Word: prosecutors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Back in 2005, when the notion of "regime change" was still in fashion, Luis Moreno-Ocampo recalls that Western countries pressed him to charge President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan with genocide in the country's Darfur region. Three years later, on July 14, Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), did just that. But by then diplomats were up in arms, as it sank in that Moreno-Ocampo actually meant to go through with it. In private meetings and public statements, they told Moreno-Ocampo that he would be responsible for a bloodbath. "My answer...
Moreno-Ocampo expected diplomats to exploit Sudan's panic as a negotiating tool. Instead, he says, the U.N. and the U.S. tried to assuage al-Bashir and his men, telling the Khartoum government, "Don't worry about the prosecutor. Just accept the peacekeepers and nothing will happen." Moreno-Ocampo says the big powers feared that the ICC's obsession with Darfur would get in the way of a peace deal between the politically dominant north and the oil-rich south that ended two decades of civil war in Sudan. The Sudanese took their cue and decided to reject notification...
...August 2007, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon went to Khartoum with his political negotiators - without the ICC charges on any schedule for discussion. He talked privately with Bashir about the ICC and arresting Haroun; Bashir refused. As if to show the prosecutor just how impotent the ICC was, al-Bashir promoted Haroun and expanded his influence a week after Ban Ki-moon left the country. In his new position as Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Haroun was able to routinely block humanitarian aid to the 2.5 million Darfuris trapped in refugee camps. In addition, he was given three new titles...
...criminals like Karadzic and his military counterpart Ratko Mladic, the slow pace and steep expense of the trials at the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the delays to the start of trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC). When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the ICC, requested a warrant to arrest Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on charges of genocide a week before the Karadzic arrest, he was widely slammed. Critics claimed the step was meaningless and that, far from deterring al-Bashir, it would only enrage and embolden him, making...
...Hamdan was not necessarily an obvious choice for this historic role. He wasn't a high-ranking officer of al-Qaeda, nor was he known to have participated in any specific terrorist operations against the U.S. But from the prosecutor's perspective, he did have certain things going for him. Because the military tribunal system was brand-new, the government thought it made sense to try lower-ranking operatives first, in case anything went wrong. Hamdan had also been in U.S. custody since his capture and had not been rendered to any foreign countries for interrogation, which might have opened...