The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) has chosen former ICC Prosecutor General Fatou Bensouda to investigate human rights violations in the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia.
Since the first reports of abuses committed in the context of the Tigray war in northern Ethiopia, the United Nations (UN) has regularly accused Addis Ababa, but also the People's Liberation Front of Tigray (FLPT).
Last December, the Human Rights Council (HRC) voted for the creation of a commission, which will be responsible for investigating alleged violations committed by all stakeholders, and identifying the perpetrators.
This Wednesday, March 2, in a press release, the president of the CDH Federico Villegas Beltrán announced the composition of the commission. Four experts will compose the latter. At the head of the commission, we will find the Gambian lawyer Fatou Bensouda.
Attorney General of the International Criminal Court (ICC) between 2012 and 2021, before being replaced by the Pakistani-British Karim Khan last June, Fatou Bensouda is the symbol of the bitter failure of international jurisdiction.
In the 1990s, Bensouda was legal adviser to her country's presidency, then minister of justice under dictator Yahya Jammeh. At the time of her appointment as head of the ICC, she had been accused of having participated in the abuses of the regime of the Gambian head of state.
The African obsession of Fatou Bensouda
At the ICC, in 2019, Fatou Bensouda was banned from a visa by the United States, then sanctioned, after she had opened an investigation into the abuses of the American army in Afghanistan. The same year, she was attacked by the Israeli government because of the launch of an investigation into the situation in Palestine.
Highly criticized by the African Union, Bensouda has often been accused of opportunism, in particular because of the imbalance of the cases treated by the ICC: the Court was much more interested in the crimes perpetrated in Africa than those committed in the rest of the world.
Between the heavy convictions of the Ugandan rebel Dominic Ongwen and the Congolese general Bosco Ntaganda (alias "Terminator"), as well as referral to the ICC for the Sudanese Ali Kusheib and relentlessness against Laurent Gbagbo, it is undeniable that Bensouda's first targets were African.
Read: Will Africa be able to trust the International Criminal Court again?
Ethiopian parties ready to cooperate with HRC
Equal to itself, therefore, it is now the complex file of Ethiopia that Bensouda will have to manage. This time, within the UNHRC, Bensouda's panel of experts will have to "establish the facts and circumstances surrounding the alleged violations and abuses, preserve the evidence in order to identify those responsible" for the crimes committed in Tigray. The report of the commission headed by Fatou Bensouda will be presented to the CDH towards the end of 2022.
The Ethiopian government, which has often criticized the UN for its bias, said it would cooperate with the investigation. “There is light at the end of the tunnel for the people of Ethiopia, who will opt for peace and reconciliation. We will cooperate with any investigation focused on the genuine protection of human rights,” Ethiopian Justice Minister Gedion Timotheos said.
For their part, the Tigrayan rebels of the FLPT had, in December, hailed the CDH for the creation of the commission of inquiry. However, the FLPT has also been accused of - documented - abuses against civilians, particularly during the capture of Mekele, and during the assault on the Afar region.