Diplomacy & Crisis News

A United Nations-supported conference on Cyprus opened in Geneva today, bringing together the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot leaders in a dialogue chaired by Secretary-General António Guterres.

The United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) released its 2017 World Employment and Social Outlook report today, which finds economic growth trends lagging behind employment needs and predicts both rising unemployment and worsening social inequality throughout 2017.

While the ceasefire in Syria is largely holding, the United Nations envoy for the country cautioned today that the truce may be under threat as clashes in villages in the Wadi Barada valley have damaged water infrastructure and left more than five million people in and around Damascus facing water shortages.

Armed fighting over land, water and other natural resources in Sudan&#39s Darfur region continues to put civilians at risk, the top United Nations peacekeeping official told the Security Council today, calling for long-term solutions that would allow 2.6 million displaced people to return or resettle.

Briefing the Security Council today, senior United Nations officials underlined the significant challenges and deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Lake Chad Basin region, including in particular those posed by the militant group, Boko Haram, and urged for sustained support to national and regional security, political and humanitarian action.

Amid a global shortage of injectable inactivated polio vaccines (IPV), a new inoculation regimen, employed by governments in the South-East Asian region, involving two fractional vaccine doses &#8211 each about a fifth of a full dose &#8211 provides the same level of protection against all polioviruses as does one full dose, the United Nations health agency said today.

Data from 2016 reveals that for the fifth year in a row, the prices of food around the world have declined, in some cases 1.5 per cent below 2015 levels, a monthly United Nations report revealed.

A United Nations-supported mass vaccination campaign is set to start tomorrow to protect more than 4.7 million children against a measles outbreak in conflict-affected states in north-eastern Nigeria.

A new partnership between the United Nations rural poverty agency and officials in Mauritania could boost finances and nutrition for nearly 300,000 farmers in the southern part of the country.

Perhaps the greatest risk is that bitter residue from this scuffle over a single (albeit significant) analytic assessment will deflect attention from the more serious intelligence policy questions that require the government’s attention.

Highlighting that the Colombian peace process faced and continues to face a range of challenges but also offers “solid” opportunities, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the country today called on the United Nations Security Council for its continued attention and strong support to the country.

The United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, Lise Grande, reported today on the conditions in Mosul, a city witnessing one of the largest urban military operations since the Second World War, warning that a proper humanitarian response, conditions that created the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da’esh) could remain.

The president-elect conceded Moscow hacked the U.S. election, but accused intelligence agencies of ‘Nazi’ tactics.

President Tsai Ing-Wen traveled to Central America to loosen China's grip on Taiwan. But will it work?

People walk to pay their respect to a memorial for the victims of the genocide in the Armenian capital Yerevan (Karen Minasyan/AFP/Getty Images).

At a certain point in the near future there will likely be a moment of clarity that cuts through the fog of partisan politics on the conflicts in Syria and Iraq. To cement this clarity for future generations and prevent them from making the same errors, it would be prudent to subject biased policy perspectives to judicial review, when possible.

Establishing the facts in an objective review would assist in completing an appropriate narrative for our time in history, and could possibly achieve some form of justice for victims of war crimes and genocide.

While acts committed by combatants, militants and terrorists can be established with evidence, the intent of these actions is harder to define. With so much fog over the intent of the players in the Middle East, it must be considered that any actions that contributed to war crimes should be considered in the assessment of these events in world history.

While whether or not an individual in Western societies can be compelled to assist those in immediate danger is a thoroughly discussed issue, it has been determined that not helping another person is not a crime in most legal systems. The lack of a moral application when discussing genocide however leads to possible horrendous situations.

The discovery of concentration camps during the Holocaust was met with inaction to help the victims of that mass genocide, leading to additional deaths due to lack of assistance. While absolving one’s responsibility to a victim group would surely be easier, it is against natural justice to avoid victims of genocide as they are too human to ignore.

To form a holistic legal precedent on mass atrocities committed against communities living in Iraq and Syria, it would be a matter of equity to acknowledge and apply legally binding precedents over third parties that have indirectly contributed to the further genocide of victim groups in the region.

Firstly, if it was established that the third party was aware of the mass atrocity to a greater or lesser degree, and actively worked to alter or fade out information about the acts taking place there for a reason that benefits that set of policymakers, then it should be considered as partly contributing to the acts taking place on the ground. Knowledge of an atrocity is the first step to help prohibit those actions, and it is why knowingly diminishing the brutality of the act should be a crime in itself.

Secondly, if the third party took indirect actions that should have been known to likely prolong the genocide taking place or prevents the rescue or assistance of that known community subject to ethnic cleansing, it should be taken as a partial contribution to the act itself. This should be applied to all victims of the targeted group during the time frame in which those contributory third party activities took place.

Thirdly, if a third party knowing of the genocide that took place puts undue bias and pressure on members of the groups that were subject to acts of genocide, murder, torture, sexual assault, acts against minors, planned extermination and others atrocities in the process of ethnically cleansing those groups that have been targeted, and discriminates in the process of assisting individuals from that group, then they should also be acknowledged and charged to respond in the greater trials on crimes against humanity against the individuals of that community.

Targeted groups and individuals should never been re-targeted by discriminatory policies before or after the resolution of the greater conflict. Ignoring the actions against them is the source of the initial discrimination and is tantamount to taking further actions against their community.

Unfortunately, many of the above third party actions have knowingly been taking place and have been blanketed over due to political games in many countries, even those founded on justice and the rule of law. While all sides accuse the others of not having clean hands, the case for justice against atrocities committed in 2016 and previously may not come to fruition in 2017 without strong public condemnation of the genocides committed in our current generation.

The post The Fog of Politics and Denied Justice appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

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