GENEVA — The United Nations Security Council should refer Syria to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prosecute those responsible for war crimes and other abuses committed in nearly two years of conflict, Carla del Ponte, a United Nations human rights investigator, said on Monday.

“Now, really, it’s time — it’s time,” Ms. del Ponte said. “We are pressuring the international community to act because it’s time to act.”

Ms. del Ponte was speaking as the United Nations Human Rights Council commission investigating Syria, of which she is a member, said violence in Syria was worsening, “aggravated by increasing sectarianism” and radicalized by the increasing presence of foreign fighters. It said the conflict was also “becoming more militarized because of the proliferation of weapons and types of weapons used.”

The panel’s 131-page report detailing evidence of war crimes and other abuses in the six months to mid-January said, “The issue of accountability for those responsible for international crimes deserves to be raised in a more robust manner to counter the pervasive sense of impunity in the country.” The top United Nations human rights official, Navi Pillay, has also urged that Syria be referred to the International Criminal Court. Authority to make such a referral, however, lies exclusively with the Security Council or the country concerned.

“It’s incredible the Security Council doesn’t take a decision,” said Ms. del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor for international tribunals on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. A referral must be made urgently, she said, “because crimes are continuing, and the number of victims is increasing day to day. Justice must be done.”

The report released on Monday is due to be discussed in the Human Rights Council in March, when member states look likely to extend the commission’s mandate. Diplomats in Geneva point out that the panel represents the only United Nations-mandated machinery shedding a spotlight on abuses, and that its reports provide the most comprehensive and factual account of how Syria’s conflict is being waged.

In their report on Monday, based on 445 interviews, the investigators said they found credible evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by both government and opposition forces in the six months to mid-January. The report cited accounts of massacres, summary executions, torture, attacks by armed groups on civilians, sexual violence and abuses against children.

Pro-government forces committed massacres in August in Daraya, where more than 100 people, including women and children, reportedly died, and in Harak in the Dara’a governorate, where witnesses said more than 500 civilians were killed.

Government forces involved in Harak included the Syrian Army as well as military and political intelligence units, the report said, noting that they may have been accompanied by members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The panel said it was still investigating other reports of mass killings.

Drawing on the accounts of defectors and “insiders,” the report said government forces had deliberately targeted civilians to punish populations in areas seen as supportive of the opposition. Entire neighborhoods of Damascus have been shelled and destroyed by government forces, and bread lines in several towns have been targeted at times when the concentration of civilians would be at their highest.

“Indiscriminate and widespread shelling, the regular bombardment of cities, mass killing, indiscriminate firing on civilian targets, firing on civilian gatherings and a protracted campaign of shelling and sniping on civilian areas have characterized the conduct of the government,” the panel said.

Investigators also cited “credible admissions against their own interest” by witnesses of the mass killing of five members of one family whose execution was filmed and posted on the Internet. They said a member of the Free Syrian Army acknowledged that his brigade had captured and executed five Alawites, members of the Shiite Muslim minority that provides the bedrock of support for President Bashar al-Assad.

The panel expressed particular concern over “an increase in acts of unrestrained violence” associated with the proliferation of armed groups that appeared to serve no strategic purpose but to foment sectarian tensions and spread terror among the civilian population. The report warned that “this trend risks becoming a malignant feature of the conflict.”

It also said that foreign intervention had helped radicalize the conflict, “as it has favored Salafi armed groups such as the Al Nusra Front and even encouraged mainstream insurgents to join them owing to their superior logistical and operational capabilities.”

The report added that “regional and international actors hampered the prospects of a negotiated settlement owing to their divergent interests. The position of key international actors remains unchanged.”

However, panel members said Monday that their ability to report on activities of the opposition was seriously hampered by the Assad government’s persistent refusal to give its investigators access to Syria.

The panel said last year that it had already accumulated a “formidable and extraordinary body of evidence” against those responsible for war crimes, and it again said that it would provide the United Nations human rights office with the names of leaders who may be responsible for abuses, as well as the individuals and units that carried them out.

By Nick Cumming-bruce
New York Times

A 32-year-old Iranian who is a U.S. citizen and a Christian convert has been imprisoned without notice of any formal charges while visiting his family in Iran, according to his wife and attorneys in the U.S., who are now hoping that a media campaign will help set him free.

The Rev. Saeed Abedini, who lives in the U.S. with his wife and two young children, was making one of his frequent visits to see his parents and the rest of his family in Iran, his country of origin and where he spent many years as a Christian leader and community organizer developing Iran’s underground home church communities for Christian converts.

On this last trip, the Iranian government pulled him off a bus and said he must face a penalty for his previous work as a Christian leader in Iran.

He is currently awaiting trial at Iran’s notoriously brutal Evin Prison, where he has been incarcerated since late September.

“When he became a Christian, he became a criminal in his own country. His passion was to reach the people of Iran,” Naghmeh, his wife, said in an exclusive interview with Fox News.

“He comes from a very close-knit family, and he loved evangelizing and passing out Bibles on the streets of Tehran. This was his passion,” she said.

In July, Abedini left his wife and kids to go to Iran to visit family and continue a humanitarian effort he began years ago to build an orphanage.

After a short visit to a nearby country, Abedini was traveling back into Iran to catch his flight back to the U.S. when members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard stopped his bus near the Turkey-Iran border and pulled Abedini from the bus, confiscating his passports and subjecting him to intense interrogation, according to his wife.

After weeks under house arrest and many calls to Iran’s passport control office about the status of his confiscated passport, Abedini was told that his case has been referred to the Revolutionary Guard, the Iranian government’s elite military force.

On Sept. 26, five men kicked open the door of Abedini’s parents’ residence in Tehran where they collected all communications devices and arrested him while placing the rest of his family members, who are also Christians converts from Islam, under house arrest.

The family remains under house arrest, according to Naghmeh.

Two days before the home raid, Naghmeh reports getting a call to her cellphone in the U.S., from someone she thinks was an Iranian government agent threatening that she would “never see him again.”

Abedini is the father of a house church movement in Iran, a community of underground places of worship for former Muslims who convert to Christianity and are not allowed to formally pray in recognized churches.

Over the course of his involvement, his home church movement had about 100 churches in 30 Iranian cities with more than 2,000 members.

“It was just growing so fast. They see the underground churches as a threat and they see Christianity as a tool from the West to undermine them,” Naghmeh said. “They think if the country becomes more Christian, they are no longer under Islamic authority. That’s why it’s a threat.”

But “Christianity saved his life,” Naghmeh says of her husband, who converted at the age of 20, after becoming severely depressed from undergoing suicide bomber training by a radical Muslim group.

Abedini was recruited in high school and taken to the mosque to be trained, she says. The more he sought to be a devout Muslim and the deeper he went into training, the more depressed he became.

Under Shariah, or Islamic law, a Muslim who converts to Christianity is on a par with someone waging war against Islam. Death sentences for such individuals are prescribed by fatwas, or legal decrees, and reinforced by Iran’s Constitution, which allows judges to rely on fatwas for determining charges and sentencing on crimes not addressed in the Iranian penal code.

All religious minorities in Iran, including Bahais, Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians, have faced various forms of persecution and political and social marginalization throughout the regime’s 30-year reign. But the government saves its harshest retribution for those who have abandoned Islam.

During the many rounds of interrogations, Abedini has informally been told he will be charged for threatening the national security of Iran and espionage, due to his involvement with Christian house churches and foreign Christian satellite TV ministries.

The Iranian government offered bail in the amount of 500 million toman, or roughly $ 410,000. Abedini’s family has prepared the bail documents many times already but have not been successful in having it accepted or approved, they say.

Just this week they prepared yet again the bail documents but were told they were not going to be accepted. When they inquired, they were told, “Boro Gomsho!” or get lost.

“It’s hardest on the kids,” Naghmeh said. “Saeed was a stay-at-home dad. My daughter said she is forgetting Daddy’s voice and she asked me, ‘Do you think he has a beard now?’ I didn’t even think of that. She keeps playing the home videos over and over. It’s the hardest at night because he had a night routine with them when he would read them books and tuck them in. They miss that the most.”

Abedini and his wife had met in Iran in 2002, while she was there working for Iranian relatives, and were married shortly thereafter. Together, they worked as Christian leaders in the underground house churches. After facing persecution for these activities, in 2005, they moved to the U.S. together.

His first trip back to Iran was in 2009 with his wife and two children to visit his family when he came under government scrutiny. As the family attempted to catch their flight back to the U.S., Abedini was detained and told he would have to stay in the country for further questioning. His wife and children were put on a plane bound for the U.S., separated from their husband and father.

After the arrest and rounds of intense interrogation, in which the interrogators threatened Abedini with death for his conversion to Christianity, they agreed to release him, according to his attorneys, but only after he signed a written agreement in which the government would not charge him for his Christian activities, and he would be allowed to enter and exit the country so long as he ceased all official house church activities.

According to his attorneys, he had honored this agreement. “He thought if he honored his part, they would honor theirs. He was transparent about his humanitarian work there,” said Tiffany Barrans, International Legal Director at the American Center for Law and Justice based in Washington D.C, the organization representing Abedini’s U.S.-based family.

This was ninth trip since 2009 to visit family and to continue his humanitarian work on developing a non-sectarian orphanage in the city of Rasht on a family-owned land plot.

“You have a situation of arbitrary detention here. Iran is violating its own constitution and its international obligations. As citizens of the world, we need to wake up to these violations. Iran needs to be exposed for its violation of these laws,” said Barrans, who has been working very closely with Naghmeh to push for her husband’s release.

The American Center for Law and Justice is providing legal support to Naghmeh by working through the US government, members of Congress, various governments around the world, and with leaders in the United Nations to help release Pastor Saeed.

The ACLJ previously played an integral role in reaching various government representatives in the case of imprisoned minister Youcef Nadarkhani, who was freed from an Iranian prison after nearly three years following a tremendous international outcry demanding his release.

Despite the fact that Abedini was arrested Sept. 26, the family elected to work through different private means to get him released. In that time, however, he was denied access to an attorney and was badly been beaten by prison guards. According to his wife, Abedini is also being severely beaten by his cell mates who self-identify as members of Al Qaeda. The family is greatly concerned for his health and well being.

The U.S. has not had formal diplomatic ties with the Iranian government since 1980 and relies on alternative efforts in such instances.

Fox News reached out to the State Department for comment on Abedini’s case but has not received a call back yet.

“We were hopeful that the Iranian government would have released him by now and that private efforts would have been more successful. Also, as Saeed has family in Iran, we had to be mindful of the fact that any public action taken could put his family at risk,” said Barrans.

“They see that the house church culture is alive and thriving. They believe that making an example out of their former leader will deter others from practicing and converting to Christianity.”

Several house church members, friends and distant relatives of Abedini have had to flee the country in recent months after being summoned by the government to collect evidence against him.

As a convert away from Islam, worshippers are not permitted to attend services at official churches. Underground house churches became a popular way to get around this restriction.

“They have denied converts the opportunity to worship in an official place of worship. Then they tell them they can’t practice their faith underground, and doing so is a crime against Iran’s national security interests. How is this not a violation of religious freedom?” Barrans said.

By Lisa Daftari
Fox News

Posted GMT 11-4-2012 16:53:16

BAGHDAD (AP) — An Iraqi court handed the country’s fugitive Sunni vice-president a new death sentence on Sunday after finding him guilty of ordering his bodyguards to attack Shiite pilgrims, the latest verdict in a trial that has fueled resentment among Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority.

It was the third case in which Tariq al-Hashemi was sentenced to death since last spring, when judicial authorities started to try him on terrorism charges. All verdicts have been delivered in absentia, since al-Hashemi is in exile in Turkey after fleeing in December 2011 when the Shiite-led government levelled accusations against him.

The court also sentenced his son-in-law, Ahmed Qahtan, to death on similar charges: planning to attack pilgrims by a car bomb last December in southeastern Baghdad. Security forces reportedly foiled the attack and seized the car. All the five bodyguards who testified said they got their orders from Qahtan, who allegedly told them that he was passing al-Hashemi’s orders.

On Thursday, the same court unexpectedly sentenced both men to death on charges of instigating bodyguards to assassinate a senior official at the Interior Ministry. Al-Hashemi’s defence team said it had not been made aware of the proceedings.

“We are mulling boycotting trials from now on because the court didn’t inform us of that (Thursday) trial,” said defence team leader Muayad Obeid al-Ezzi, who added that two new trials will start early next month.

The first death sentence came in September, for masterminding killings of a lawyer and two government security officials which was submitted as one case. Al-Hashemi was found not guilty on one count, but guilty on two others. All sentences are to be carried out by hanging.

Al-Hashemi is a longtime opponent of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite Muslim. The government has accused the vice-president of playing a role in 150 bombings, assassinations and other attacks from 2005 to 2011. That was a period when Iraq was mired in retaliatory sectarian violence that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime.

He has dismissed the charges as a political vendetta pursued by his long-time rival, al-Maliki.

Also Sunday, a provincial official said authorities have arrested a police officer in charge of a prison from which scores of inmates, including as many as 47 convicted al-Qaida militants, escaped last September with what the government has acknowledged was help from inside.

Ahmed al-Shaalan, deputy head of Salahuddin provincial council said Col. Laith al-Sagmani was arrested few days ago and was sent to Baghdad. He’s accused of failure to carry out his duties during the jailbreak, al-Shaalan added.

By Sinan Salaheddin

Associated Press Writer Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.

Posted GMT 10-10-2012 23:11:0

CAIRO — Two Coptic Christians boys in Egypt, who spurred massive attention after they were detained by police after being accused of desecrating Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an, will not be charged with blasphemy, a lawyer for the boys said on Wednesday.

“The case has been closed … and today we knew that the charges were dropped and the children were released after a deal was reached between Muslims, Christians and security officials in the area,” said Gamal Eid, a human rights activist and part of the team of lawyers defending the boys, in comments published by Reuters news agency.

Nabil Rizk, 10, and Mina al-Farag, 9, had been taken from their parents and arrested after a Muslim man accused the two youngsters of desecrating the holy Qur’an in a small village in Bani Sweif in the Nile Delta region.

They faced a prosecutor, and were expected to be charged with blasphemy. The two boys were released from their juvenile detention on October 4 after spending days away from their families.

The children had been facing an investigation for allegedly urinating on the holy book and putting it next to a mosque, al-Shorouk newspaper reported.

Rizk’s father, Nabil, said his child cannot read and write and had been looking in the trash “for anything useful” when he found a small bag with pages from the Qur’an so he took them and placed it next to a mosque as he did not know what to do with it.

A meeting had taken place in the village in an effort to solve the crisis after the children were accused, but to the surprise of the villagers, children have been transferred to the junior holding facility pending investigation.

Heavy security has taken over the small Nile Delta village, which is home to 157 Christian families after fears of a confrontation between the residents arose.

According to Copts United, a Christian news organization and website, the families of the two boys had been urging rights groups and organizations to help them free the children and to “have mercy” on them.

By Joseph Mayton
www.bikyamasr.com

Gaza – Officials of Gaza’s Islamist Hamas government turned up at a news conference by Human Rights Watch in Gaza on Wednesday to dispute an HRW report accusing Hamas of torture and other abuses of justice in the Palestinian enclave.

The surprise appearance by government representatives turned the news conference into an open debate, an uncommon display in the Gaza Strip where Hamas in the past would probably have remained aloof or prevented such a press event on its turf.

The Human Rights Watch report – researched in Gaza with the knowledge of the Palestinian Islamist movement – said Hamas subjects Palestinians to serious abuses of justice, including torture, arbitrary arrest and unfair trials.

The Islamist faction said the report was “politically motivated”. Hamas has run Gaza unopposed since it seized control in 2007, suppressing rivals in the Fatah movement and launching sporadic attacks against Israel, which maintains a partial blockade of the coastal strip to prevent the entry of arms.

Surprising presence

Bill Van Esveld, an HRW Middle East researcher who chaired the press conference, said the presence of Hamas media officials was surprising. “They knew it was happening but they were not invited,” Esveld said.

Hamas refuses to accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel and is ostracised in the West as a perceived terrorist group. But its ties with Iran have frayed since the Arab Spring of popular uprisings and it is now allied to Egypt’s elected Muslim Brotherhood rulers and working to improve its image
.
Hamas cooperated with HRW’s Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director of the New York-based rights group, who visited the enclave to conduct interviews and research. It did not reply to his written questions, but Stork did meet the minister of justice and the director of internal security.

They were not quoted in the 43-page report, Hamas said.

‘Routine’ rights violations

Islam Shahwan, spokesperson for the Hamas interior ministry, confronted Esveld and accused the rights group itself of failing to reflect the reality of the situation in Gaza.

“Your report has many mistakes in it,” Shahwan told Esveld before the television cameras.

The report is based on interviews with ex-detainees, prisoners’ families, lawyers, officials and human rights activists.

Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, urged Hamas to “stop the kind of abuses that Egyptians, Syrians and others in the region have risked their lives to bring to an end” – an allusion to Arab Spring uprisings.

“After five years of Hamas rule in Gaza, its criminal justice system reeks of injustice, routinely violates detainees’ rights and grants impunity to abusive security services,” Stork said in a statement.

Collaboration

Human Rights Watch said witnesses reported that Hamas’s Internal Security agency, the drug unit of the civil police force and police detectives have all tortured detainees.

“The Hamas authorities have failed to investigate and prosecute abusive security officials, and have in practice granted immunity from prosecution to officials in the Internal Security service in particular,” Human Rights Watch said.

Shahwan said the report was “politically motivated and relied, in part, on guessing rather than on facts”.

He acknowledged, however, that Hamas authorities had dismissed or detained 120 members of the security forces for what he termed “violations” since 2007.

Calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, the report said Hamas had executed three men in the past five years, convicted on confessions apparently made under torture.

“Some of the Gaza abuse cases documented were against people detained on suspicion of collaborating with Israel or the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank,” it said.

“Collaboration is a serious crime under Palestinian law, but suspicion of collaboration does not justify torture or other abuse.”

h ttp://www.news24.com/World/News/Hamas-disputes-HRWs-charges-of-torture-20121003

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.

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Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end. Without elaborating, Mr. Holder suggested that the end of the criminal investigation should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners’ treatment and deaths.

“Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” his statement said. It said the investigation “was not intended to, and does not resolve, broader questions regarding the propriety of the examined conduct.”

The Justice Department did not say publicly which cases had been under investigation. But officials had previously confirmed the identities of the prisoners: Gul Rahman, suspected of being a militant, who died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures at a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit; and Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in C.I.A. custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was photographed packed in ice and wrapped in plastic.

Mr. Holder’s announcement might remove a possible target for Republicans during the presidential campaign. But the decision will disappoint liberals who supported President Obama when he ran in 2008 and denounced what he called torture and abuse of prisoners under his predecessor.

“It is hugely disappointing that with ample evidence of torture, and documented cases of some people actually being tortured to death, that the Justice Department has not been able to mount a successful prosecution and hold people responsible for these crimes,” said Elisa Massimino, president of Human Rights First. “The American people need to know what was done in their name.”

She said her group’s own investigation of the deaths of prisoners showed that initial inquiries were bungled by military and intelligence officers in charge of prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. She said Mr. Holder, whose statement referred to consideration of “statutes of limitations and jurisdictional provisions,” should have been more explicit in explaining exactly why charges could not be brought.

While no one has been prosecuted for the harsh interrogations, a former C.I.A. officer who helped hunt members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and later spoke publicly about waterboarding, John C. Kiriakou, is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he disclosed to journalists the identity of other C.I.A. officers who participated in the interrogations.

The C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, who as an Army general had spoken out against brutal interrogations, issued a cautious statement to agency employees about Mr. Holder’s announcement. He thanked C.I.A. officers “who played a role in supporting the Justice Department’s inquiries” and added, “As intelligence officers, our inclination, of course, is to look ahead to the challenges of the future rather than backwards at those of the past.”

Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, welcomed the announcement. “I am pleased that the attorney general’s re-examination of these cases has come to a close and that he recognizes that filing criminal charges in these cases is inappropriate,” he said. “These intelligence officers can now continue to focus on the hard work at hand, protecting our national security.”

Mr. Holder’s decision in 2009 to open a new investigation into the C.I.A. interrogations was sharply criticized by some former intelligence officials and Republicans in Congress. The harsh interrogation methods, including the near-drowning of waterboarding, had been authorized in Justice Department legal opinions, and the deaths in custody had been previously reviewed by prosecutors during Mr. Bush’s presidency.

But after reviewing secret documents describing the treatment of prisoners, most of whom had been held in secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, Mr. Holder directed John Durham, the organized-crime prosecutor already looking into the C.I.A. destruction of video recordings of waterboarding, to broaden his inquiry.

Mr. Holder said interrogators would not be charged if they had acted strictly in accordance with the department’s legal advice, though the legal opinions involved were later withdrawn. The review focused more narrowly on cases in which interrogators exceeded legal guidelines, including instances of prisoners waterboarded more often than permitted and of one prisoner who was threatened with an electric drill.

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In November 2010, the Justice Department said there would be no charges in the destruction of the videotapes of C.I.A. interrogations. In June 2011, Mr. Holder said that of more than 100 prisoners whose treatment had been reviewed, only the final two cases remained under investigation.

On his first full day in office in January 2009, Mr. Obama banned coercive interrogation methods and ordered the closing of the C.I.A.’s remaining prisons overseas. But he said that month that while he did not “believe that anybody is above the law,” he preferred “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and that he did not want C.I.A. employees to “suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee has largely completed its own three-year investigation of the C.I.A. interrogation program, but its report is still classified and its conclusions are not yet known. In April, responding to a book by a former C.I.A. official asserting that brutal interrogations had produced the intelligence that helped locate Osama bin Laden, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, called that claim “misguided and misinformed.”

The moral and political debate over responsibility for the abuse and death of prisoners is unlikely to be ended by Mr. Holder’s announcement. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has long called for a “truth commission” to look into interrogation and other matters, offering immunity from prosecution in return for candid testimony. But Mr. Obama never supported the idea, and with prosecution all but ruled out, it seems unlikely to gain new momentum.

Ms. Massimino noted that in some other countries, the torture and death of prisoners have been the subject of public inquiries decades after the events. “I don’t think this is over,” she said. “I take the long view.”

h ttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/us/holder-rules-out-prosecutions-in-cia-interrogations.html?_r=2&hp