Rights groups support ICC but renew calls for justice

While some human rights groups have applauded Afghanistan's accession last week to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague in the Netherlands, others say those responsible for decades of abuses should also be prosecuted. The ICC treaty will take effect in Afghanistan on 1 May but may only impact on very recent human rights abuses. The court will have the authority to investigate and prosecute serious war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed since 1 July 2002 in a country where such acts have been commonplace during decades of war and conflict. "The instrument was deposited last Tuesday at UN headquarters in New York," Manuel Almeida da Silva, spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), told IRIN in the capital, Kabul. The US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has issued a statement describing the move by Kabul as encouraging. "This is a historic day for Afghanistan," John Sifton, a researcher for the group said. "For over two decades, perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan have enjoyed total impunity. On May 1, that impunity will formally end." But there has also been criticism that the ICC was not empowered to pursue those accused of relevant crimes before July 2002. There are currently no effective mechanisms in place to address crimes committed during the two decades of war that followed the Soviet-backed coup in 1978. Ahmad Zia Langari, a member of the Kabul-based Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), told IRIN that joining the treaty had symbolic value, but little practical meaning while government control extended little beyond Kabul's city limits. "If Afghanistan doesn’t have a real multiethnic national army and police, and the disarmament process is not taken seriously, there will be many crimes in future," he warned. Hangama Anwari, another member of AIHRC, told IRIN in Kabul that punishing past gross human rights abuses was critical if similar abuses were to be stopped in the future. "It will be a bit unfair if we are not addressing past criminals," she said, adding that potential perpetrators would be deterred if past criminals were made examples of. However, the problem of finding witnesses, evidence and financing a modern, well-resourced judiciary in Afghanistan suggests few if any human rights abusers will ever be called to account for their crimes. HRW said it would continue to lobby the Afghan government and the international community, including the UNAMA, to pursue justice for victims of past crimes in Afghanistan. In October 2002, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, Asma Jahangir, visited the country to investigate serious human rights abuses. "I have called for an independent international inquiry to map and to sketch crimes against humanity that have been committed in Afghanistan over the last 23 years. The country has just opened up and there has been no documentation of it," she told IRIN from the Pakistani city of Lahore in an interview following her visit. Her trip followed a UN team of forensic experts, who in May investigated three alleged mass-grave sites in Mazar-e Sharif, Sheberghan and Bamian in northern and central Afghanistan. Then a Newsweek story in late August made public the grim details of the killing of hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners of war near Sheberghan earlier in the year. This and other stories evoked renewed international calls for action over human rights abuses in Afghanistan. In early September, the UN sent a team of human rights advisers to northern Afghanistan after local warlords controlling the region showed a willingness to discuss the issue. Afghanistan’s accession to the ICC Treaty brings the total number of states party to the agreement to 89. The states met in New York last week and elected the court’s 18 judges, who will be sworn in on 11 March. The court’s prosecutor will be selected at the end of April.