24.06.2009

Statement by Holly CARTNER

Director for Europe and Central Asia,

Human Rights Watch

on the occasion of the third part of the 2009 Ordinary Session

of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly

(Strasbourg, 22-26 June 2009)

Thank you for the opportunity to address this important forum and contribute to this welcome and much-needed reflection on the state of human rights in Europe.

This morning’s discussion has already highlighted a wide array of areas in which serious human rights abuses have gone unpunished. And a strong case has been made for how a climate of impunity in turns fuels further violations.

As the Monitoring Committee’s report so pertinently points out, “protection of human rights can only be achieved if the victims of human rights violations have access to an effective remedy.” Yet this fundamental human right, enshrined in so many instruments, including the European Convention on Human Rights, is being breached on a continuous basis in many member states. This fact underscores a serious enforcement gap that urgently needs to be addressed.

Of course the responsibility for effective enforcement rests at the national level – with the governments who voluntarily undertook the commitments enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and other international standards, and whose failure to fulfill these commitments is at issue.

The Committee’s report identifies numerous examples of such failure on the part of states to meet their obligations and commitments as members of the Council of Europe. And as is well known, such shortcomings are not limited to the states subject to the Assembly’s special monitoring procedure.

Impunity still largely prevails for the torture and other abuses committed in the framework of the secret detentions and renditions program led by the United States and supported by a number of European governments, despite the laudable work by Senator Dick Marty and the European Parliament to uncover these abuses and press for accountability. With the exception of a handful of investigations into complicity of European governments, including in Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom – some of which are marred by delays and obstruction from national authorities – there has been scant follow-up on the key recommendation flowing from these European inquiries about the necessity of effective, thorough national level investigations to establish the facts and ensure those responsible are held to account. Despite the change in administration in Washington, much needs to be done to ensure accountability for the abuses that took place and to make certain that similar abuses will not happen again.

The Italian Constitutional Court upheld earlier this year the claim by successive administrations that certain evidence introduced in the trial of 33 people—including 26 U.S. citizens and seven Italians, including high-ranking intelligence officials—for the 2003 abduction and rendition to Egypt of Abu Omar was covered by state secrecy. The trial, the most advanced effort to seek accountability through the criminal justice system in Europe, continues. A Spanish judge at the Audiencia Nacional, Ismael Moreno, has been investigating the alleged use of Spanish airspace by CIA rendition flights since 2006; only in November of last year did government authorities acknowledge an agreement by the previous Aznar administration to allow these flights to use Spanish airspace and hand over the relevant documents to the court. Finally, the UK police have opened a criminal investigation into alleged complicity by MI5 agents in the torture of Binyam Mohamed and others in the conduct of the fight against international terrorism.

Repeatedly we note a distressing lack of accountability for excessive use of force and ill-treatment by police, often but not only during large demonstrations or civil unrest. The Monitoring Committee rightly notes such concerns in a number of member states, including Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. Months and in some cases years after the violence, accountability remains elusive, and the respective states have failed to provide a thorough, independent investigation or to hold the perpetrators accountable, resulting in widespread mistrust and affecting the credibility of security forces among the public.

Nearly a year after the August 2008 war over South Ossetia, there has been no accountability for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law committed by all parties to the conflict, a chief reason for the continued massive displacement of the ethnic Georgian population.

Although the Russian government recently announced an end to its counterterrorism operations in Chechnya, grave human rights abuses, including enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment in detention, and illegal detention persist, albeit on a smaller scale, and impunity for past and ongoing abuses is rampant.

Just next week, Human Rights Watch will be issuing a new report on Chechnya, documenting a disturbing pattern of punitive house burnings and other types of persecution against families whose relatives are allegedly rebel fighters. The Russian justice system provides no recourse for the victims of these collective punishment practices. The house burnings are carried out by local Chechen law-enforcement personnel, who typically tell the victims that if they complain to the authorities, it will only lead to further repercussions.

As noted in the report presented this morning by the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee, the persisting impunity for grave human rights abuses in Chechnya has allowed similar abuses to spread to other parts of the North Caucasus, including in Ingushetia and Dagestan, where abusive counterinsurgency operations are ongoing. And I cannot overemphasize here just how distressed all of us at Human Rights Watch were to learn of the attack on the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who had started a dialogue on the need to observe human rights in counterinsurgency operations. We also cannot stress enough the importance of ensuring that the Assembly’s rapporteur on legal remedies for human rights violations in the North Caucasus, Senator Dick Marty, is able to effectively pursue his mandate and gain access to the region without any further delay, so as to ensure the Assembly may remain adequately seized of the situation in the North Caucasus.

Human Rights Watch has also documented continuing problems of police violence in Turkey, and a reported rise in overall complaints of torture and police violence – including shootings – since the beginning of 2007. These phenomena persist because of a deeply rooted culture of impunity. Historically, law enforcement officials were rarely if ever held to account, and are still rarely held to account in a manner that reflects the gravity of the violations committed. Today, despite increased legal safeguards, law enforcement officers often enjoy effective impunity for serious abuse.

In a shocking illustrative example, the Court of Cassation, Turkey’s top court of appeal, last week upheld the acquittal of four police officers for the fatal shooting of father and son, Ahmet and Ugur Kaymaz in Mardin, in November 2004. The court entirely overlooked the forensic evidence that showed that 13-year-old Ugur had been shot repeatedly in the back, that there was no possibility that there had been an armed clash, and that all evidence pointed to it being a summary execution.

In the Western Balkans, efforts to bring to justice perpetrators of the war crimes committed in the 1990s are hampered by various obstacles, including inadequate witness protection and witness relocation programs. This war crimes accountability gap is particularly acute in Kosovo, where weaknesses in the criminal justice system compound the problem. Other obstacles to justice prevalent throughout the Western Balkans region include lack of financial resources and staffing; inadequate cooperation between prosecutors and police; and insufficient outreach to affected communities. Despite regional mechanisms for judicial cooperation, the key states (including Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia) all prohibit the extradition of their citizens to face trial in other countries, representing a major impediment to war crimes accountability in the region.

The lack of accountability in Kosovo is the responsibility of every European state involved there. Specifically, the new EULEX mission has oversight of rule of law in Kosovo, but like UNMIK before it, has failed to set up adequate legal and other accountability mechanisms for its own acts. Just today, we have released a report on the horrific situation of Roma in Kosovo who have been forced, since 1999, to live in camps where they have been poisoned by lead. Over the entire decade they have not been able to hold any authority, including UNMIK, accountable for the severe human rights abuses they have suffered.

And the list goes on.

When national institutions fail to fulfill their role as effective guarantors of rights protection, victims of abuse in Europe have a unique recourse in the European Court of Human Rights.

The court represents without doubt the single most effective mechanism for ensuring accountability for human rights abuses in Europe. And yet the full potential of this important institution is being squandered because of member states’ failure to fully implement its decisions.

While they are certainly not the only examples, the court’s rulings on Chechnya underscore why full implementation of judgments is important for the cause of ending impunity – they show why implementation is crucial not just as a means of ensuring accountability for past abuses, but also for ending ongoing abuses and preventing future ones.

It has been over 4 years since the court issued its first ruling on Chechnya. In more than 100 decisions with many more pending, the court has held Russia responsible for serious human rights violations in Chechnya – including torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions. And in nearly every ruling, the court has called on Russia to account for failing to properly investigate these crimes.

In these years, Russia has paid monetary compensation to the victims, as required by the court. But it has to date failed to hold a single individual accountable for the violations found in these rulings. This means that it has not meaningfully implemented a core component of the judgments or taken other measures that follow from the rulings, such as addressing the causes of the abuses to prevent future such crimes.

Full implementation of the Chechnya rulings carries perhaps the single most significant potential to produce lasting improvements in the human rights situation in the North Caucasus region. The importance of this task can hardly be overemphasized.

In this respect it is essential that we learn lessons from the court cases that were brought against Turkey stemming from abuses committed on a mass scale in the southeast in the 1990s. The legacy of this period includes disappearances, systematic torture in police and gendarmerie custody, unresolved killings suspected to have been perpetrated by state agents, and forcible village evacuations. When the court and former commission dealt with these violations, they repeatedly noted the lack of investigations and accountability as central to the findings. Yet while the court’s rulings did lead to some changes, primarily in legislative reform, failure to rigorously insist on general measures to address the need for systematic accountability has left the way open for on-going violations and impunity over a decade after the court started handing down its judgments. The ongoing police violence, which we recently documented, is one prominent example.

Another is the continued existence of the system of unaccountable village guards –militia paid and armed by the Turkish state – who were implicated any many abuses that took place in the region during the 1990s. The village guards have sometimes occupied the land of displaced persons, effectively preventing their return. There are also many documented cases of ongoing human rights violations committed by village guards - drug and arms trafficking, sexual assaults, and in the recent past, summary executions and disappearances – and there has been a general failure to investigate these violations.

The massacre perpetrated by village guards last month in Mardin province is just the latest, and deeply tragic, example of the consequences of maintaining an unaccountable armed militia in the region. Forty-four people were killed in one evening during an engagement ceremony.

The rulings of the European court presented a significant opportunity to tackle the lack of accountability which continues to provide cover for abuses—an opportunity not as rigorously pursued as it could have been. This can still be remedied for the future of human rights in Turkey. And this same opportunity for promoting meaningful accountability and deterrence by full implementation of the Chechnya judgements must not be lost.

Despite the impressive legal framework embodied in the European Convention, and the sustained and comprehensive focus on member states’ obligations by this body, too many Council of Europe states continue to commit serious human rights violations and flout the decisions and recommendations by important Council of Europe mechanisms. Permitting this situation to persist will ultimately threaten the credibility of this forum and its work, and jeopardize the integrity of the European court. The stakes are far too high for this to be allowed happen.

Further efforts are needed to effectively address repeated failure by some member states to implement the decisions of the court and take steps to end human rights abuses documented by the Assembly’s Monitoring Committee and other Council of Europe bodies.

Of crucial importance in this regard is that the ongoing process to reform the court results in a strengthened role of the Committee of Ministers in supervising the implementation of judgments. Better implementation of judgments at national level will ultimately reduce people’s need to apply to the court for redress.

Protocol 14 bis may be a useful interim step to ease the workload of the court. But it should not be allowed to slow the momentum towards broader reform, including an enhanced role for the Committee of Ministers.

But ultimately, it is sufficient and genuine political will on the part of individual governments that is required to ensure full implementation of European court decisions and adequate follow up on the recommendations of the Monitoring Committee and other Council of Europe bodies. Governments should see it as their responsibility to help ensure these objectives are achieved even when it is not their own state institutions that are at breach, by making compliance with court rulings and recommendations by Council of Europe bodies an integral part of their bilateral and multilateral relations with the abusing states. In other words, discussions and scrutiny of states’ compliance with court rulings and recommendations formulated by the Assembly, the Commissioner, CPT and other Council of Europe institutions should not be confined to Strasbourg. Effective rights protection and accountability requires ensuring that what comes out of Strasbourg makes its way to national capitals and finds its rightful place in foreign policy at all levels.

In the absence of such political will and clear policy consequences, Europe’s countless victims of human rights violations will continue to wait for justice and new victims will inevitably be added.

As the Monitoring Committee has rightly noted, national parliaments have a key role to play in ensuring this does not happen. We fully subscribe to the call made in the draft resolution that national parliaments should actively use assessments by the Committee and other Council of Europe bodies pertaining to their human rights records to ensure the findings and recommendations are addressed, to ensure necessary legislative initiatives are undertaken in a timely manner, and to exercise their democratic oversight role with respect to government action (and equally as important, in exposing inaction, thus helping to prompt necessary follow up).

Human Rights Watch is deeply appreciative of our partnership with the Assembly, and indeed the Council of Europe as a whole. We stand ready to continue our collaborative efforts to ensure that victims of human rights violations have a voice, and that governments hear it, loud and clear, and take the necessary action.

Thank you.