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	Under international law, health workers must be protected by Staffan de Mistura United Nations iAfghanistan   9 August 2010   All United Nations staff in Afghanistan are “shocked and appalled” at the killing of ten medical workers in the northeast of the Asian nation, a senior world body official said today, calling for the protection of international health-care workers as they provide life-saving services.   The ten people killed on 5 August in Badakhshan were part of a group known as the International Assistance Mission, which has had an office in the area for many years and is known for bringing medical services to remote villages across Afghanistan.   “The United Nations condemns this serious crime and apparent cold-blooded execution,” Staffan de Mistura, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative, said in a press statement.   “These were individuals who came to Afghanistan or were Afghans working in their own country to help the poorest and most vulnerable,” he stressed.   Also condemning the attack today was Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who emphasized that “health workers must have access to treat those in need and must be able to do so without fear.”   At a press conference in New York, he added that “under international law, health workers must be protected while they carry out their life-saving work.”   Mr. de Mistura expressed his condolences to the families, friends and colleagues left behind after the tragic incident, emphasizing that “all those involved in this and other incidents targeting health workers should respect the value of human life.”
	UN concerned about extrajudicial killings in Ecuador by Philip Alston UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial executions   July, 2010   A senior United Nations investigator says murders by gang members and hired killers in Ecuador are rising steadily, while the number caught is falling.   Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial executions, said that for every 100 killings, only one perpetrator was convicted. Mr Alston described a "vicious circle of impunity which left Ecuadorians feeling increasingly insecure".   But he said the government was attempting to address the problem. Speaking in Quito, the UN rapporteur pointed out that the murder rate in Ecuador had doubled since 1990, to 20 killings per 100,000 inhabitants, and in some areas was five times higher.   He said the police rarely carried out "serious or sustained investigations of killings", and that they did not seem to pursue a murder case seriously once they had decided it was a settling of accounts by criminal groups.   He also singled out Ecuador"s prosecution service, which seemed "more concerned with public relations than with convicting major criminals", and the judicial system, which was "almost universally condemned for its inefficiency and mismanagement".   "Hired killers are paid as little as $20 to "solve" a problem, but they can confidently expect to get away with murder because the criminal justice system functions so badly," said Mr Alston.   The UN rapporteur said he was concerned about the spillover of the conflict in Colombia into Ecuador, creating a situation where civilians became trapped between the armed forces, rebels and criminal gangs.   "The Ecuadorean military is not well-equipped to deal with the situation, and as its relations with citizens have soured, its reliance on abusive tactics to obtain information has increased," he said.   But he also said the government of Rafael Correa had attempted to address the situation by introducing extensive reforms to the constitution and to human rights legislation.   Mr Alston called on the government of Ecuador to ensure that cases documented by the official Truth Commission, which examined human rights abuses over the past three decades, should become the subject of effective criminal investigations.   June 2010   UN independent expert voices concerns over the practice of targeted killings.   A United Nations independent human rights expert today sounded the alarm about the practice of targeted killings, saying it had a tenuous legal basis and could undermine the rules that aim to prevent extrajudicial executions and guarantee people the right to life.   Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said in a new report that legal justifications for targeted killings were often based on “excessively broad circumstances” and there was a lack of essential accountability mechanisms to ensure that they were legal.   “In terms of the first problem, there are indeed circumstances in which targeted killings may be legal,” Mr. Alston noted. “They are permitted in armed conflict situations when used against combatants or fighters, or civilians who directly engage in combat-like activities.   “But they are increasingly being used far from any battle zone. The United States, in particular, has put forward a novel theory that there is a ‘law of 9/11’ that enables it to legally use force in the territory of other States as part of its inherent right to self-defence on the basis that it is in an armed conflict with al-Qaida, the Taliban and ‘associated forces’, although the latter group is fluid and undefined.   “This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defence goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the UN Charter. If invoked by other States, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos,” Mr. Alston writes in his report to the UN Human Rights Council.   He emphasized that he did not question the seriousness of the challenges posed by terrorism, saying he wholeheartedly condemned actions of al-Qaida and other groups that killed innocent civilians, as well as those that increased the danger of attacks on civilians by hiding in their midst.   “But the fact that such enemies do not play by the rules does not mean that a government can cast those rules aside or unilaterally re-interpret them. The credibility of any government’s claim that it is fighting to uphold the rule of law depends on its willingness to disclose how it interprets and applies the law – and the actions it takes when the law is broken,” according to Mr. Alston.   On accountability, Mr. Alston observed that international law requires that States using targeted killings demonstrate that they are complying with the various rules governing their use in situations of armed conflict.   “The clearest challenge to this principle today comes from the programme operated by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which targeted killings are carried out from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. It is clear that many hundreds of people have been killed as a result, and that this number includes some innocent civilians,” Mr. Alston said.   “Because this programme remains shrouded in official secrecy, the international community does not know when and where the CIA is authorized to kill, the criteria for individuals who may be killed, how it ensures killings are legal, and what follow-up there is when civilians are illegally killed.   “In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated,” Mr. Alston said.   He contrasted the lack of accountability during targeted killings to the established practice in the United States Department of Defense, where controversial military decisions can be reviewed.   “While it is by no means perfect, the United States military has a relatively public accountability process, as demonstrated earlier this week by its report on the incident in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, in which at least 23 civilians were killed based on erroneous intelligence from surveillance drone operators,” Mr. Alston said.   “Intelligence agencies, which by definition are determined to remain unaccountable except to their own paymasters, have no place in running programmes that kill people in other countries,” Mr. Alston added. 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