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	UN world court rules Senegal must prosecute ex-Chadian leader or extradite him by International Court of Justice   20 July 2012   The United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled today that Senegal must either prosecute former Chadian President Hissène Habré for war crimes or extradite him “without further delay.”   The decision by the Court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, is in response to a request by Belgium to prosecute Mr. Habré, who has been accused in a Senegalese court of massive human rights abuses committed by his regime during the 1980s.   Belgium had also sought to have him extradited to face charges in Belgium, citing among other things procedural delays in Senegal’s handling of the case.   In its judgment, which is final and binding, the Court found, unanimously, that Senegal “must, without further delay, submit the case of Mr. Hissène Habré to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution, if it does not extradite him.”   He was charged in February 2000 by a lower court in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, but an appeals court later ruled that Senegalese courts did not have the legal competence to try such cases if they were perpetrated in another country.   In April 2008, however, Senegal’s National Assembly adopted an amendment to the constitution that together with previous changes allowed the country’s legal system to deal with such cases.   Mr. Habré ruled Chad from 1982 to 1990, when he was overthrown and went into exile in Senegal. It is alleged that during his rule thousands of Chadians were tortured and unlawful killings and other serious human rights violations took place.
	Syrian Government forces and militias accused of committing widespread crimes in conflict by UN News   An independent panel appointed by the United Nations to investigate rights abuses in Syria said that the government’s armed forces and loyalist militias were responsible for the worst known atrocity in the conflict, a massacre of 108 villagers, nearly half of them women and children, in the western village of Houla on May 25.   The Houla finding was contained in a highly incriminating 102-page report from the panel, created by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, that was based on testimony from hundreds of witnesses and survivors who had fled Syria, as well as medical evidence, satellite images and photographs, all of which contradicted the government’s assertion that insurgents had carried out the massacre.   The Syria panel’s report also recited a litany of murders, extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests, crimes against children, sexual violence, pillaging and destruction that it said had been committed “pursuant to State policy” by the armed forces and thuggish militia members working with them, known as shahiba.   The report asserted that the complexity and scale of these violations “indicate the involvement at the highest levels of the armed and security forces and the Government.”   The Houla finding was particularly significant, because responsibility for that atrocity became immersed in conflicting claims that have come to define the maelstrom of misinformation presented by antagonists in the nearly 18-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.   The government and the insurgents reported diametrically opposite accounts of what happened in Houla, as they have in many other instances of mass killings in Syria.   The Syria panel’s report also said it had found “reasonable grounds” to believe that war crimes, including murder and torture, had been carried out by anti-Assad groups, but that their abuses “did not reach the gravity, frequene and scale of those committed by the Government forces and the shahiba.”   Despite repeated requests by the Syria panel’s chairman, Sergio Pinheiro, a veteran human rights investigator, Mr. Assad refused to grant the panel permission to enter Syria, which meant that all of its firsthand accounts were based on depositions from people who had left the country.   Established in September 2011, Mr. Pinheiro’s panel is to present its final report on Syria at the Human Rights Council session on Sept. 17.
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