In a report released today, Human Rights Watch calls on the United Nations to strengthen its monitoring of the human rights performance of the local police in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The U.N. Security Council is due to renew the mandate of the International Police Task Force (IPTF), the United Nations police operation in Bosnia, by June 21.
The IPTF is the most ambitious civilian police operation ever established by the United Nations, with over 2,000 international police monitors. It has a mandate to screen all applicants for posts in local police, and to assure that individuals who have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, or other serious human rights abuses, during the conflict or since, are prevented from holding any police posts.
After IPTF's first year, the Security Council gave the IPTF the authority to investigate human rights abuses by local law enforcement, and authorized an additional 120 posts to accomplish that task. The new Human Rights Watch report, entitled Beyond Restraint, Politics and the Policing Agenda of the United Nations International Police Task Force, notes with concern that the U.N. has been seriously underusing its human rights mandate, leaving local police to investigate human rights violations_in many cases, trusting the suspected perpetrators to investigate themselves.
"The moment it has information about human rights abuses, the IPTF should initiate its own investigation," said Joanna Weschler, U.N. representative of Human Rights Watch. "Instead, official U.N. policy now lets them take an extremely minimal approach."
Human Rights Watch is also concerned that the screening process is proceeding slowly, due to lack of political resolve. A high turnover of IPTF personnel has led to management failures and institutional memory lapses.
Human Rights Watch calls on the international community to assure that no bilateral or multilateral aid is given to the police of a locality of Bosnia and Herzegovina before IPTF completes the vetting process in that locality and that no aid goes to the governments of municipalities in which members of the local police have committed serious human rights abuses or obstructed the implementation of the Dayton agreement and the local government has failed to hold them accountable.
"No amount of training or modern equipment will make a democratic police force out of human rights abusers," Weschler said. "Providing aid to a police force that has not been rid of its worst elements will be a huge waste on the part of governments granting it."
