EJIL: Talk!

‘We know the grave can cry out after 50 years’. Kumar Lama, a colonel in the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA), sat in his hut in Gorusinghe Barracks opposite Amnesty official Daniel Alderman in May 2005. The Amnesty visit was prompted by on-going reports of serious human rights violations in the course of the people’s war between the CPN (Maoist) and the RNA. Alderman described the colonel as ‘a man of the world’, friendly and forthcoming, who clearly understood the laws of war and (as his comment to Alderman reflected) the possibility of bringing violators to justice, even many years later. In 2009, years after his visit to Nepal, Alderman received an email with the title ‘From a Nepalese friend’. The email was from Lama, then doing an MA in International Relations at Sussex University, inquiring about an Amnesty research job on Nepal, ‘a job’, Lama wrote confidently, ‘I could easily do’.

Colonel Lama was never offered the Amnesty job. In January 2013, he was arrested at his home in East Sussex and charged with two counts of torture under section 134 of the Criminal Justice Act, relating to incidents that had allegedly occurred between April and May 2005 at the Gorusinghe Barracks. The Act vested British courts with ‘universal jurisdiction’ over the offence of torture, meaning the offence could be prosecuted in the UK whatever the offender’s nationality and wherever the crime was committed. The arrest was the result of a sensible wager on the UK’s part, bargaining relatively low diplomatic cost for diplomatic credit in fulfilling its obligation under the Torture Convention to prosecute those suspected of torture found on its territory. While Nepal reacted angrily to the arrest, this served merely to expose the unholy (and inverse) relationship between justice and power. The most the Nepalese government could do in reaction to Lama’s arrest was to reject the offer of RAF chinook helicopters to help in the relief effort following the devastating earthquake in Nepal in April 2015.

The trial of Kumar Lama took place in the Old Bailey from June to July 2016. It can hardly be said there was a public appetite for the trial. Public and press galleries were consistently empty – I often sat there alone with Lama’s wife and daughters (disrupted occasionally by bored and bemused school groups, interested pensioners or tourists who had taken a wrong turn in the Lonely Planet guide). The Lama trial proceeded, like many trials in the Old Bailey, as something of a private conversation between judge and lawyers, upon which the public gallery were intrusive eavesdroppers. Trial observation is not easy in a system increasingly geared to see public access as less an aspiration of than a threat to the justice system. Even the jury seemed cast in the role of vexatious bystanders in a trial in which they were ultimately expected to be judges of facts affecting a family, victims, a country in which they had no apparent interest and of which they had no apparent knowledge. Read the rest of this entry…

This article reflects on Relja Radović’s article “A Comment on Croatia’s Concerns over Serbia’s So-Called “Mini-Hague”.

The major point of contention

As a major point of contention between Croatia and Serbia in the current “jurisdictional debate”, Radović rightly pinpoints Article 3 of the Law on the Organization and Competence of State Authorities in War Crime Proceedings (the “LWC”) (see here) by which Serbia extended its criminal jurisdiction in proceedings for the most serious violations of IHL committed on the territory of the former SFRY (LWC Article 2), regardless of the citizenship of the perpetrator or victim (LWC Article 3). Radović also summarizes Croatia’s objections to LWC Article 3 and the jurisdiction it introduced, which argue that it is incompatible with international law (including international criminal law) and “European standards”, as well as contrary to the very notion and basic principles of universal jurisdiction. For the sake of clarity, it should be noted that LWC Article 2, which introduces the aforementioned territorial extension of the Serbian criminal jurisdiction, and Article 3, which reasserts this extension and simultaneously cuts any links to the citizenship of the perpetrator or victim, must be read in conjunction. However, for the purposes of this article, reference will be made to Article 3 to cover both, as was Radović’s approach.

In his analysis of the dispute, Radović fully and unreservedly accepts the official Serbian narrative, which equates LWC Article 3 to universal jurisdiction as it is commonly understood or – as Radović later in his contribution dubs it – to “real” universal jurisdiction. Namely, according to Radović:

“the contested Article 3 does not, in itself, create Serbian criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed during the Yugoslav conflict based on the universality principle” … but “… this jurisdiction exists independently of the contested Law … and is provided by the virtue of … Article 9 para 2 in conjunction with Article 10 para 3 of the Serbian Criminal Code … regulating “real” universal jurisdiction for international crimes”.

The author therefore concludes that there is no difference between the two (LWC Article 3 and “real” universal jurisdiction), that “it seems that Croatia has totally misinterpreted the whole issue”, and that by opposing LWC Article 3 Croatia is blindly and unreasonably opposing a form of jurisdiction (“real” universal jurisdiction) accepted in criminal legislation in many EU Member States, as well as other States, including Croatia’s own criminal legislation. Read the rest of this entry…