed,'' said HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth.
Despite these advances, the report noted serious problems in
the application of these new principles, not the least of which
was inconsistency in their use.
Citing the 1993 UN debacle in Somalia and the failure of the
international community to intervene against the 1994 genocide in
Rwanda, the report observed that ''Africa seems to have been
particularly neglected.''
And the fact that the situations in both Kosovo and East Timor
were permitted to deteriorate so dramatically before the rest of
the world took action demonstrated a failure to anticipate crises
in advance in order to better deter them.
The world faced a similar problem, as violence and polarisation
grew in Aceh (Indonesia), Burundi and Colombia, according to Roth.
HRW also criticised the way NATO intervened against Yugoslavia
in Kosovo, noting that its bombing campaign, while attempting to
minimise civilian casualties, was aimed at disrupting civilian
life.
''The result was a dangerous inversion of the principles of
humanitarian action,'' according to the report, which noted that,
to avoid risks to its own troops, NATO failed to take the most
rapid or effective steps to achieve the paramount goal of stopping
the killing and forced migration of Kosovar Albanians.
''Thus, while NATO's actions in Kosovo showed a heightened
willingness to override sovereignty to stop crimes against
humanity, they signaled a disturbing disregard for the principles
of humanitarianism,'' the report said.
The ''destructive ethos'' of this approach already could be seen
in Russia's recent campaign in Chechnya and Israel's attacks in
Lebanon, the report added. (END/IPS/jl/mk/99)
Origin: Harare/ATT/
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[c] 1999, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS)
All rights reserved
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