Marlise Simons is a Dutch-born journalist who joined The New York Times in 1982.
She has been based in Paris since 1989, covering a range of subjects across Europe and elsewhere. Most recently she has focused on international human rights law and on trials involving war crimes and genocide at both national and international courts.
Simons has worked extensively as a journalist throughout Latin America, also reporting for The Washington Post . She was based in Mexico City from 1971 to 1984 and in Rio de Janeiro from 1984 to 1989.
For The New York Times, she has reported from Central and South America and the Caribbean on conflicts and political murder, torture and disappearances in Latin America. [1] She has also reported on environmental issues in the Brazilian Amazon. [2]
She currently works for The New York Times's Paris Bureau. In Europe her writing has covered political, social, cultural and environmental issues and in particular proceedings at international courts and tribunals in The Hague dealing with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. She has reported extensively on the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [3] [4] and the International Criminal Court. [5] [ original research? ]
Simons was born in Sittard, The Netherlands. She is married to Alan Riding, a journalist and author, with whom she has a son, Alexander.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal was an ad hoc court located in The Hague, Netherlands.
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
Crimes against humanity are certain serious crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as foreign nationals. Together with war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity are one of the core crimes of international criminal law and, like other crimes against international law, have no temporal or jurisdictional limitations on prosecution.
Biljana Plavšić is a Bosnian Serb former politician, university professor and scientist who served as President of Republika Srpska and was later convicted of crimes against humanity for her role in the Bosnian War.
Goran Jelisić is a Bosnian Serb war criminal who was found guilty of having committed crimes against humanity and violating the customs of war by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at the Luka camp in Brčko during the Bosnian War. Jelisić called himself the "Serb Adolf Hitler" and admitted that his "motivation and goal was to kill Muslims".
Carla Del Ponte is a Swiss former Chief Prosecutor of two United Nations international criminal law tribunals. A former Swiss attorney general, she was appointed prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in August 1999, replacing Louise Arbour.
The Bosnian genocide took place during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995 and included both the Srebrenica massacre and the wider crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing campaign perpetrated throughout areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25000–30000 Bosniak civilians by VRS units under the command of General Ratko Mladić.
Theodor Meron, is an American lawyer and judge. He served as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (Mechanism). He served as President of the ICTY four times and inaugural President of the Mechanism for three terms (2012–19).
International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
Antonio Cassese was an Italian jurist who specialized in public international law. He was the first President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the first President of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon which he presided over until his resignation on health grounds on 1 October 2011.
Félicien Kabuga is a Rwandan businessman and genocide suspect who played a major role in the run-up to the Rwandan genocide. A multimillionaire, he was closely connected to dictator Juvénal Habyarimana's Hutu nationalist MRND party and the Akazu, an informal group of Hutu extremists who helped lead the Rwandan genocide.
The Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [2007] ICJ 2, commonly known as the Bosnian Genocide Case, is a public international law case decided by the International Court of Justice.
Pamela Yates is an American documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She has directed films about war crimes, racism, and genocide in the United States and Latin America, often with emphasis on the legal responses.
Dragan Nikolić was a Bosnian Serb army commander of the Sušica detention camp near Vlasenica in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina who was charged with war crimes. He was arrested in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) and taken to the Hague in Netherlands for trial.
The Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić was a case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, concerning crimes committed during the Bosnian War by Radovan Karadžić, the former President of Republika Srpska. In 2016, Karadžić was found guilty of 10 of 11 counts of crime including war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 40 years imprisonment. In 2019, the sentence was increased to life in prison.
Radovan Karadžić is a Bosnian Serb politician who was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He was the president of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War.
Florence Hartmann is a French journalist and author. During the 1990s she was a correspondent in the Balkans for the French newspaper Le Monde. In 1999 she published her first book, Milosevic, la diagonale du fou, reissued by Gallimard in 2002. From October 2000 until October 2006 she was official spokesperson and Balkan adviser to Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Payam Akhavan is an Iranian-born Canadian lawyer. He is nominated as a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague by Bangladesh. He is a Senior Fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto and is a visiting adjunct at its Faculty of Law.
Throughout the ongoing Darfur genocide in the Darfur war there has been a systematic campaign of rape, which has been used as a weapon of war, in the ethnic cleansing of black Africans from the region. The majority of rapes have been carried out by the Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed paramilitary groups. The actions of the Janjaweed have been described as genocidal rape, with not just women, but children also being raped, as well as babies being bludgeoned to death and the sexual mutilation of victims being commonplace.
Amal Clooney is a British international human rights lawyer. She has represented several high-profile clients, including former Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad, Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa, Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, and Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy. She has also held various appointments with both the United Nations and the Government of the United Kingdom. She is an adjunct law professor at Columbia Law School. In 2016, she and her husband, American actor George Clooney, co-founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice.