Move to Set Up Chechnya Crimes Tribunal

The Council of Europe, the intergovernmental human rights organisation, yesterday threatened to establish an international war crimes tribunal to try abuses in Russia’s conflict-torn republic of Chechnya. A resolution overwhelmingly adopted by the legal affairs and human rights committee of the council’s parliamentary assembly said it would consider setting up an ad hoc tribunal modelled on the International Criminal Tribunal in former Yugoslavia if the Russian authorities did not do more to prosecute war crimes. The move represents an intensification of criticism of Russia’s failure to act against abuses in Chechnya, at a time when much of the international community has been taking a softer line with Moscow in the context of the coalition against terrorism. Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, called the report the work of “an extreme foe” of Russia. The committee strongly criticised the failure of the Russian and Chechen authorities to bring the perpetrators of gross human rights abuses to justice over the past decade, and said the Council of Europe and its member states had also “failed dismally” to improve the situation. It said calls since 1994 to deal with gross human rights abuses, war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law had been “to little avail”, with the limited investigations that take place rarely leading to convictions, and Russian government bodies doing little more than catalogue complaints. Full Story