She cannot tell it herself, but with her miserable death, Reda, a five-year-old Yazidi girl, has made legal history after all. A German court on Tuesday found Taha al-Jumaily, the 29-year-old Iraqi supporter of Islamic State who drove her to death, guilty of genocide. A world first, as the president of the court in Frankfurt himself established. Because never before has an IS member been convicted of this most serious crime in international law. In addition, Al-Jumaily was convicted of crimes against humanity and human trafficking. He got a life sentence.
“It is an important acknowledgment of the suffering of the Yazidis,” says Jan Kizilhan, a German psychologist who himself comes from this small religious minority who lives mainly in Syria and Iraq. Kizilhan has been fighting for years for the mass killings and rapes of Yazidis by IS members to be recognized as genocide. “Yesterday I spoke to several of the 1,100 Yazidi women with post-traumatic disorder that I brought to Germany for treatment,” he says over the phone. “They were happy and said: nice that our new country thinks of us and supports us.”
Reda and her mother Nora were bought by the man and his German wife at a slave market in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2015. Once the girl had wet the bed, she was ruthlessly punished. At a temperature of 50 degrees Celsius, she was chained to a barred window in the blazing sun. She was not allowed to drink. Only when she was already dead or nearly dead was she released. After that she could not be saved.
The court reasoned that Al-Jumaily treated the girl this way because he thought – in line with IS ideology – that the Yazidis should be exterminated because they are devil worshippers. In evidence, the judges argued that Al-Jumaily forced Nora to call her daughter by an Arabic name in order to strip her of her identity. Al-Jumaily’s wife Jennifer, who herself was sentenced to ten years earlier for crimes against humanity, testified that her husband thought Yazidis were “worth nothing”. In the two years of the trial, Al-Jumaily never apologized to the mother who survived.
On the basis of the so-called principle of universality, the German judiciary can prosecute certain serious crimes, even if they were committed outside Germany. Al-Jumaily was arrested in Greece in 2019 and then extradited to Germany. On the same principle, some executioners of the regime of Syrian President Assad were recently prosecuted in Germany.
The concept of genocide dates back to after the Second World War and was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, following the Nazi massacre of the Jews. Initially, the term was mainly considered to apply to the murder of entire peoples or large parts of them, such as the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. The term genocide also suggests that: of the ancient Greek genos (race or tribe) and the Latin cide (to kill). The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia also classified the murder of approximately 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica as genocide.
‘Bar is too high for genocide criteria’
However, some international lawyers, including the well-known British professor, criminal lawyer and author Philippe Sands, have argued for some time that a less rigid application of the term is necessary. “I think we set the bar too high. I myself tried to do something about this in the lawsuit of Croatia against Serbia in 2014, but that failed,” he says on the phone from Chile, where he works for.
Sands is pleased that the German prosecutor was now successful and that the judge concluded that even one person can be guilty of genocide if they are part of a group with an ideology that aims to exterminate another group because of race or religion. “This seems to indicate a more realistic approach,” says Sands, “a bit away from that high threshold we had and more towards the intentions of the concept’s founders. It’s not about the numbers, it’s about the intention of the perpetrator.”
Also read: ‘The label of genocide is too easily pasted after the Holocaust’
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source https://pledgetimes.com/recognition-of-genocide-by-german-court-offers-yazidis-comfort/
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