A Double Victory for Justice, Daily Brief 16 May, 2024

We’ve got an all-too-rare bit of excellent news today: the conviction of a top former official for atrocity crimes.

Yesterday, a Swiss court delivered a guilty verdict against former Gambian Interior Minister Ousman Sonko for his role in crimes against humanity relating to torture, illegal detentions, and unlawful killings between 2000 and 2016. The court sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

These crimes happened under the brutal rule of then-president Yahya Jammeh. For 22 years, Jammeh’s government carried out systematic repression, targetting journalists, human rights defenders, student leaders, religious leaders, and LGBT people, among others.

Many were tortured, subjected to sexual violence, disappeared, and/or murdered.

You may be wondering: Why was a Swiss court trying a former Gambian official for crimes committed in Gambia?

The answer is a legal principle known as “universal jurisdiction.”

Now, a country’s national courts are usually able to deal with a crime if there’s some connection between that country and the crime. That seems obvious enough.

However, national courts are also able to act even if there is no such link for a limited number of international crimes. These include war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, genocide, and so on.  

National courts can investigate and prosecute these crimes even if they were committed abroad, by foreigners against foreigners. The reasoning is, such crimes are considered so serious that ensuring they do not go unpunished concerns humanity as a whole.

This principle of universal jurisdiction is not actually new. It was codified in the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the laws of war. Universal jurisdiction enabled, for example, the state of Israel in 1961 to prosecute senior Nazi official Aldolf Eichmann for his role in the Holocaust.

National courts have started using universal jurisdiction more and more in the last few years. It’s particularly helpful to address serious crimes in places where local justice efforts are stymied or delayed.

Since Jammeh’s fall in 2016, Gambia’s government has brought only two prosecutions for Jammeh-era crimes. There are newly revitalized justice efforts in Gambia today, but still, many victims have been waiting a long time for justice.

The recognition of universal jurisdiction in Swiss law offered a way forward. Sonko was arrested in Switzerland in 2017, after the Swiss nongovernmental group TRIAL International filed a criminal complaint against him.

Yesterday’s news was huge. This was a senior leader – a former interior minister, no less – of an appalling regime. His conviction is a monumental victory for Gambian victims.

And it’s a double victory, because it strengthens a legal principle that can lead to justice for many other victims of atrocity crimes around the world.