Turkey should face charges in front of international courts over being complicit in genocide against the Yazidi people, according to a new investigation.
The groundbreaking report was compiled by a group of prominent human rights lawyers and endorsed by infamous British human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy.
The report aims to highlight the binding responsibility that nations have to prevent genocide within their own territories, even if those genocides are carried out by a third party. The report also says that Syria and Iraq failed in their duties to prevent killings.
The lawyers are grouped under the title “Yazidi Justice Committee (YJC)”.
The report said there was accountability under international law for countries to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention. The chair of the YJC, Geoffrey Nice QC, said the genocide of the Yazidi was “madness heaped on evil.”
“Mechanisms in place could have saved the Yazidis from what is now part of their past, and part of their past partial destruction,” Nice said.
It is accepted worldwide that genocide was attempted against the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria from 2013, by the Islamic State. The Yazidis are a religious minority.
The report followed a three-year inquiry that investigated the conduct of 13 countries. It concluded that three of them — Syria, Iraq, and Turkey — failed in their duties to take reasonable steps to prevent a genocide against the Yazidis.
The committee found that Turkey was worse than Syria and Iraq. The report said Turkey’s leaders were complicit in the massacres, alleging that it failed to police its borders in order to stop the free flow of Islamic State fighters. A number of IS fighters were Turkish nationals.
The report called for states to be held accountable. If not, the authors said, the promise of “never again” rings hollow.
Be the first to comment