Use of Force, and International Humanitarian Law

If the persons responsible for the hijacking of the commercial jets and the subsequent intentional crashes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 can be identified and apprehended, they could face prosecution in virtually any country that obtains custody of them.

 

            On June 28, 2001, the Government of Serbia sent Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, to The Hague for trial on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.  The surrender of Milosevic complied with an international arrest warrant issued by a United Nations judicial body, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, headquartered in The Hague. Milosevic, a Serb nationalist leader, was indicted by the tribunal in May 1999 on allegations of murder and ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo.

 

            On June 21, 2001, a federal grand jury in the United States indicted 13 Saudi Arabian nationals and one Lebanese national in connection with the truck bombing that killed 19 members of the American military services and wounded nearly 400 others in an apartment building in Saudi Arabia in 1996.  The building was being used as a barracks for U.S. military service personnel.  The bombing allegedly was pursuant to an organized terrorist agenda designed to drive Americans out of the Persian Gulf region.

In a landmark decision which develops international humanitarian law pertaining to sexual violence and enslavement, Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court for Yugoslavia (ICTY) on February 22, 2001, sentenced three ethnic Serbs to prison for their abuse of women at a "rape camp" near Foca, a small Bosnian town southeast of Sarajevo.[1]  Dragoljub Kunarac was sentenced to 28 years, Radomir Kovac 20 years, and Zoran Vukovic 12 years.

 

            The United Nations Security Council, in Resolution 1441 (November 8, 2002), unanimously deplored Iraq's lack of compliance with Resolution 687 (1991) on inspection, disarmament and renunciation of terrorism in Iraq, and went on to make several decisions under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. Resolution 687, like Resolution 1441, was adopted under Chapter VII.  Chapter VII gives the Council the authority to determine the existence of a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression, and to take action accordingly.