Topic 1

On February 3, 2000, a court in Senegal indicted Hissène Habré, the head of state in Chad from 1982 to 1990, for presiding over a pattern of torture during the period of his rule in Chad.  Habré fled from Chad to Senegal after being overthrown in 1990.  He has lived in Senegal since then.

The case is similar to, but not the same as, the proceedings in the United Kingdom aimed at the extradition of former Chilean head of state Augusto Pinochet to Spain for prosecution on charges of presiding over systematic torture in Chile while he was in power there.

The proposed coalition to form a government between Austria's People's Party and Mr. Jorg Haider's Freedom Party (FPO) sparked widespread protest and criticism within the European Union (EU) and also outside Europe. The reason for this outcry is none other than Mr. Haider's policy statement and past remarks which seem to promote xenophobia, by inter alia proposing discriminatory immigration policies, and praising Nazi practices before and during World War II. On a number of occasions Mr. Haider publicly praised as honorable men Austrian Waffen SS veterans.

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 27, 2001, the International Court of Justice (the World Court) issued its judgment on the merits of the LaGrand Case (Germany v. United States).  Walter LaGrand and his brother, German nationals living in the United States, were arrested in Arizona in 1982 on suspicion of armed robbery and murder.  They were not informed of their rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, a multilateral treaty to which both Germany and the United States are parties.  Article 36, paragraph (1)(b) of the Convention provides:

 

            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.