The Security Council has established two special short-term international criminal tribunals for war criminals: one for the former Yugoslavia 1993 (ICTY) and one for Rwanda 1994 (ICTR).
In the spring of 2014, the Yugoslav tribunal had sentenced 74 people to prison, including the former president of the Bosnian Serb breakaway republic, Biljana Plavsic, who had been sentenced to eleven years in prison for crimes against humanity. Former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic was arrested in July 2008 and General Ratko Mladic was extradited to the tribunal in May 2011. Both have been charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The high-profile four-year trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for genocide and crimes against humanity has been suspended since Milosevic died of a heart attack in his cell in The Hague in March 2006.
In 2013, the Rwanda Tribunal had handled a total of 75 cases; in twelve cases, the persons had been acquitted while appeals were pending in connection with some other judgments. Former Rwandan Prime Minister Jean Kambanda pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 1998 to life in prison for genocide. In 2004, former Minister Jean de Dieu Kamuhanda was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Nine suspected war criminals were still at large.
At the end of 2010, the UN Security Council formed a special unit, the “Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT)”, which would help complete the work of the Rwandan and former Yugoslav tribunals. MICT consists of two divisions: one in Arusha, Tanzania, which began operations in July 2012 and one in The Hague, which began its work in July 2013. While the two tribunals concluded appeal proceedings and other work, a period of overlap was expected. MICT’s main priorities will be to arrest and prosecute suspected war criminals who are still at large, as well as to handle appeals against convictions and trials.
The Freetown Special Court set up by the United Nations and the Government of Sierra Leone in 2004 began trials against people suspected of war crimes committed during the country’s civil war since 1996. Prosecution was brought against the top twelve leaders of three organizations involved in the civil war. Eight of them were sentenced to long prison terms. Among the others, three had died and one had disappeared.
In April 2012, Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former president, was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The trial was held for security reasons at the premises of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The Special Court for Sierra Leone ended its activities in 2012, the remaining trials were to be heard in the “Residual special court for Sierra Leone”, based in the Netherlands.
For many years, the UN has been in talks with the Cambodian government on co-operation to bring Khmer Rouge leaders to justice for genocide and crimes against humanity committed in the mid-1970’s. An agreement on cooperation was entered into in 2005 and judges and prosecutors were hired. The UN has promised to bear most of the cost of the trials. The process has been slow due to funding, corruption and political interference by the Cambodian government.
The first trial began in February 2009 against Kang Kek Ieu (or Duch), who under the Khmer Rouge ruled the head of the infamous S21 prison in Phnom Penh. He was charged with torture and murder in 16,000 cases as well as crimes against humanity. When the verdict was handed down in July 2010, Duch was found guilty of murder, torture and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Both the prosecution and the defense appealed against the verdict against Duch. In February 2012, the appeal was rejected and Duchs’ sentence was increased to life imprisonment. In 2011, trials were formally opened against three other senior Khmer Rouge leaders: Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Nuon Chea. In March 2013, Ieng Sary died before any verdict against him fell. His wife Ieng Thirith, who also held a high position in the Khmer Rouge regime, was judged in 2011 to be too ill to take part in a trial.Cambodia).
The Hari Tribunal, a special tribunal for Lebanon, was established in 2007 by the Lebanese government and the United Nations. The court, which is based in The Hague, will bring to justice those responsible for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. In the summer of 2011, the UN tribunal indicted four members of the militant Shia Muslim movement Hezbollah in Lebanon and issued an arrest warrant against them. The tribunal announced in 2012 that a trial would be held against five suspected Hezbollah members even though they were still at large. The trial began in early 2014.
The work for development
According to homethodology, one of the UN’s more important tasks is to “promote higher living standards, full employment and progress and development in economic and social terms”. If the UN works for these goals, it can also help prevent conflicts. Today, most of the UN system’s resources go to work for economic and social development in developing countries.
In the first decade after the formation of the World Organization, there was a strong focus on emergency aid to European countries after the devastation of the Second World War. In the coming decades, development assistance was built up to other parts of the world as more and more new countries in strong need of support were formed in connection with decolonization. In the 1960’s, development work became a higher priority when the developing countries together gained an increasingly strong voice in the non-aligned movement and the G77. In the 1970’s, the division of the world into the North, which were the rich industrialized countries, and the South, which were the developing countries, were consolidated. From the 1980’s onwards, economic and social development has been rapid, not least in many countries in Asia, while development in Africa has long lagged behind. Many difficult conflicts,
In 1997, the General Assembly adopted an “Agenda for Development”. According to it, economic growth was indeed the engine of a country’s development, but it was not enough. Development must be sustainable with a functioning economic structure, a functioning protection of the environment, social justice, equality, respect for human rights and good governance.
From the mid-1990’s, the eradication of poverty also became a high priority within the UN system.
The Millennium Development Goals
The leaders of the UN countries agreed in September 2000 at the Millennium Summit on a number of concrete measurable goals for development work, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), several of which were to be achieved in 2015. At a UN conference on aid financing in Monterrey, Mexico in 2002. world leaders entered into a global partnership for development. In doing so, they promised to strive to meet the Millennium Development Goals, the action plans of the UN World Conferences and Summits of the 1990’s, and the UN Agenda for Development. At the 2005 summit, Member States promised to develop national strategies for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Development Goals have come to play a central role both in many countries’ development cooperation and in UN work.
In the summer of 2013, with two years left to the end date, the UN Secretary-General called the goals “the most successful global effort against poverty ever”. It was then clear that the world would achieve some of the goals, even though some researchers claimed that some of them would have been achieved even without the millennium investment. At the same time, the result was still more mixed than Ban Ki-Moon suggested. With regard to several of the goals, it seemed doubtful whether they would be achieved.
Progress includes halving the proportion of people globally living in extreme poverty. That goal was achieved in 2010. The proportion of people in developing countries living on less than $ 1.25 a day had fallen to 22 percent compared to 47 percent in 1990. The achievement of this goal is largely due to the increasing economic growth in Asia and in particular in China. In sub-Saharan Africa, the decline in the proportion of the extremely poor has been much slower.
Another success is that over two billion people have gained access to cleaner drinking water and further progress has been made in reducing hunger, with the proportion of malnourished people in developing countries declining from about 23 percent in the early 1990’s to just under 15 percent in the beginning. of the 2010’s. At the same time, more and more children go to school – even though the increase has been slower over the past five years compared with the period 2004-2009 – and fewer and fewer children die before the age of five.
But there are also setbacks. Many sub-Saharan countries will not meet the MDG targets by 2015, one important reason being the lack of basic health care and the lack of doctors and nurses, inadequate infrastructure and lack of funding. In addition, an estimated one billion people are still living in extreme poverty in 2015, when the Millennium Development Goals expire.
The global financial crisis at the end of the twentieth century and the economic recession in its wake became a threat to the realization of the Millennium Development Goals. Many affected western countries became less inclined to open their wallets for development assistance and unemployment increased globally, unemployment was high especially among young people. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), 28 million people have lost their jobs since 2007 and 39 million have left the labor market.
