United Nations should threaten Qaddafi regime with International Criminal Court

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has called on the UN Security Council to threaten Libya with activation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) if the violence against demonstrators is not stopped immediately. "It must be made unmistakably clear to the Qaddafi regime that the violation of basic international human rights conventions will not go unpunished," stated the head of the Africa section at the STP, Ulrich Delius, on Tuesday in Göttingen. The UN Security Council is in special session today to deliberate on the situation in Libya. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon expressed his outrage at the violence and urged Muammar al Qaddafi in a telephone conversation to respect human rights.

"Since there is no independent judiciary in Libya and the people suffer under a system of justice that is erratic at best, where perpetrators go unpunished, the ICC is mandated to intervene when empowered to do so by the UN Security Council," said Delius. As the case of the popular singer Abdullah Ashini shows, Qaddafi uses the judges in Libya to secure his hold on power. The Berber artist was recently taken to court on spurious charges because he had taken part in a festival of Berber music in the Canary Islands. After an unfair trial he was sentenced to 5 years in prison. Ever since he took part in that festival he has been banned from producing records in Libya, because Qaddafi fears that his music will strengthen the movement of the indigenous minority Berber population in the country.

No other regime has advocated against the ICC as vociferously as Libya. In March 2009, Qaddafi called the ICC "a new form of terrorism" intended to re-colonize the developing countries. He then mobilized 30 African states which had ratified the Rome Statute of the ICC to threaten that they would pull out of the treaty if the ICC's warrant for the arrest of Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir for crimes against humanity in the Darfur region of Sudan was executed.

Even Libya's deputy UN ambassador yesterday in New York called for an investigation of the Qaddafi regime by the ICC.