Genocide Watch

Cambodian Tribunal Supreme Court Chamber increases Duch sentence to life imprisonment

By ECCC
3 February 2012

The Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) today sentenced KAING Guek Eav alias Duch to life imprisonment, the maximum sentence available under the law, for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

Granting an appeal from the Co-Prosecutors, the Supreme Court Chamber quashed the 35 years sentence imposed by the Trial Chamber on 26 July 2010, and by supermajority also quashed the Trial Chamber’s decision to grant a remedy for the violation of KAING Guek Eavs’s rights occasioned by his illegal detention by the Cambodian Military Court between 10 May 1999 and 30 July 2007. The Supreme Court Chamber dismissed an appeal from KAING Guek Eav in which he alleged that he did not fall within the personal jurisdiction of the Court, holding that, whether an accused is a senior leader or one of those most responsible are exclusively policy decisions for which the Co-Investigating Judges and Co-Prosecutors are accountable. (Read More)

Click here to read the official summary of the Appeal Judgement issued by the Supreme Court Chamber.

Syria Resolution: UN Close To Deal On Draft, Envoys Say
By Reuters, The Huffington Post
2 February 2012

UNITED NATIONS - Several U.N. Security Council members said they were close to a deal on Thursday on the wording of a draft resolution backing an Arab League plan for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, but it was unclear if Russia would agree to it.

Pakistan's U.N. Ambassador Abdullah Hussain Haroon told reporters that the 15-nation council was "two words away" from an agreement on an amended version of a European-Arab draft resolution circulated to the council by Morocco. (Read More)

Nigeria: Christians Killed in North
By The Associated Press
6 January 2012

Gunmen from a radical Muslim sect attacked a town hall on Friday in rural northeast Nigeria, killing at least 20 people who had gathered for a meeting of a Christian ethnic group in Mubi in Adamawa State, the police said. The attack at noon targeted a town hall where Christian Igbo people were holding a meeting. The attack, for which the sect, Boko Haram, claimed responsibility, came after the group threatened to begin specifically singling out Christians living in the country’s Muslim north in its increasingly bloody sectarian fight with Nigeria’s weak central government. (Read More)

3,000 Deaths in Ethnic Violence in South Sudan
by Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times
5 January 2012

In the past two weeks, United Nations aircraft had been tracking an unusually large column of 6,000 to 8,000 heavily armed fighters from the Lou Nuer ethnic group as it advanced toward the town of Pibor, cutting a swath of destruction across the savanna. Pibor is the hometown of the Lou Nuer’s traditional rival, the Murle, and the two groups have been locked in a tit-for-tat cattle rustling feud for years, with the death toll steadily rising each round.

According to Joshua Konyi, the commissioner of Pibor County and a Murle, 2,182 women and children and 959 men were killed, 1,293 children were abducted and 375,186 cows were stolen.

“We’ve been counting the bodies,” Mr. Konyi said by telephone from Pibor on Thursday night. “It’s really a genocide. If you come, you will see.” (Read More).