Two innovative women from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where violence against women and girls has been harsh and unrelenting through years of lawlessness and civil conflict, came to New York in early March with a message of progress and hope. They have been chipping away at the epidemic of abuse, working not [...]
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Bosco Ntaganda, whom the United States calls “one of the most notorious and brutal rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” has arrived at the International Criminal Court in The Hague after being transported by court officials from Rwanda. Ntaganda is a Congolese warlord who has been operating with impunity in eastern Congo on [...]
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Gert Rosenthal does not sound like a Spanish name, but the mother of Rosenthal, the Guatemalan ambassador to the United Nations, was born there and his father was German. To complicate matters, “a little accident happened,” he said, as his parents, Florence and Ludwig, left Germany in the 1930s, and Rosenthal was born in Amsterdam. [...]
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The president of the International Criminal Court, Judge Sang-Hyun Song, told a Columbia University audience recently that a major challenge facing the court is what he called a steady lack of political support from the United Nations Security Council and UN member states. “We need a far more consistent and vigilant approach by the [...]
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One of Fatou Bensouda‘s missions as the new chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is to make rape during conflicts a thing of the past. Until 20 years ago, she said in a speech at the United Nations recently, sexual violence and other sexual attacks were “all but ignored and dismissed as regrettable but [...]
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CANBERRA, Australia — A steady rise has been occurring in the last two centuries in the proportion of civilians killed in armed conflict, either from direct violence or conflict-related hunger and disease. The international community has responded to the calls to protect innocent victims by developing two parallel principles, the protection of civilians and the [...]
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Less than two decades ago, this is what happened to a huge African country once known as Zaire: Rebels backed by Rwanda’s recently installed, ethnic Tutsi-led government moved out of their strongholds in the eastern flank of the country and advanced toward the Zairian national capital, Kinshasa, and overthrew the central government. To Rwandan Tutsi, [...]
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Eighteen members were elected by the United Nations General Assembly to the Human Rights Council on Nov. 12. The members, serving three-year terms beginning Jan. 1, join 29 other countries on the council. Of the 18 new members, only the United States was seeking a second term. The other states chosen were Argentina, Brazil, Estonia, [...]
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The conclusion of the International Criminal Court’s first trial this summer was duly noted in global media and political circles. Yet little attention was paid to the equally landmark move by the court mandating reparations for victims of the atrocities committed by the man who was sentenced for the war crimes case, Thomas Lubanga of [...]
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The visibility of human-rights violations by the Syrian government amid the current turmoil owes much to the United Nations, particularly to its Independent International Commission of Inquiry, led by Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, a Brazilian lawyer, public official and professor. Such commissions are part of a growing number of tools used by the UN to promote [...]
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