ICC Prosecutor Can Spur National Justice: Daily Brief

The prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court has important leverage to encourage countries to investigate and prosecute grave international crimes. “Twenty years after the Rome treaty, the ICC’s burgeoning caseload and limited resources underscore the need for fair and effective domestic prosecutions,” said Elizabeth Evenson, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “More ICC member countries should support the prosecutor’s efforts to encourage successful local proceedings.”

Afonso Dhlakama, the leader of Mozambique’s main opposition party and former rebel group, Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), died this week after an illness, party sources have confirmed. Dhlakama was a guerrilla leader who for decades allowed his forces to commit serious human rights violations with impunity. He was also a political leader who used unconventional and at times violent means to challenge the political control and abuses of the Frelimo-led government.

Liu Xia, the wife of deceased Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, has said she is ready to die in protest at being held under house arrest by Chinese authorities. Liu Xia, a Beijing-based poet, artist, and photographer, has been under house arrest since 2010. Since her husband’s death last year, there has been growing concern for her.

The execution of an Iranian man scheduled for Thursday has been postponed, apparently due to an online campaign to save him. Ramin Hossein Panahi, a 22-year-old man from Iran’s Kurdish minority was sentenced to death in January for “taking up arms against the state” after a trial that Amnesty International called “grossly unfair.”

Some 800 migrants and refugees are detained in inhumane conditions in a dangerously overcrowded center in the Libyan city of Zuwara, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF). The organization warned that the men, women, and children held in the center don’t receive adequate food or water, and that the situation is deteriorating daily as more refugees and migrants are arbitrarily detained.

Migrants working long hours for negligible pay in the countryside in southern Italy are having their settlements razed, exposing them to even worse treatment. According to trade unions and associations, more than a dozen illegal camps have been demolished in Italy over the past three years.

Humanitarian groups fear that political tensions could complicate their work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, after the government refused to attend a donor conference in Geneva last month. The government has now set up a new fund to manage donations, and warned that there will be “serious consequences” for aid agencies and donor governments who do not cooperate.

Since May 2016, the ICRC has registered over 1,200 incidents of violence against health-care facilities or personnel in 16 countries alone. “Attacks against health facilities and personnel are a double tragedy,” said ICRC President Peter Maurer. “First, such attacks wound and maim people seeking and providing health care. But they also deprive an uncountable number of people from receiving aid in the future, crippling the hopes of recovery for people in desperate need.”