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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Belgian War Crimes Law Undone by Its Global Reach
Cases Against Political Figures Sparked Crises
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 30, 2003; Page A01
BRUSSELS -- In her last phone call from Rwanda, Claire Beckers told her sister, Martine, that thugs wielding machetes had broken into the house, stolen everything of value and warned that they would return. Claire and her family were about to set out for a U.N. peacekeepers' compound just 500 yards away. It was their only chance.
They never made it. The next day, Martine Beckers, living in Brussels, received a call from friends in another part of Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Claire, her Rwandan husband, Isaie, and their 18-year-old daughter, Katia, were dead -- hacked to death by soldiers along with 10 of their neighbors, their bodies dumped in a hastily dug pit in the front garden. They were among 800,000 Rwandans, most of them ethnic Tutsis, slaughtered by Hutus in the spring of 1994.
Shaken and appalled, Martine Beckers said she did what anyone does when a crime occurs. "To me, it was obvious," she recalled. "When something happens in Belgium, you automatically go to the police."
But that simple act nine years ago set off a chain reaction that is still reverberating here. It led to an unprecedented prosecution of Rwandans in Belgium, the first ever under the country's far-reaching war crimes act. The result encouraged others to file cases here against all manner of political leaders, including Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Cuba's Fidel Castro and former president George H.W. Bush. This led, in turn, to diplomatic crises, first with Israel and then with the United States, that have compelled a chastened Belgian government to gut its own landmark law.
The crisis formally ended Wednesday, when the Belgian Supreme Court dismissed the cases against Bush and other U.S. officials, as well as Israelis. U.S. and Israeli officials say they are satisfied. But along the way, human rights activists contend, something of value has been lost. The principle of universal jurisdiction, designed to ensure that war criminals and perpetrators of genocide have no place to hide, has been undermined, if not destroyed. And Europe, which sees itself as a champion of international law and human rights, suffered another setback in its own clash of civilizations with the United States.
"We didn't lose everything, but we lost a lot," said Alain Destexhe, a Belgian senator and an ardent supporter of the original law. "We have to live in the real world. It was an excellent law, but unfortunately it was used in a political way, and at the end of the day, we moved backward rather than forward. It's a setback."
Rwanda Was the Trigger
When it was passed unanimously by Parliament in 1993, Belgium's war crimes law seemed anything but controversial, a mere legislative implementation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions protecting civilians in time of war.
Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, neither the complainants nor the accused needed to be Belgian for a case to go forward. And because Belgium follows continental European legal systems, any private person can bring a criminal complaint, which a magistrate is required to investigate and then determine whether further action is warranted.
But no one attempted to use the new law until the slaughter in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony. Then Eric Gillet, one of Belgium's most prominent human rights lawyers, decided to take up Martine Beckers's case and those of about 30 Rwandans living in Belgium.
As he recalls, it was an uphill battle. No magistrate was interested in seriously pursuing the Rwanda matter. So in early 1995, he and his associates held a news conference accusing the authorities of serving effectively as accomplices to genocide. He cited Rwandan refugees who had spotted their former tormentors -- now refugees themselves -- on the streets of Brussels.
Within weeks, the Justice Ministry appointed a magistrate who cleared his calendar, gathered a team of as many as eight police investigators and went to Rwanda. It took more than six years of investigation and legal maneuvering, but in 2001, four Rwandans went on trial: two Roman Catholic nuns, accused of encouraging Hutu thugs to butcher several thousand Tutsis who had sought shelter at the nuns' convent, and a government minister and a university professor, both alleged to have incited other killers.
'So Much Worse' for Others
None of the four accused was implicated in Claire Beckers's killing. Nonetheless, Martine Beckers took leave from her job as an energy researcher for the European Commission and went to the gray marble Palace of Justice in central Brussels every day for a month to attend the trial. She says it became a kind of communal event for her and other relatives of victims. "The killing of my family was done inside a huge genocide," she said. "I lost only three people. For others, it was so much worse."
It took the jury 11 hours to find the four defendants guilty on most of the 55 counts, including murder and incitement to genocide. They were sentenced to between 12 and 20 years. Human rights advocates hailed the verdict, predicting it would be a springboard for other cases.
Their prediction was all too accurate. One week later, a group of Palestinians living in Lebanon filed a complaint against Sharon for his alleged role, when he was the Israeli defense minister, in the 1982 massacre of hundreds of refugees by Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Shatila camps outside Beirut.
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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瞧瞧"自由派"政客的丑恶嘴脸.他们整天叫喊我们的总统是战争犯.可是同样的指控用于他们身上时:
