In this week’s episode of our Inside Geneva podcast, we revisit our coverage of laws that changed the world. Save the Date for a live recording
We’d like to invite you to a live recording session of our Inside Geneva podcast about the role of the Geneva Conventions and international law. Mark your calendars - June 5, 2024, from 12:30am to 13:30pm - at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Registration is required to secure your spot here. If you have any questions, please email us at event@swissinfo.ch.
From the Convention against Landmines:
"The very day that I entered the hospital for war victims, I realised that all these patients were without one or two legs," said Dr Alberto Cairo from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
"Every day, just about, somebody was injured by a landmine, and they were rushed off to Khao-I-Dang hospital to have their legs amputated," said nurse Denise Coghlan, in Cambodia.
The convention was adopted in 1997.
Steve Goose, from Human Rights Watch, says: "This has been an extremely successful treaty, because it has saved so many lives, and so many limbs, and so many livelihoods."
But landmines still cause huge harm.
"Every morning when I get up in the morning I put on my artificial leg. That’s something that I will do every day for the rest of my life," said Stuart Hughes, a landmine survivor.
We have a convention against genocide, but is it enough?
Ken Roth, human rights expert, says: "People feel like, if you don’t call it genocide, then it’s not serious. And that’s a mistake."
"We have a genocide convention, and we don’t have a crimes against humanity convention, at least not yet," said Paola Gaeta, professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
And the Convention against Enforced Disappearances – a protection for families as well as the disappeared.
Cordula Droege, from the ICRC, says: "Victims of enforced disappearances are not only those who are disappeared but also those who suffer directly from it, such as the relatives."
"He was taken by armed men, and taken to a car, a red car without a plate number, and he disappeared," said Aileen Bacalso.
Olivier de Frouville, UN expert on enforced disappearances, adds: "That’s why we describe also for the relatives, who are victims of enforced disappearances, we describe it as torture, because this is real torture."
Inside Geneva hears from the people who campaigned to make our world safer, and asks, are we honouring their laws and their sacrifices?
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
In this week’s episode of our Inside Geneva podcast, we revisit our coverage of laws that changed the world. Save the Date for a live recording
We’d like to invite you to a live recording session of our Inside Geneva podcast about the role of the Geneva Conventions and international law. Mark your calendars - June 5, 2024, from 12:30am to 13:30pm - at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Registration is required to secure your spot here. If you have any questions, please email us at event@swissinfo.ch.
From the Convention against Landmines:
"The very day that I entered the hospital for war victims, I realised that all these patients were without one or two legs," said Dr Alberto Cairo from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
"Every day, just about, somebody was injured by a landmine, and they were rushed off to Khao-I-Dang hospital to have their legs amputated," said nurse Denise Coghlan, in Cambodia.
The convention was adopted in 1997.
Steve Goose, from Human Rights Watch, says: "This has been an extremely successful treaty, because it has saved so many lives, and so many limbs, and so many livelihoods."
But landmines still cause huge harm.
"Every morning when I get up in the morning I put on my artificial leg. That’s something that I will do every day for the rest of my life," said Stuart Hughes, a landmine survivor.
We have a convention against genocide, but is it enough?
Ken Roth, human rights expert, says: "People feel like, if you don’t call it genocide, then it’s not serious. And that’s a mistake."
"We have a genocide convention, and we don’t have a crimes against humanity convention, at least not yet," said Paola Gaeta, professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
And the Convention against Enforced Disappearances – a protection for families as well as the disappeared.
Cordula Droege, from the ICRC, says: "Victims of enforced disappearances are not only those who are disappeared but also those who suffer directly from it, such as the relatives."
"He was taken by armed men, and taken to a car, a red car without a plate number, and he disappeared," said Aileen Bacalso.
Olivier de Frouville, UN expert on enforced disappearances, adds: "That’s why we describe also for the relatives, who are victims of enforced disappearances, we describe it as torture, because this is real torture."
Inside Geneva hears from the people who campaigned to make our world safer, and asks, are we honouring their laws and their sacrifices?
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogen Foulkes, and this is a production from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland.
Speaker 3:
In today's programme, Every morning, when I get up in the morning, I put on my artificial leg. That's something that I will do every day for the rest of my life.
Speaker 4:
People feel like if you don't call it genocide, then it's not serious, and that's a mistake.
Speaker 5:
He was taken by armed men and taken to a car, a red car without a plate number, and he disappeared red car without a plate number and he disappeared.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Imogen Fowkes. Now, loyal listeners may know that this podcast regularly takes a look at the standards we humans have set ourselves and asks how well we're living up to them. I'm talking about international law, the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, the rules that stand someone once said to me between us and barbarism. When we look at our world today, many of us might ask whether we even care about those rules anymore, the ones that say civilians should be protected during war, that torture is banned, that some weapons are banned too, that prisoners have a right to contact with their families.
Speaker 2:
Next month, inside Geneva will devote a whole episode to asking whether international law is in effect dead. But before that, today we thought we would revisit some of the episodes we have already devoted to international law, how it came about and the personal stories of those who campaigned for it. We'll be bringing you highlights of our episode on the Convention Against Genocide and on the Convention Against Enforced Disappearance, but we'll start with a look at a treaty banning a weapon that has blighted lives, many of them children's, around the world for decades. Those weapons are landmines, and our story begins in Afghanistan in 1990.
Speaker 6:
My name is Alberto Cairo. I am the head of the physical rehabilitation program of the ICRC, the International Committee of Red Cross, in Afghanistan. I've been here in Afghanistan for almost 31 years now. I can't believe it, but it is true.
Speaker 2:
Alberto Cairo runs the ICRC's Physical Rehabilitation Centre in Kabul, supporting landmine survivors to become mobile again with therapy and prosthetic limbs.
Speaker 6:
Sometimes I am asked what is your first memory of Afghanistan? The first memory is the very day that I entered the e-ward of the hospital for war victims of the Red Cross. It was a big room with more or less 70, 80 beds, all of them with people inside, and when I was walking I realized that all these people were without one or two legs and the feeling, my feeling, is that, oh my God, this is what I have to face every day. Will I be able to do anything? And then, that is the very moment that I realized that I was in a place at war. I could sense this terrible suffering that was going, the tragedy of the war. That was the memory, the first things. That and that was Kabul at the time.
Speaker 2:
Tell me about some of your patients, because I think, sometimes, far distant from somewhere like Afghanistan and living fortunately in a country which is not contaminated with landmines, we tend to forget the lifelong damage that they can do.
Speaker 6:
Oh yeah. That's forever. Imagine that if someone suddenly, suddenly, for some reason, tore your leg off your body Suddenly, and then you can imagine the pain, the despair, the shock, the fear, the terror, and it's not something that is going to end tomorrow or after one month, that is for the rest of your life.
Speaker 7:
Baghdad tonight under heavy bombardment From.
Speaker 2:
Afghanistan. Our story moves to Iraq.
Speaker 3:
I'm Stuart Hughes and I'm a senior world affairs producer with BBC News, based in London.
Speaker 2:
In 2003, Stuart was sent to report on the war in Iraq.
Speaker 3:
As I stepped out of the jeep initially, I just heard a bang and fell to the floor. I knew that I'd been injured in some way and it was our translator, rabin, who shouted landmines, landmines. I looked down at my foot and I could see that a big part of my my foot had been blown away. The back of my heel had been blown away. The wound was was wide open. I was flown then back to the UK and it was a civilian doctor who looked at my medical notes and took one look at my foot and he said well, we can try and rebuild your foot. We don't think it's going to work. We don't think we're able to save it. You know, I was 31 years old, active, fit, wanted to get back to work, and so five days after stepping on the landmine, my right leg was amputated below the knee and I started life as a landmine survivor.
Speaker 1:
And this is what they're finding here in Tikrit. Here we have the pressure plate. It was a device exactly like this that killed a little girl two weeks ago.
Speaker 2:
Over many decades, millions of landmines were laid around the world. The campaign to ban them went on for decades too. Way back in the 1980s, nurse Denise Cochlan, volunteering to work in Thailand, couldn't believe the scale of the injuries.
Speaker 8:
Well, I was in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border and every day just about somebody was injured by a landmine and they were rushed off to Kaui Dung Hospital to be have their legs amputated or to go through a very traumatic experience. And I can remember walking around the camp saying these weapons should be banned. But I didn't really do anything about it except make a big noise. Except these weapons should be banned.
Speaker 1:
A worldwide battle against landmines came to the nation's capital today as NBC.
Speaker 2:
People listened to Denise's big noise, among them Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch. The campaign for a ban gained global momentum.
Speaker 9:
Well, when we started the campaign in late 1992, we had no supporters among governments at all. No one had thought about the idea of a ban on these weapons, even though they had been in existence for decades and decades. There were some 120 countries who had anti-personnel mines in their inventories, in their arsenals, so they were considered a very normal thing by all governments. When we first started, everybody told us that this was pie-in-the-sky thinking to believe that we could possibly get a ban on these weapons.
Speaker 2:
Pie-in-the-sky became reality in Oslo in 1997. Became reality in Oslo in 1997. Steve, who had been in the negotiations to the last, and Denise and Alberto, who continued to treat landmine victims, remember that day vividly.
Speaker 8:
We were sitting in our little old dining room in Phnom Penh and suddenly the news came on the BBC and we started shrieking and yelling and everybody was hopping around or riding around in their wheelchairs, just shouting for joy.
Speaker 6:
Personally, I was so happy because I hoped that something like this was going to happen, but I did not believe very much. It was an incredible moment because the world had decided that the landmines were bad, had to be banned.
Speaker 9:
So I mean, I was so so happy We'd had two weeks of very intense negotiations. We were never sure if we were going to get to a successful conclusion or not, and when they brought down that gavel in Oslo in September of 1997. That was the most special moment of my life.
Speaker 2:
And although some of the biggest powers the United States, russia and China haven't ratified the convention, landmines are being used less and less. The problem is, many remain in the ground waiting to cause someone like Stuart life-changing harm. To cause someone like Stuart life-changing harm.
Speaker 3:
As Alberto said, this is a forever moment. Every morning, ever since that day in April 2003, every morning, long after the Iraq war was over, every morning, when I get up in the morning, I put on my artificial leg. That's something that I will do every day for the rest of my life and that random moment in Iraq is one of the defining moments, moments of my life. I try not to make it the defining moment of my life, but it's something that's always there. That random landmine. I'll never know who planted it, I'll never know why they planted it, but it has become a big part of my life. And all of that, for some little bit of plastic and explosives that cost a few dollars, $3 worth of landmine has had a pretty major impact on one person's life.
Speaker 2:
To hear that podcast in full. Scroll through our back catalogue, wherever you get your podcasts, to December 2020, and find the episode called the Global Treaty that Saved Thousands of Lives. That landmine treaty from 1997 is relatively recent, but much of our international law dates back to the late 1940s when, after the horrors of the Second World War, we united in a never-again moment. The convention against genocide dates from 1948. Genocide is seen by many as the worst, most unthinkable of crimes, but in relation to China's treatment of its Muslim Uyghur population, russia's actions in Ukraine or Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza, some people are using the term more widely. Are they right? Back in 2021, I got international law professor Paola Gaeta and Ken Roth, then Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, round the table to explain what the law on genocide is and why many human rights experts use the term very sparingly. Today, we bring you a flavour of that conversation. Paola Gaeta began with the law.
Speaker 7:
Of course, there is a legal definition of genocide, which is enshrined in the Genocide Convention adopted in 1948, which defines genocide as a series of acts there is an exclusive list of these acts, including murder that are committed with intention to destroy a national, racial, religious or ethnic group in whole or in part as such. So this is the definition of genocide, which has been then repeated, without any major change, in all subsequent treaties or instruments establishing international criminal courts and tribunals, and the current international criminal court is working with the same definition of genocide which was in 1948. And what is interesting is that it has never changed at the international level.
Speaker 2:
I've got another basic question. I was actually discussing the fact that I was going to do this programme with friends and family, and that also showed me that it is a term that is not necessarily that well understood. So under law, genocide doesn't necessarily have to involve actually killing.
Speaker 7:
Yes, indeed, because I mean, I think that, first of all, we shall clarify that the way people understand the term genocide may not be the same, as genocide has been defined. And why is it so? Because, as I said, the definition of genocide and shrine in the Genocide Convention is very strictly construed. It relates primarily to the individual criminal responsibility for the crime of genocide and this definition was construed in particular having in mind the Holocaust, in particular having in mind the Holocaust. For instance, the genocide definition includes the prevention of births within a group as a genocidal act and does not include rape as a form of genocide. And we have seen that in Rwanda, rape was perpetrated as a form of genocide. So, you see, the definition of genocide includes, for instance, the so-called concentration camp form of genocide. So, you see, the definition of genocide includes, for instance, the so-called concentration camp form of genocide. So the definition very much reflects the particular period of time of the history of humanity.
Speaker 2:
Ken Roth even now, crimes against humanity is a term we hear much more often than genocide. You told me that human rights groups are also quite well, let's not say reluctant, but you use the term genocide very sparingly. It's not one that you're going to leap to and say yes, that's what's happening.
Speaker 4:
Well, there's almost a kind of a rhetorical inflation these days where people feel like if you don't call it genocide, then it's not serious and that's a mistake. You know, crimes against humanity are incredibly severe and indeed genocide is a crime against humanity, as is persecution, and you know various forms of systematic, you know murder and the like, various forms of systematic murder and the like. To be accused of a crime against humanity is a very big deal and there's a tendency, I think, to feel like, oh, that doesn't count, we got to call it genocide. Unless it's genocide it's not serious, and that's just not the case. And so Human Rights Watch tends to apply the terms of the treaty as Paola outlined, and if they fit, they fit.
Speaker 4:
But if they don't, we'll call it what it is systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity, what have you which are also very serious. And we're just trying to maintain these category distinctions, to suggest that the world should stop, say, crimes against humanity, even if it's not genocide. And I think we've saw this, even going back to the Rwandan genocide, where there's a kind If it's genocide, the world really has to act to stop it. But if not that you know, maybe you don't Now, that's a mistake. So we maintain the distinctions, but we also press the world to respond to other mass atrocities, regardless of what the legal name is.
Speaker 2:
Paola, I saw you had your hand up there for a moment. I'm just thinking about this. Crimes against humanity versus genocide Two different things you know. On the statute book, one crime is viewed as worse than another, and many other things you know burglary versus burglary with assault, for example. Does the law view genocide is worse than crimes against humanity, or is it just different?
Speaker 7:
I agree with Ken that of course there is no higher shame among those crimes and this has been repeated many times by international criminal courts and tribunals. They are all very serious, okay, and clearly the same act, the same murder, the same inhuman acts may be classified as a war crime, a crime against humanity and an act of genocide at the same time. So this is not the question of the higher share of the atrocities here, but there is a point that I think is important to underline here.
Speaker 7:
First that we have a genocide convention and we don't have a crimes against humanity convention, at least not yet. And this might explain the fact that there is a so-called inflation of the use of the term genocide, because there is a treaty that has led many states, since the adoption of this convention, to incorporate the crime of genocide within their national criminal legislation, while the path for crimes against humanity has been much longer. Consider that in 1998, when the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court was negotiated, they were fighting on the definition of crimes against humanity, while for genocide it was just cut and paste from the Genocide Convention. So let's say crimes against humanity, although they have their origin in the Nuremberg Tribunal, they have been quite controversial in terms of the definition until the adoption of the Rome Statute.
Speaker 4:
Genocide is almost always preceded by the dehumanization of the victims, because if you genuinely see the victims as other human beings, you're less likely to kill them, and so if you wanna kind of mobilize your troops to go out and slaughter people, it's always useful to pretend that they are either subhuman or that they represent a lethal threat to you. So, yes, those are precursors to genocide, but it is an over-inclusive category because you get many cases of dehumanization. That doesn't mean that we're about to face a genocide, nonetheless, I mean, I think, wherever we see this kind of dehumanization, this systematic discrimination, it is worth calling out just on its own right, even though it often won't lead to genocide. So I do think that in all of these circumstances, we should push governments that describe themselves as rights promoting to do more. These are all urgent situations, you know, not necessarily leading to genocide, but nonetheless involving serious human rights violations, and the response should always be public, forceful, generating as much pressure as possible.
Speaker 2:
And if you want to hear that episode in full, it first came out in April 2021, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Now fast forward to the 21st century and we are still striving to set ourselves a few rules to make us more decent human beings. In 2021, we brought you a podcast about the Convention on Enforced Disappearance, designed to help families suffering one of the worst experiences imaginable the disappearance of a loved one.
Speaker 1:
Hundreds of thousands of people have vanished during conflicts or periods of repression in at least 85 countries around the world.
Speaker 2:
in at least 85 countries around the world. The Convention on Enforced Disappearances was first drafted in 2006 and came into force in 2010. It was the result of 40 years of campaigning by the families of the disappeared and human rights groups.
Speaker 1:
While these sons, daughters, mothers and fathers remain unaccounted for, their families still search for answers.
Speaker 2:
Among them were Olivier de Frouville and Aileen Bacalso. To start our programme, let's hear from both of them about what enforced disappearance is and how it affects families. Olivier, with the legal side first, how does it?
Speaker 10:
happen Most of the time. So most of the cases, there is the intelligence security coming to your home, knocking at the door and presenting no particular warrant of arrest, but who requests the person to come or would arrest the person by force and take that person to an unknown place.
Speaker 2:
Thousands of miles away in the Philippines, Aileen was experiencing this firsthand.
Speaker 5:
Two months after we got married. I got married with my husband in 1988. He was taken in one of the busy streets in Cebu City, which is the second urban center in the Philippines, and he was taken by armed men and taken to a car, a red car without a plate number, and he disappeared the whole time. We were searching for him and he was taken by these men believed to be members of the military intelligence group in Cebu City.
Speaker 10:
So the family, after one or two days, becomes worried and then goes to the place where they think this person is detained and at this moment they face a refusal to deliver an information or sometimes even a denial of the arrest of the person. So basically, you're facing a security officer and you may even recognize that person for having arrested your relative, and he would say, no, we don't have that person, we don't know him, they did not have any knowledge, but I knew all the while that he knew and the men that were present they were all military men that were present knew all the while where my husband was.
Speaker 5:
So he was there the whole time and he was tortured and he was accused of being a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Speaker 10:
A military person would come to them and say, yes, we have that person, but don't make too much trouble. You know, don't file a complaint or withdraw your complaint, otherwise something will happen. But can you tell me where he is? Where is he detained? No, no, I can't tell you. This is a secret issue. You have to be very careful, don't make noise. You know that kind of things. And then again, silence.
Speaker 5:
It was terrible, especially so that we just got married. It was just exactly two months after we got married and there was no certainty of where he was, what happened to him and who took him. I went with my parents and with the relatives of my husband to the military camp every day, pushing for his release.
Speaker 10:
So that's the situation. That's why we describe also for the relatives who are victims of enforced disappearances. We describe it as torture because this is real torture victims of enforced disappearances. We describe it as torture because this is real torture.
Speaker 2:
Olivier is now a UN expert on enforced disappearances.
Speaker 3:
He has spent decades campaigning for the rights of the disappeared and their families.
Speaker 2:
Inspired in part by the courage of women in Chile and Argentina, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who were campaigning for news of tens of thousands of young people who disappeared during the military regimes. In fact, there was already an organisation and some international law trying to find the missing and trying to protect the disappeared. Corda Ludroga is chief legal officer with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Speaker 11:
The Geneva Conventions have so many provisions that try to prevent people from going missing. It was the Geneva Conventions that set up the Central Tracing Agency on the basis of what had happened in the First World War and after, to account for thousands and thousands of people who went missing on the battlefield but also in detention settings and so on. The 1977 First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions contains one of the most, I think, critical provisions that I actually really love. I'll read it to you, and it's Article 32. It introduces the section which is about missing and dead persons. All the activities that are carried out shall be prompted mainly by the right of families to know the fate of their relatives. This is 1977, but I think it really captures all the humanity also that international humanitarian law embodies.
Speaker 4:
The Central Tracing Agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, traces the missing and helps detain.
Speaker 2:
The ICRC joined the campaign for a convention because enforced disappearance is not the same as taking prisoners of war. A new international law was needed to support families and to bring prosecutions against perpetrators.
Speaker 10:
Desaparacidos or the Disappeared is a theater play in Manila that aims to remind young Filipinos of the horrors of the recent past.
Speaker 2:
In 2010, the Convention on Enforced Disappearances came into force. For Aileen Bocasio, who was finally reunited with her husband, an important victory although not all UN member states have yet ratified it.
Speaker 5:
It's a consolation for the families of the victims. It's actually some kind of not just a legal victory, but moral victory. So we don't want any family to suffer from the consequences of enforced disappearance and we don't want any person to be disappeared, because every person has the right to live, and it's a violation of the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to a family, the right to a job, the right to community. So it's about time for governments, for states, to ratify the convention now.
Speaker 2:
And you can hear that episode of Inside Geneva in full by checking our back catalogue. Defending the Disappeared came out in May 2021. And if you're hungry for more, take a longer look at our previous episodes. You can find out about the Convention Against Nuclear Weapons, about the courts bringing war criminals to justice, or about the campaign to put legal restrictions on lethal autonomous weapons or killer robots All on Inside Geneva, wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget our next episode where we'll be asking whether international law is dead, here in Geneva, with experts on the subject and an audience of students from Geneva's Graduate Institute. That's out on June 11th. A reminder inside Geneva is a Swiss Info production, the International Public Media Company of Switzerland, available in many languages as well as English. Check out our other content at wwwswissinfoch. You can find Inside Geneva and review us and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening and do join us next time on Inside Geneva.
