London-based UN expert says Geneva unit will investigate civilian drone deaths
The United Nations plans to set up a special investigation unit examining claims of civilian deaths in individual US covert drone strikes.
UN investigators have been critical of US ‘extrajudicial executions’ since they began in 2002. The new Geneva-based unit will also look at the legality of the programme.
The latest announcement, by UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson QC, was made in a speech on October 25 at Harvard law school. Emmerson, who monitors counter-terrorism for the UN, previously called in August for the US to hand over video of each covert drone attack.
The London-based lawyer became the second senior UN official in recent months to label the tactic of deliberately targeting rescuers and funeral-goers with drones ‘a war crime’. That practice was first exposed by the Bureau for the Sunday Times in February 2012.
‘The Bureau has alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns … has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view,’ said Emmerson.
‘Last resort’
Both Heyns and Emmerson have become increasingly vocal in recent months, even as the United States attempts to put its targeted killings scheme on a more formal footing.
‘If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms… then it may in the last resort be necessary for the UN to act. Together with my colleague Christof Heyns, [the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings], I will be launching an investigation unit within the special procedures of the [UN] Human Rights Council to inquire into individual drone attacks,’ Emmerson said in his speech.
The unit will also look at ‘other forms of targeted killing conducted in counter-terrorism operations, in which it is alleged that civilian casualties have been inflicted, and to seek explanations from the states using this technology and the states on whose territory it is used. [It] will begin its work early next year and will be based in Geneva.
‘The [global] war paradigm was always based on the flimsiest of reasoning, and was not supported even by close allies of the US,’ he added. ’The first-term Obama administration initially retreated from this approach, but over the past 18 months it has begun to rear its head once again, in briefings by administration officials seeking to provide a legal justification for the drone programme of targeted killing in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.’
Emmerson singled out both President Obama and the Republican challenger Mitt Romney for criticism. ‘It is perhaps surprising that the position of the two candidates on this issue has not even featured during their presidential elections campaigns, and got no mention at all in Monday night’s foreign policy debate. We now know that the two candidates are in agreement on the use of drones.’
The UN expert made clear in his speech that pressure for action is now coming from member states – including two permanent members of the Security Council: ‘During the last session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in June many states, including Russia and China called for an investigation into the use of drone strikes as a means of targeted killing. One of the States that made that call was Pakistan,’ he noted.
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October 26th, 2012 at 12:59 pm (#)
I totally support the UN investigating civilian deaths and point out strongly that drones radicalize. I had the following response today from a young man displaced from Waziristan due to drones and internal conflict between the Pakistan military and the Taliban… “You asked a question from me that if Pakistan come out from USA war (though there is no official war) then will Tribals be finished with Taliban and I said that why Tribal people are not finishing now with Taliban, why are they not doing something against them, because when they seeing that they are fighting for us then why would they take action against them. I know when a drone is targeted by Taliban then how happy the Tribals are for them.” He recently told me of the case of a young student in his final year of study that became radicalized and a suicide bomber due to family and friends being killed by drones… The father of the dead young man wanted people to listen and stop using drones… it is counterproductive!
November 1st, 2012 at 11:33 am (#)
With USA openly – on an extremely shaky basis I would say – disrespects completely International Law, Human Law etc.
the case should be opened exact about these facts.
So it should not only the civilian deaths investigated what should investigated is that USA is disrespecting International Law and the sovereignity of other states.
USA declaring persons as “danger to its country” is practically truthless and reminds me on the Middle Ages where the Roman-Catholic Church worked out its demonizing of not so favored individuals which were sometimes political important persons.
With this killing machines USA together with its secret services working outside USA declares practically our whole globe to its political game ground except Russia and China, however I am sure that CIA is working there to start turmoil within some groups to weaken these countries as it did in Europe during the Cold War Era and in other smaller countries too and still does nowadays in other smaller and weaker countries far too often.
So drones just show how USA sees itself: a master playing with its puppets whether it is the EU or the UNO and declaring smaller and defenseless countries as their play ground. As long as other big countries don’t speak up nothing will change.
USA is doing what it wants to do and it doesn’t even care about its own citizen (the brutality of their police speaks for itself and drones are already adopted as a means of law to control the population respectively some “targeted” individuals). How sad these developments.
Human lives don’t count in the eyes of US politicans.
Especially if they are foreigners.
Maybe we are going back to these times where only a very few (clerics, kings and nobility) had their say.
So I would say: nowadays the air is the newly explored road to bomb innocent people wherever they live into death and to bring countries, especially poor ones, into focus where the game can take place – to the liking of USA “master of puppets”; already on a global scale.
It will not give-up this dangerous game unless it is forced to do.
monalisa
December 4th, 2012 at 4:40 pm (#)
At the top of this webpage you have some numbers on the various number of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes. But you don’t say where these numbers come from, merely that they were — in “passive voice” — reported. Who reported them, the CIA itself I would guess, since the number of civilians killed is, at least to me, ridiculously low, roughly 6 to 1 combatants to civilians. Are you simply taking the CIA, or the Pentagon, at their word? Clearly that would be as foolish as taking seriously the nearly always reduced numbers of any party or government carrying out mass killings. What EVIDENCE do you have that these numbers are anywhere close to realistic? Certainly everything I have read or heard about U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, at least outside of the completely independently unconfirmed repetition of government or Pentagon “official estimates” as provided in the many “ready to report” press releases which are generally never investigated before being widely disseminated, usually even verbatim, by the U.S. mainstream media,leads me to believe that the truth is much closer to 6 civilians for every 1 “combatant” however liberally the latter term is stretched, as it invariably is, to include almost anyone who conceivably could be a “bad guy” [sic] whatever that puerile term is supposed to mean. Indeed, there are enough reports, and often clear videos as well, of strikes on weddings, funerals, festivals, private parties, mistaken address targets, medical personnel, ambulance crews, bystanders to a “first tap” strike killed in a “second — or even third –tap” strike, presumably to leave no witnesses, or, more likely, simply to terrorize the civilian population enough to discourage cooperation with any Taliban who, may, or may not, be in the region, something that is frequently done in war settings. So once again WHO EXACTLY “reported” these numbers and why did you so hastily publish them, without first confirming their veracity, if they came directly from the U.S. government and its military forces, the same source, one might recall, that reported for months the false claim that the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had been bombed “by accident,” that there were very few if any “war crimes” committed in Fallujah, that obliterated, via precision tank shelling, the sixth floor offices of Al Jazeera in Bahgdad, once again allegedly merely “by accident,” while American reporters working on the fifth floor were told to evacuate before the attack,that Saddam Hussein had numerous Weapons of Mass Destruction, a blatant lie told directly to a frankly hugely naive and gullible United Nations General Assembly by Colin Powell and George Tenant, even at a time when their own UN team investigating such reports, and actively searching for WMD in Iraq, had become decidedly skeptical of such propaganda claims, utilized by the George W. Bush administration to sell the coming invasion to the U.S. public and a still dubious world opinion.
This is, by the way, hardly a small matter. If you are merely reporting U.S. government-related claims you are directly complicit with that country in attempting to falsely minimize the actual carnage and death, not to mention hundreds, or thousands, of violations of basic human rights, their drone strikes have actually caused. You would also, in such a case, be making a true mockery of your own claim to be “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.” In fact, your failure to document the sources of the “reported” numbers on your webpage, is already a flagrant instance of neglecting the standards of documented reporting and objectivity which any true “investigative journalism” simply MUST meticulously uphold.
December 6th, 2012 at 2:22 pm (#)
@B.D. Fusroi
The figures that you refer to are the result of a project spanning almost two years, in which Bureau researchers tracked reports of drone strikes in order to monitor reported casualties. You can find databases of every reported strike, including links to all our sources, here:
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drone-data/
Reporting on drone strikes in Waziristan is extremely complex: it is very hard for outside journalists to enter the region, so reports often contradict one another on even the most basic details, such as the number of individuals killed and whether they are civilian or militant. For this reason, we do not claim that the casualty counts are definitive. But tracking reports of casualties sheds at least some light on a highly secretive campaign.
You can read about how we arrived at those figures in detail here:
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/pakistan-drone-strikes-the-methodology2/