Impunity Watch: Europe

Fragments of Skull Found: Likely Belong to Murdered Ukrainian Journalist

By Elizabeth A. Conger
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

KIEV, Ukraine - Ukrainian investigators say they have uncovered fragments of a skull they believe belong to Georgiy Gongadze, a journalist who was decapitated nine years ago. The find came less than a week after a former Ukrainian general, Oleksiy Pukach, was arrested in connection with the murder. 

      
Photo: Georgiy Gongadze [Source: AP]

Spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office (PGO), Yuriy Boychenko, reported that the skull was found in a village outside of Kiev. The discovery came just days after the authorities arrested a key suspect who allegedly promised to lead the police to the location of Gongadze's head.

PGO press service told Interfax-Ukraine: "The fragments of a skull, which could belong to journalist Georgiy Gongadze, were found outside the village of Sukholisy in Bila Tserkva district, Kyiv region, on Tuesday."

Investigators were only able to recover fragments of the skull. According to Interfax-Ukraine, a source has said that a road was built over the spot where the skull fragments were found.

Gongadze was an investigative journalist who exposed high level corruption. He focused upon Ukraine's political elite, and was an outspoken critic of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. Gongadze was abducted in September of 2000 and found murdered in a forest outside of Kiev in November of that year.

General Pukach was the head of the interior ministry's surveillance department during Kuchma's presidency. Police are alleging that Pukach, himself, strangled Gongadze. Ukrainian investigators say that Pukach confessed to the killing after he was arrested on July 21, 2009 after having spent the past several years on the run. On July 23, 2009 a district court in Kiev remanded Pukach into custody for two months. 

Prosecutor General, Oleksandr Medvedko has refused to comment on whether Pukach has named those who ordered Gongadze's murder, but said that a "secret investigation" was underway.

 
Photo:  Oleksiy Pukach, who allegedly confessed to Gongadze's murder last week. [Source: AFP]

Three former officials of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry's foreign surveillance department and criminal intelligence unit were convicted of Gongadaze's murder in 2008, but Gongadze's family has always claimed that those responsible for the murder were higher up in the government.

Shortly after the 2000 killing, recordings made secretly by a member of President Kuchma's personal guard were released. These recordings include a conversation between Kuchma and the former interior minister, Yuri Kravchenko, discussing ways in which to remove Gongadze.

Kuchma denied any connection to the murder of Gongadze, but does not deny that the voice on the recording is his. Kravchenko was later found dead, allegedly of suicide. The tapes sparked months of protest in Ukraine, ultimately leading to the ousting of Kuchma in the Orange Revolution.

The body has yet to be buried as the journalist's mother, Lesia Gongadze, refuses to bury her son without his head.

For more information, please see:

AP - Skull pieces found in Ukraine likely journalist's - 28 July 2009

BBC - Ukraine finds 'reporter's skull' - 28 July 2009

Interfax-Ukraine - Source: Fragment of Gongadze's skull found - 28 July 2009

Kyiv Post - Prosecutors say examination will confirm whether fragments of skull belong to Gongadze - 28 July 2009

 

Serb Nationalist Convicted of Contempt

By Ese Omofoma
Impunity Watch Senior Desk Officer, Europe

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Serb nationalist, Vojislav Seselj, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for disclosing the names and details of protected witnesses at his war crimes trial.

In January, the tribunal charged Seselj with contempt relating to the publication of the names, occupations and addresses of witnesses. He was accused of writing a book in which the information was published, along with other material such as excerpts from a written statement by one witness, the disclosure of which was prohibited.

In his defense, Seselj produced five press articles he said had identified the protected witnesses prior to the publication of his book. However, the court rejected the claim, ruling that the press articles produced by the accused had not referred to the witnesses and had not contained references to their pseudonyms.  "The chamber considers this a serious interference with the administration of justice, particularly given the potential adverse impact of such conduct upon witnesses' confidence in the tribunal's ability to guarantee the effectiveness of protective measures," said Judge Kwon O-Gon.

Seselj had been on trial since 2007 for alleged crimes committed in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia between 1991 and 1994. Prosecutors at The Hague say Seselj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), recruited and indoctrinated Serb forces with speeches containing "poisonous ideas" and sent them to commit "unspeakable crimes" against hundreds of non-Serbs. Seselj is accused of forming a joint criminal enterprise with the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to "ethnically cleanse" large parts of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia's northern Vojvodina region.

Seselj, acting as his own lawyer, did not deny making nationalist speeches, but insists they did not constitute war crimes. He said the tribunal was illegitimate and biased against Serbs, and accused it of falsifying history by classing the 1995 Srebrenica massacre as genocide.

Seselj's trial for war crimes was suspended in February after prosecutors said the case was compromised by threats against a witness. It is not yet known when it will resume.

For more information, please see:

AP - Serb Radicals leader convicted of contempt - 24 July 2009

BBC- Serb Seselj convicted of contempt - 24 July 2009

Reuters - Serb nationalist convicted of contempt of court - 24 July 2009

Anti-Semitic Acts at Record High in the UK

By Elizabeth A. Conger
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

LONDON, England - According to the Community Security Trust (CST), 609 anti-Semitic attacks were reported in the UK between January and June, up from 276 incidents in the first half of the previous year. This figure also exceeds the previous year's total record of 598.

The Community Security Trust, a Jewish advisory body, has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents in the UK since 1984. The CST says that the rise in anti-Semitic acts directly corresponds with anger over Israel's military campaign in Gaza. The conflict in Gaza occurred between December 2008 and January 2009, and involved a twenty-two day long offensive against Gaza, in which more than 1,400 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis were killed.

The Gaza campaign was followed by an immediate spikein anti-Semitic incidents in the UK. In their report, the CST said: "The number of incidents recorded did return to normal pre-Gaza levels until April, some three months after the fighting in Gaza ended." 

Additionally, CST reported that while the number of anti-Semitic instances generally rises because of events in the Middle East, the surge which came as a result of the recent Gaza conflict "outstripped by far" any other such surge CST has encountered since they started gathering data in 1984.

The British Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis said that he was "deeply concerned" by the CST report.

 
Photo: LEFT: This swastika was found painted outside a Manchester Synagogue in January 2009. RIGHT: A sticker distributed in Bournemouth, recovered by the Jewish Community Security Trust [Source: CST / BBC News]

Most of the incidents involved abusive behavior, such as hate mail, graffiti, and racist abuse. However, the CST also reported seventy-seven violent assaults against individuals. Most of the incidents took place in London and Manchester, home to the two biggest Jewish communities in Britain.

CST spokesman, Mark Gardner said:  "British Jews are facing ever-higher levels of racist attack and intimidation that threaten the well-being of our otherwise happy and successful Jewish community...There is noexcuse for anti-Semitism, racism and bias, and it is totally unacceptable that overseas conflicts should be impacting here in this way."

For more information, please see:

TimesOnline - Gaza bombing sees attacks on Britain's Jews at highest for 25 years - 25 July 2009

Reuters India - Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain rise to record - 24 July 2009

AFP - British anti-Semitic attacks surged post Gaza: report - 23 July 2009

BBC - 'Record rise' in UK anti-Semitism - 23 July 2009

 

 

Ukrainian General Allegedly Confesses to Murder of Journalist: Senior Political Figures Implicated

 By Elizabeth A. Conger
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

KIEV, Ukraine - Vasyl Hrytsak, deputy head of the national security service, has reported that former Ukrainian general and intelligence officer, Oleksiy Pukach, has allegedly confessed to the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. Pukach has also implicated senior political officials in the slaying, but Hrytsak has not yet released the names of those implicated.

Gongadze's investigative reporting sought to expose high-level corruption. He was abducted in 2000, and his decapitated and burned body was found months later in in a forrest outside of Kiev.

  
Photo: Slain reporter, Georgiy Gongadze. [Source: AP]

Three former policemen were arrested and jailed for the murder last year, receiving twelve to thirteen year sentences. The family of the slain reporter has consistently claimed that someone more senior than the policemen were behind Gongadze's murder. 

Pukach remained on the run until he was apprehended last Tuesday. At the time of Gongadze's murder, Pukach was the chief of the interior ministry's surveillance department. Prosecutors are alleging that Pukach organized the abduction and personally strangled Gongadze.

In addition to Pukach's allegations that senior political leaders were behind the crime, secret tape recordings released after the murder appear to implicate Leonid Kuchma, President of Ukraine at the time of Gongadze's slaying. The tapes were covertly made by a member of Kuchma's personal guard, and were released by an opposing politician. In the recordings, Kuchma allegedly discusses ways to get rid of Gongadze with former interior minister, Yuri Kravchenko. Kravchenko was later found dead, allegedlyof suicide. Kuchma does not deny that it is his voice in the recordings, but claims that the tapes were doctored to make it sound as if he said things that he did not.

The scandal surrounding the tapes incited massive street protests against the Kuchma government, and resulted in his expulsion from power in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution.

 
Photo: Georgiy Gongadze's widow, Myroslava Gongadze. [Source: Kyiv Post]

Gongadze's widow, Myroslava, mother of Gongadze's twin daughters, has long held the belief that the evidence implicating the people who ordered her husband's murder has never been properly investigated.

She said of the confession: "For me and Ukraine it's a very important step in bringing justice to my husband...and generally to society. It's a cleansing process."

Viktor Yushchenko, the current pro-Western President of Ukraine, has pledged to fight corruption and to bring Gongadze's killers to justice. The arrest came during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Ukraine.

For more information, please see:

AP - Former Ukrainian official arrested in murder case - 22 July 2009

BBC - Ukraine general 'killed reporter' - 22 July 2009

Kyiv Post - Myroslav Gongadze: Kuchma has reason to fear Pukach's arrest - 22 July 2009

 

 

Bosnian Serb Cousins Found Guilty in Burning Deaths of Muslims

 
Photo: Milan Lukic entering the courtroom of the war crimes tribunal in The Hague yesterday. [Source: Ed Oudenaarden/AFP/Getty Images]

By Elizabeth A. Conger
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

THE HAGUE, The Netherlands - After a year in trial, judges at The Hague found cousins, Milan and Sredoje Lukic, guilty of war crimes which include the burning alive of Bosnian Muslim women and children. The crimes, committed between 1992 and 1994, were perpetuated against Bosnian Muslim populations near the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad.

The cousins were both members of the White Eagles, a Bosnian Serb paramilitary group also known as "the Avengers," that carried out an agenda of ethnic cleansing in the early 1990's. Milan Lukic, 41, was arrested in Argentina in August 2005 after being placed on The Hague tribunal's top fugitives list. Sredoje Lukic, 48, surrendered to Bosnian Serb authorities a month after Milan was caught.

 
Photo: Sredoje Lukic, left, and Milan Lukic, right. [Source: www.orbus.be]

Milan Lukic, the leader of the White Eagles paramilitary force, received a life sentence. He was found responsible for rounding up 130 women, children and elderly men into two houses near Visegrad, and burning them alive. Among those killed in the fire were newborn babies and pregnant women. Those who sought to flee the burning houses were shot. 

Milan Lukic's career has also included involvement in organized crime and drug racketeering. Furthermore, he was involved in protecting the networks of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

 
Photo: Milan Lukic, leader of the paramilitary group known as "the Avengers," was found guilty in the deaths of over 100 Bosnian Muslims.

Sredoje was found guilty as an accessory in one of the house burnings, but as it could not be determined that he was present at the other burning, received only a thirty year sentence.

As he read his verdict, Tribunal Judge Patrick Robinson said: "The perpetuation by Milan Lukic and Stredoje Lukic of crimes in this case is characterized by a callous and vicious disregard for human life."

Robinson said, "In the all too long, sad and wretched history of man's inhumanity to man, the Pionirska Street and Bikavac fires must rank high."

The president of the support group, 'Women-Victims of War,' Bakira Hasecic, said that she hoped both men would be tried by the Bosnian war crimes court for the rapes and torture of women they were not indicted for in The Hague. Hasecic, a rape victim during the war, said that the tribunal "only concentrated on the gravest crimes but it is only five percent of all the crimes they committed."

For more information, please see:

BBC - Bosnian Serbs guilty of burnings - 20 July 2009

CNN - Serb cousins guilty of burning Muslims alive - 20 July 2009

Reuters - Bosnian Serb pair jailed for burning Muslims alive - 20 July 2009

The Guardian - Serbian warlord gets life for crimes against humanity - 20 July 2009

 

 

Prominent Human Rights Activist Murdered: Medvedev Publicly Condemns her Killing

By Elizabeth A. Conger
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

MOSCOW, Russia - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has expressed public outrage at the murder of Natalia Estemirova, a human rights activist who was investigating alleged government backed militias in Chechnya. Estemirova was abducted from her home in the Chechen capital of Grozny on Wednesday, and her body was found eight hours later along a highway in neighboring Ingushetia with gunshot wounds.

 
Photo: Slain human rights activist Natalia Estemirova.  [Source: Musa Sadulayev / AP]

The President of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, said that those who perpetrated her murder "deserve no support and must be punished as the cruelest of criminals."

However, Oleg Orlov, the chairman of Estemirova's human rights organization, Memorial, has already accused the pro-Moscow Kadyrov of involvement in her murder. He said in a statement on the website, "I know, I am sure of it, who is guilty for the murder of Natalia...His name is Ramzan Kadyrov," and claimed that Kadyrov had previously threatened Estemirova.

Kadyrov, a former warlord, has been accused of participating in other beatings and torture. Estemirova is the latest in a string of individuals who had sought to expose Kadyrov and were murdered. Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer in Chechnya, was gunned down in Moscow six months ago, and weeks later a former bodyguard of Kadyrov's who had gone into exile was shot to death in Vienna. Additionally, two of Kadyrov's rivals have been murdered in the past year.

In her work for Memorial, she documented hundreds of cases of human rights abuses in Chechnya, drawing attention to crimes committed by government backed militias. 

 
Photo: Natalia Estemirova. [Source: AFP]

Estemirova, fifty-years-old at her death, was born in the Russian province of Saratov to Russian and Chechen parents, taught history in Grozny until 1998, and was the mother of a teenage daughter. During the second Chechen War in 1999, she began to report on human human rights abuses and civilian casualties. She joined Memorial in 2000, and in 2005 was awarded a Robert Schuman Medal by the European Parliament for her work.

In 2007 she was awarded the first ever Anna Politkovskaya award from the campaign group, Reach All Women in War. Estemirova was a close friend of Politkovskaya, a human rights journalist who was killed outside of her home in 2006.

The White House responded to her killing with a statement from National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer, which called on Russia to "bring to justice those responsible for this outrageous crime and demonstrate that lawlessness and impunity will not be tolerated."

The Kremlin has responded more quickly to Estemirova's murder than it has to the murders of other critics of the government in the past. President Medvedev offered condolences and has instructed the top Russian investigative official to take all measures necessary to solve the crime.

Colleagues reported that she had ignored death threats, and her persistent investigations and evidence collecting infuriated local officials. 

When asked by BBC reporters if she feared for her safety, she said, "Sometimes I just can't even come to feeling that because I have such strong other feelings...I try to be very exact about how I go about things and of course I do have worries about my family and people close to me but I still have to do my work."

For more information, please see:

BBC - Russian Leader Condemns Killing - 16 July 2009

Moscow Times - Rights Activist Abducted and Killed - 16 July 2009

Washington Post - Chechen Rights Activist is Slain - 16 July 2009

BBC - Obituary: Natalia Estemirova - 15 July 2009

 

Alleged Nazi John Demjanjuk to Face Prosecution for the Death Camp Murders of 27,900 in Germany's Last Major Nazi War Crimes Trial

By Nima Nayebi

Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe and North America

MUNICH, Germany - German prosecutors charged 89-year old retired US auto worker John Demjanjuk with the murders of 27,900 people during his time as an alleged death camp guard in Nazi-occupied Poland.

John Demjanjuk denies any involvement with the Holocaust. Photo: Daily Mirror

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk is alleged to have herded children into the gas chambers of Sobibor camp. Prosecutors said they have obtained damning evidence in the form of wartime documents, including an SS ID card, which prove Demjanjuk worked at Sobibor in 1943 and was trained at another Nazi facility. The documents have been authenticated by US and German experts.

Demjanjuk, who was born in 1920, was forced to join the Soviet army in 1941, but became a German PoW in 1942. He served at Nazi prison camps until 1944, but denies any involvement with the Holocaust. 

Demjanjuk immigrated to the US in 1951, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, and becoming a naturalised American in 1958. He was stripped of is citizenship in 1986 when he was accused of having been "Ivan the terrible," an infamous prison guard at the Treblinka concentration camp. He was subsequently extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to death in 1988.

The Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1993 on grounds that newly discovered evidence showed that another man has probably been Ivan. Following his acquittal, Demjanjuk returned to the US and regained his citizenship, only to loose it gain in 2002 after the Justice Department alleged he had been a concentration camp guard at three other facilities, including Sobibor.

The US Department of Justice released Demjanjuk's ID card in 2002. Photo: US Department of Justice (click for larger version)

In 2005, a US immigration judge cleared the way for his deportation to Germany, Ukraine, or Poland. A jurisdictional battle and a fruitless fight against extraditions ensued, but Demjanjuk was finally extradited to Germany on 12 May 2009. 

Munich prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant for Demjanjuk in March of this year. The warrant accuses him of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people, the number of arrivals at Sobibor during his time as an alleged guard at the camp. The number of victims was originally estimated at 29,000, but was reduced because some prisoners were killed before reaching the camp. A quarter million people were gassed at Sobibor during the 18 months it was in use by the Nazis.

His relatives have argued that Demjanjuk is too frail to stand trial due to cancer, arthritis, and kidney disease, and that he has only about 15 months to live. German doctors have ascertained that he is fit enough to withstand trial, so long as the hearings are restricted to two 90-minute sessions per day.

Elderly and frail Nazi suspects have withstood trial in the past. According to the Associated Press, :in 2001, Anton Malloth, an 89-year-old former guard at the Theresienstadt fortress in then-occupied Czechoslovakia, sat through his trial in Munich in a wheelchair, connected to an IV drip. He was sentenced to life in prison for beating a Jewish inmate to death, and died a year later."

Each one of the 27,900 murders carries a 15-year sentence in under German law. 

A court date has not been set, but it is expected that the trial, probably Germany's last major Nazi war crimes prosecution, will take place sometime this autumn.

An pre-extradition AP report may be viewed below:

 

For more information, please see:

AP - Chronology of Demjanjuk case - 14 July 2009

Daily News - 27,900: Deported Nazi John Demjanjuk finally facing justice for death camp murders - 14 July 2009

Irish Times - Germany charges alleged Nazi with 27,900 counts of murder - 14 July 2009

Mirror UK - Nazi death camp trial: Guard charged with 28,000 murders - 14 July 2009

Impunity Watch - Demjanjuk Declared Fit to Stand Trial - 3 July 2009

Greek Police Bulldoze Migrant Camp

Elizabeth A. Conger
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

PATRAS, Greece - Approximately a hundred members of the Greek Special Anti-Riots Force demolished a makeshift migrant camp in Patras before dawn yesterday morning. Patras, a port town in western Greece, has been the home of thousands of migrants who hope to make their way into Western Europe through Italy.

The police escorted bulldozers into the camp, flattening dozens of cardboard and plastic hovels, leaving only a makeshift mosque and a tent used by volunteer doctors standing. The camp was largely empty today, as residents had been forewarned of its demolition. However, approximately a hundred individuals, including thirty minors, were detained by the police and housed in a local hotel.

 
Photo: Part of the Patras migrant camp was set alight as police destroyed the camp. [Source: Sky News]

The Red Cross has described the early morning effort by the police as "terrorizing" the migrants, and it is reported that many were injured by police attacks.

In recent months the camp has been occupied by roughly 1,800 people, largely arriving from Afghanistan. Those living in the camp generally range between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, and have lived in the camp for months at a time without proper water or hygiene facilities. Clashes have recently been growing between Somali and Afghani residents of the camp, causing further tension with the Greek residents of Patras.

 
Photo: The migrant camp at Patras before its destruction. [Source: GR Reporter]

The BBC has reported that the bulldozing of the migrant camp will likely force many immigrants to seek out the services of traffickers in Athens and Italy who demand as much as $8,000 for passage out of Greece.

The bulldozing of the camp is part of an effort by the the conservative government in Athens to take tougher measures against migrants. This effort has heightened since the success of the right-wing nationalist Laos party in the recent European parliamentary election. Additionally, many Greeks regarded the camp as an eyesore for themselves and for tourists arriving from Italy, and tensions had been escalating between the city residents and camp dwellers.

Greece has recently been criticized internationally for its policy towards would-be asylum seekers. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has described the situation as an "emergency" and has called upon the Greek government to improve its procedures for receiving immigrants who claim asylum in Greece, and to upgrade their immigrant reception centers.

For more information, please see:

GR Reporter - Police destroyed illegal immigrant camp near Patra - 13 July 2009

Kathimerini - Patra immigrant camp cleared out - 13 July 2009

AFP - Police bulldoze migrant camp in Greek port - 12 July 2009

BBC - Greek police flatten migrant camp - 12 July 2009

France: Life Sentence in Anti-Semitic Murder Case

By Elizabeth A. Conger
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

 
Photo: Youssouf Fofana, the gang leader convicted of abducting, torturing and murdering Ilan Halimi, a 23 year-old Jewish man. [Source: Issouf Sanog/AFP/Getty Images]

PARIS, France -  In a case that sent shock waves through France, Youssouf Fofana was convicted today of killing Ilan Halimi. Fofana, 28, was found guilty of the 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of the 23-year-old Jewish man.

Fofana led a gang of twenty seven youths in Bagneux, a western suburb of Paris, who held Halimi captive for twenty four days. He was constrained and bound with tape, beaten, stabbed, slashed, and burned with cigarettes and acid. The gang, known as "the Barbarians," tied Halimi to a tree in a wooded area near a train station in Ste.-Geneviève-des-Bois, a suburb south of Paris. Naked, stabbed, and set on fire, Halimi died of his injuries on the way to the hospital.

Ilan Halimi had been lured by a young French-Iranian girl who came into the mobile phone shop where he worked and invited him to go on a date. He was abducted after driving to meet the 17-year-old girl, who was a member of Fofana's gang. In an abandoned apartment Halimi was attacked, beaten and drugged by gang members.

Fofana was quoted in 2006 as saying that the plan had been to kidnap a Jew because, "they're loaded with dough."

 
Photo: Ilan Halimi, the 23 year-old Jewish man tortured and murdered by Youssouf Fofana and his gang. [Source: AFP]

After Halimi's abduction the gang made phone calls to Halimi's family and sent text messages, some with horrific images of Halimi, demanding a ransom of $500,000. This sum was later decreased to $5,000. Halimi's family were instructed to send the ransom to the Ivory Coast where Fofana was later arrested.

Fofana and his gang told Halimi's family that if they did not have the money for the ransom, they should "go and get it from [their] synagogue." Furthermore, they later contacted a rabbi saying, "We have a Jew."

Ruth Halimi, mother of the victim, said that if Ilan "had not been Jewish, he would not have been murdered." Additionally, she accused the police of being slow to accept the anti-Semitic nature of her son's murder because they did not want to offend the Muslim population.

Fofana, born in France to parents from the Ivory Coast, has a history of violence and run-ins with the law. He served two years for stealing a car and beating the car's owner, and emerged as the leader of an interracial gang called "the Barbarians" after he left prison at the age of twenty one.

At the trial's opening Fofana was heard to shout, "Allah will prevail," and declared that the date of his birth was February 13, 2006, the day that Ilan Halimi died. Fofana was raised in a nominally religious family, and lawyers said that Fofana's actions emanated from his desire for money and his stereotype of Jews, rather than from genuine religious conviction.

The French authorities held a closed trial as several of the defendants were under the age of eighteen at the time of the crime. However, lawyers on both sides of the case said that this move was regrettable as the trial would have been instructive for French society.

 
Photo: Ilan Halimi's murder sparked a wave of public outcry in France. [Source AFP]

Halimi's murder triggered tens of thousands to take to the streets in protest of anti-Semitism in France, a country which has Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish populations. The murder came months after the violent 2005 riots in France, which underscored the depth of disenfranchisement, poverty and frustration felt by immigrant populations. Some viewed the case as representative of the poverty and ignorance experienced by immigrants in France, and the anti-Semitic stereotypes held by members of such populations as evidence of this. Additionally, the case reveals the growth in power of gangs in the poor suburbs of Paris.

Fofana, extradited to France in 2006, went on trial this past April. He was given the maximum sentence in France of life in prison with no possibility of parole for twenty two years. Fofana's accomplices received sentences ranging from fifteen to eighteen years in prison. The young woman charged with luring Halimi to his captors received nine years in prison.

For more information, please see:

NY Times - Man Sentenced to Life for Killing of Jew in France - 10 July 2009

Times Online - Youssouf Fofana jailed for the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi - 11 July 2009

BBC - Inside France's 'Barbarian' trial - 10 July 2009

 

Hackers: Rupert Murdoch's 'News of the World' Allegedly Involved in Mass Violation of Privacy

By Nima Nayebi

Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe and North America

LONDON, UK - The Guardian UK reported Wednesday that Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers paid out more than £1 million ($1.6 million) to gag victims of an alleged phone-hacking scheme by its News of the World and Sun newspapers. The payments were made to settle legal cases that threatened to expose the company's repeated use of criminal tactics to break stories.

Murdoch journalists helped by private investigators allegedly hacked into the voice mail boxes of thousands of public figures to gain unlawful access to confidential data such as "tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills" according to the Guardian. "Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators."

The suppressed lawsuits have been linked to the 2007 imprisonment of News of the World journalist Clive Goodman, who hacked into the mobile phones of royal staff members in violation of the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. At the time, News Group denied knowledge of any other journalists being involved in such acts and that Mr. Goodman had acted without their knowledge. 

The most recent scandal reportedly involved the hacking of two to three thousand mobile phones. In an interview with Bloomberg, Mr. Murdoch denied knowledge of the payments. "If that had happened, I would know about it," he said. Mr. Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox News, MySpace, Dow Jones, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Sky Television, 20th Century Fox, and Photobucket among others.

London's Metropolitan Police is reportedly no longer investigating the case, however, the House of Commons is conducting its own investigation into the allegations. “If there were more than 1,000 phone taps, it beggars belief that this was just one journalist and that senior executives didn’t know,” said lawmaker Chris Huhne in Parliament today.

These new phone hacking allegations have brought the contentious issue of privacy as a human right into the UK spotlight.

According to Bloomberg, "[s]ome media analysts said the revelations are not a surprise given the dog-eat-dog world of U.K. tabloids."

For more information, please see:

BBC - New phone hack inquiry ruled out - 9 July 2009

Bloomberg - Murdoch Newspapers to be Probed Over Hacking Claims - 9 July 2009

Guardian UK - Sir Alex Ferguson and Alan Shearer calls were hacked - 9 July 2009