AGORA. ONU NEWS NR.2817

GENEVA, 17 March (UN Information Service) -- The increasing number of racially and ethnically motivated massacres and atrocities occurring in different regions of the world prompted the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination this afternoon to recommend the establishment of an international tribunal. The recommendation was adopted by a show of hands vote of 11 in favour to 2 against, with 3 abstentions.

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In the recommendation adopted, the Committee considered it urgent to establish an international tribunal with general jurisdiction to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds and other inhumane acts directed against any civilian population and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the Additional Protocols of 1977 thereto.

The Committee urged the Secretary-General to bring the recommendation to the attention of the competent bodies of the United Nations, including the Security Council. It requested the High Commissioner for Human Rights to ensure that all relevant information pertaining to those crimes was systematically collected by the Centre for Human Rights, so that it might be readily available to an international tribunal as soon as it was established.

The experts who voted against the recommendation argued that it was not an appropriate time to establish an international tribunal and that it was not within the Committee's competence to do so. They also warned that the activities of the tribunal could turn against certain groups of countries of the third world.

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