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55 ICJ Newsl. 1 (1993)

handle is hein.icj/icjnews0055 and id is 1 raw text is: 6 NO 55 Ocoer19 CIJL Reports World-Wide Attacks on Justice On 16 August 1993, the Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers (CIJL) released its fifth annual report Attacks on Justice. The report demonstrated that violence against in- dividual judges and lawyers continued to escalate. The report also analyzed various legal systems, and assessed their level of respect for judicial and legal independence. This year's Attacks on Justice cata- logued the cases of 352 jurists in 54 countries who have suffered reprisals for carrying out their professional func- tions. Of these, 32 were killed, 3 were disappeared, 34 were attacked, 81 received threats of violence, 95 were detained, and 107 were professionally sanctioned. This violence has been car- ried out not only by governments, but also by opposition groups, land-owners, guerrilla, and para-military groups. The report found that in Colombia alone, 18 judicial officers were killed, 10 received death-threats, seven kid- napped, and three were tortured. Co- lombia has traditionally experienced widespread violence. Although the Co- lombian Government has set up several supervisory and investigative organs over the last two years, attacks against judges and lawyers have continued to occur with impunity. In Haiti, pro-democracy lawyers and judges have been tortured, attacked and killed. Death threats against human rights lawyers were issued in an attempt to deter these jurists from carrying out their professional duties. This trend particu- larly increased in Northern Ireland. Thirty-nine lawyers have been subjected to threats and intimidation by the police this year. When the reportwas presented before the Sub-Commission, the United Kingdom exercized its right to reply stat- ing that there lacked adequate facts to investigate these cases. The CIJL had to withhold the names of these lawyers for fear of reprisals. The government's fail- ICJ NEWSLETTER NO 55/1993 ure to resolve the case of Mr Patrick Finucane, a leading human rights law- yer murdered in February 1989, main- tained the CIJL's concern over the safety of these lawyers. In many countries of the world, law- yers faced sanctions for their human rights work. Jurists were arbitrarily de- Continued on Page 2 ICJ Denounces Human Rights Abuses at UN Sub-Commision T he 45th Session of the United Na- tions Sub-Commission on Pre- vention of Discrimination and Protec- tion of Minorities met in Geneva be- tween 2-27 August 1993. It was attended by the ICJ Secretary General and the ICJ/CIJL Legal Of- ficers who delivered statements on a number of items. This was the first major international gathering on l- man rights following the UN World Conference on Human Rights, which took place in Vienna in June. As such, the expectations of the NGO communi- ty in general, and of the ICJ in particu- lar, ran high. The ICJ/CIJL released several reports at the occasion of the meeting. Continued on Page 4 The news that war crimes were, in 1993, being committed with impunity and on a daily ba- sis in camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina (photo), as well as in regions of Angola, Somalia, Cambodia and the Caucasus took the world by storm. The creation of a permanent Interna- tional Penal Court would break the cycle of impunity. H

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