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War Criminals: The Hunt Is On in Switzerland

Helping refugees from Darfur bring to justice war criminals in Switzerland. That is what the organisation, TRIAL, is proposing. It is calling on the authorities, police, and army to identify those responsible so that they can be tried at the International Tribunal. Interview with Philip Grant.

Interview by Carole Vann/Infosud - In May 2003, an organisation up to then unknown, Trial (Track Impunity Always) sent an unexpected request to the International Olympic Committee. It asked the IOC to bar the former American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, from its honorary committee for his involvement with the Chilean dictator Pinochet and the bombing of Cambodia. The request was not followed up. However, dictators and torturers can no longer walk the streets of Switzerland without looking over their shoulder. TRIAL is on their heels. Today those responsible for the tragedy in Darfur are also within their sights. The NGO is offering to help refugees in Switzerland bring them to trial. Interview with its President Philip Grant.

How are you going to involve refugees from Darfur?

Philippe Grant: It also concerns refugees from Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. These countries along with Sudan are under the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court.

We have to first get access to the victims through the authorities (Federal Office for Migration, FOM) or support organisations. We can also help these people get in contact with our lawyers, with the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in order to provide them with information. And if a case is opened, they can ask for reparations.

An international arrest warrant has been issued against the Sudanese Minister responsible for humanitarian affairs and a leader of the Janjaweed militia. But Sudan refused to cooperate. What has been the impact?

Sudan says that it does not have to cooperate with an investigation imposed on it by the Security Council. But Khartoum has ratified a number of treaties, including the civil and political pacts which oblige it to do everything possible to prosecute war criminals and that includes cooperating with the International Criminal Court.

The cooperation of the state concerned is fundamental. Without this, you get nowhere. The investigators can’t go to the field and don’t have access to secret service files.

There is always the possibility that people will leave the country or that a change of regime occurs. This happened in the case of Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia. He was accused while in power but then arrested when the balance of power changed. This could also happen in Sudan for the crimes are indefeasible.

What can the Swiss legal system do?

If one of the criminals comes here, the victims can make a judicial complaint under the law of universality which allows the prosecution of a criminal passing through a country even if he committed a crime elsewhere. We have already seen such cases but they were not successful.

Can you give an example?

It was in 2003. One evening at 22.30 a Tunisian refugee rang me. “ I have just passed Habib Ammar in the street. What can we do?” He was the former minister of the interior who had cracked down on the opposition in Tunisia at the end of the eighties. And he was in Geneva to organise the World Information Summit. I spent the evening drafting a legal case against him. We contacted our international network. The victims faxed us the power of attorney and medical documents from other towns in Switzerland, from the UK, France, Tunisia. The next day at 16.00 we filed a 20 page case with the attorney general. However he said Ammar was protected by diplomatic immunity.

All of that work for nothing?

No, the file drawn up is solid and it could be useful here later or elsewhere. On the other hand we have to move from an amateurish judicial system to one which shows greater professionalism. For that to happen, we are probing various networks around the world to speed up their information sharing. Our aim it is to be able to guide the plaintiffs so that they know which court to submit their case and what arguments to advance.

In Swiss, the system is extremely splintered. For acts of torture, you go to the cantonal court, for war crimes to the military court and for genocide to the federal court. Fortunately Berne is in the process of drafting a law that would means all of these cases are heard by the civil federal courts.


Translated from French by Claire Doole

URL: TRIAL

Blunders in Switzerland

They are due to a lack of coordination between the Swiss authorities, says Philippe Grant. The millionaire, Felicien Kabuga, one of the main figures accused of genocide in Rwanda, came to Switzerland in 1994 on a refugee visa. Instead of arresting him, the authorities expelled him.

There was also Hussein Barzan Al Tikri, the half brother of Saddam Hussein and the ex ambassador of Iraq to Switzerland. One day a complaint was lodged with the office of the attorney general in Geneva, who sent it back to the Confederation who sent it on to the prosecutor fo r the army. And by that time it was too late. Al Tikri had left the country.

In 2005, a Croat living in Graubunden was stopped on the Austrian Hungarian border. An international arrest warrant for genocide had been issued for him. The Swiss ignored it.

In order to avoid this type of mistake, Trial aims to pass on concrete information to the federal authorities: such and such is present in Switzerland. The NGO also directs them to the UN Security Council travel ban list.

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