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Spain pushes for setting up special int'l criminal court on terrorism

Xinhua, October 22, 2015 Adjust font size:

The Spanish mission to the United Nations will call a meeting among UN member states to discuss creating a special international criminal court on terrorism, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Garcia-Margallo said here Wednesday.

"On the 4th of November our mission will call -- along with the mission of Romania -- another meeting so we can talk about the International Criminal Court and terrorism," Garcia-Margallo said at a press conference here.

The meeting was needed because the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague does not have jurisdiction over some countries where terrorism is prevalent.

"We have suggested this idea to create a special court on terrorism which would have jurisdiction on all of these cases," he said. "An international criminal court would reach places that The Hague has not been able to reach and where national courts will not reach, so we can put an end to impunity."

The briefing came after a closed-door meeting where victims of terrorism told the 15 members of the UN Security Council about their experiences.

Spain, one of the 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council, holds the rotating council presidency for October.

Garcia-Margallo said that although governments often talked about terrorism among themselves, they rarely heard from victims of terrorism directly.

"This is also the first time that the victims can express themselves before the Security Council," he said. "They have a forum to express themselves before the 193 members of the international community."

For his part, Pari Ibrahim, executive director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, told journalists that her organization has launched its own case in the ICC against ISIS -- also known as Daesh or IS.

"We are trying to push the Security Council to start a full investigation against ISIS so that Yazidis can get the justice they want because what matters for the victims and for the treatment of post trauma is that the genocide against the Yazidis is going to be recognized as a genocide," said Ibrahim.

In March, the UN Human Rights Office issued a report claiming that ISIS may have committed the most serious international crimes -- including genocide -- against the Yazidi minority in Iraq.

Also speaking at the press conference, Spanish Minister for Interior Affairs Jorge Fernandez Diaz Minister said that Spain sympathized with victims of terrorism, due to its own experiences of terrorism.

"Spain has been a country that has been particularly hurt by terrorism," said Diaz. The Madrid train bombing of March 11, 2004, was the biggest terrorist attack in Europe's history, he said.

These experiences meant that Spain wanted to see victims of terrorism achieve justice, said Diaz.

"(Spain has) turned the first stone so that we can all build in the UN as an international community ... an international law recognizing the victims of terrorism," he said. Enditem