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Liesbeth Zegveld (born 14 January 1970) is a Dutch lawyer, legal expert and professor.
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Liesbeth Zegveld (born 14 January 1970) is a Dutch lawyer, legal expert and professor.
Zegveld was born in Ridderkerk and grew up on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee in South Holland, the Netherlands. After her law studies at Utrecht University she obtained a doctoral degree cum laude in 2000. She received several awards for her doctoral thesis Accountability of Armed Opposition Groups in International Law.
In 2000, she was sworn in as a lawyer; and in 2005, she became a partner at Prakken d'Oliveira Human Rights Lawyers. At this law firm, Zegveld heads the international law and human rights department, where her cases mainly focus on liability for violations of human rights and compensation for victims of war.
Between 2006 and 2013, Zegveld was a professor at Leiden University, where she lectured on international humanitarian law, in particular on the rights of women and children during armed conflict. She has been professor of war reparations at the University of Amsterdam since the end of 2013.
Liesbeth Zegveld is a member of the Dutch Human Rights Watch committee and former member of the Committee on Reparation for Victims of Armed Conflict within the International Law Association and a member of the Netherlands Society for International Law.
Zegveld is well known for her work on the Srebrenica case of the Bosnian genocide, where she represented the relatives of two victims of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. Before the Dutch courts, Zegveld asserted that Dutchbat – the Dutch battalion of the United Nations Protection Force that was responsible for the protection of the Srebrenica enclave – and the Dutch government knowingly exposed Bosnian Muslims to the enemy Bosnian Serb Army. In 2013, the Dutch Supreme Court accepted the claim. [1]
In 2011, Zegveld represented seven widows and two others in a case filed by the Dutch Honorary Debts Committee Foundation against the Dutch state for its involvement in the Rawagede massacre of 9 December 1947, during which 431 Indonesian villagers were killed by the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. Following a judgment by the Court of The Hague, [2] the state decided to settle the matter, publicly apologising for its involvement and paying €20.000 in compensation to each still living stakeholder. [3]
In 2011 and 2013, Zegveld represented family members of victims of the 1976–81 military regime of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina, who reported Jorge Zorreguieta – the father of Queen Máxima of the Netherlands – to the Public Prosecution Service for his role in the regime. [4]
Zegveld also represented the victims of Iraqi chemical attacks against Iran during the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88 in a case against Frans van Anraat, a Dutch businessman who sold materials to produce chemical weapons to the Iraqi regime during the war. All victims were granted €25.000 in damages. [5]
Another high-profile case was that of Azhar Sabah Jaloud, who was fatally shot at a Dutch military checkpoint on 24 April 2007 during the Iraq War. On behalf of the young man's father, Zegveld started a case against the Dutch state, which resulted in a successful complaint against the Netherlands before the European Court of Human Rights. [6]
On behalf of the Federation of Dutch Trade Unions and a Bangladeshi migrant worker, Zegveld held the FIFA accountable for the mistreatment of migrant workers who prepare the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. [7]
Zegveld represented the families of two Moluccan perpetrators of the 1977 Dutch train hijacking in a case against the Dutch government. [8] In July 2018, the Court of The Hague dismissed the case, concluding that the Dutch state had not taken unlawful action in ending the hostage crisis. [9]
In 2018, Zegveld and her client Salo Muller persuaded the Dutch state-owned rail operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen to pay compensation to Holocaust survivors and relatives of those transported by Dutch rail to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. [10]
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 widespread or systemic criminal acts which are committed by or on behalf of a de facto authority, usually by or on behalf of a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war. They are not isolated or sporadic events because they are part of a government policy or they are part of a widespread practice of atrocities which is tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. They do not need to be part of an official policy, but they only need to be tolerated by authorities.
The Anfal campaign was a counterinsurgency operation which was carried out by Ba'athist Iraq from February to September 1988 during the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict at the end of the Iran–Iraq War. The campaign targeted rural Kurds because its purpose was to eliminate Kurdish rebel groups and Arabize strategic parts of the Kirkuk Governorate. The Iraqis committed atrocities on the local Kurdish population, mostly civilians.
The Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide, was the July 1995 genocidal killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica, during the Bosnian War. The killings were perpetrated by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of Ratko Mladić. The Scorpions, a paramilitary unit from Serbia, who had been part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, also participated in the massacre. Prior to the massacre, United Nations (UN) had declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, a "safe area" under UN protection. However, the UN failed both to demilitarize the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) within Srebrenica and to force withdrawal of the VRS surrounding Srebrenica. UNPROFOR's 370 lightly armed Dutchbat soldiers were unable to prevent the town's capture and the subsequent massacre. A list of missing or killed people during the massacre compiled by the Bosnian Federal Commission of Missing Persons contains 8,372 names. As of July 2012, 6,838 genocide victims have been identified through DNA analysis of body parts recovered from mass graves; as of July 2021, 6,671 bodies have been buried at the Memorial Centre of Potočari, while another 236 have been buried elsewhere.
International humanitarian law (IHL), also referred to as the laws of armed conflict, is the law that regulates the conduct of war. It is a branch of international law that seeks to limit the effects of armed conflict by protecting persons who are not participating in hostilities and by restricting and regulating the means and methods of warfare available to combatants.
The Bosnian genocide refers to either the Srebrenica massacre or the wider crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing campaign throughout areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. 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 25,000–30,000 Bosniak civilians by VRS units under the command of General Ratko Mladić.
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands, officially the High Council of the Netherlands, is the final court of appeal in civil, criminal and tax cases in the Netherlands, including Curaçao, Sint Maarten and Aruba. The Court was established on 1 October 1838 and is located in The Hague.
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.
Lyal S. Sunga is a well-known specialist on international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law.
Thomas Jakob Peter Karremans is the former commander of Dutchbat troops in Srebrenica at the time of the Srebrenica genocide during the Bosnian War. Dutchbat had been assigned to defend the Bosniak enclave made the U.N. "safe area", but it failed to prevent the Serbs from taking the city. The scene of him drinking wine with Ratko Mladic is still considered very controversial.
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.
The Hague Initiative for Law and Armed Conflict is an initiative of the Netherlands Red Cross and the T.M.C. Asser Instituut. Its goal is to bring all actors in the field of International Humanitarian Law in the Netherlands together, and to disseminate International Humanitarian Law through different activities. Recently, HILAC has joined forces with the Amsterdam Center for International Law of the University of Amsterdam. The Hague Initiative for Law and Armed Conflict organizes a monthly lecture series, speakers in 2008 include:
Hasan Nuhanović is a Bosnian survivor of the Srebrenica genocide who campaigns "For truth and justice" on behalf of other survivors and relatives of the victims. Hasan, the former U.N. interpreter for Dutch peacekeepers who were stationed in Srebrenica in 1995, at the end of the Bosnian war, has been battling the Dutch state in civil court for nine years. Finally, in July 2011, he won on appeal against the Dutch Government with court stating the Dutchbat are to blame for handing over his family members to forces of Ratko Mladić, who was tried in The Hague. His entire immediate family: mother, father and brother, were murdered by the Bosnian Serb Army and its allies from Serbia proper, when they were handed over to them by Dutch U.N. soldiers after seeking refuge in the UN protection force base at Potočari following the fall of the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. Bosnian investigative journalist Dragan Stanimirović nicknamed him the “Elie Wiesel of Bosnia", in a reference to another activist survivor of genocide. His story, Zbijeg, was published in Bosnian in 2012 and in English as The Last Refuge: A True Story of War, Survival and Life Under Siege in Srebrenica in 2019.
Payam Akhavan is an Iranian-born 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.
The Rawagede massacre, was committed by the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army on 9 December 1947 in the village of Rawagede. Forces of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army were battling Indonesian Republican army fighters TNI and militia forces seeking independence for Indonesia. Almost all males from the village, amounting to 431 men according to most estimates, were killed by the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, since the people of the village would not tell them where the Indonesian independence fighter Lukas Kustaryo was hiding.
GS Media BV v Sanoma Media Netherlands BV and Others (C-160/15) is a case decided by the European Court of Justice. The case regards a request for a Preliminary ruling by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands on whether hyperlinking to a public third-party website that contains work(s) published without the consent of the rightholder constitutes a "communication to the public" within the meaning of article 3 of the Copyright Directive.
Bosnian genocide denial is the act of denying the occurrence of the systematic Bosnian genocide against the Bosniak Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or asserting it did not occur in the manner or to the extent that has been established by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) through proceedings and judgments, and described by comprehensive scholarship.
The Cover-up General is a non-fiction thriller by Dutch author Edwin F. Giltay, first published in 2014. The book describes an espionage scandal he witnessed first-hand, within military intelligence of the Armed forces of the Netherlands. At the root of it all was the infamous film roll of Srebrenica depicting war crimes, which was misdeveloped by a navy photo laboratory.
The Dutch Honorary Debts Committee Foundation is an independent interest group in the Netherlands and Indonesia for victims of Dutch colonialism in the former Dutch East Indies (1603–1949), in particular within the context of the Indonesian National Revolution of 1945–1949.
Media related to Liesbeth Zegveld at Wikimedia Commons
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