War crimes tribunals aim to end culture of impunity

Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali yesterday told an international conference that the International Crimes Tribunals in Bangladesh were set up to end the culture of impunity, establish rule of law, and dispense justice to the victims and their families.
The ICT Act, 1973 adheres to relevant international standards to ensure due process and fairness of the trials and rights of the defendants, he said.
 “The Bangladesh experience should make a compelling case for the travails our people had to endure to secure justice for the mass atrocities suffered in 1971,” the minister told the International Conference on Prevention of Genocides in Brussels, the capital of Belgium.
He highlighted that during the nine-month war in 1971 “three million Bengali civilians were killed, more than 200,000 women were violated, and 10 million people were rendered refugees. A small minority of ideologically motivated local collaborators and auxiliary forces participated and abetted in committing these mass atrocity crimes.”
Mahmood regretted that Bangladesh's experience of one of the worst genocides since the Holocaust had received rather scant attention in international scholarship till recently.
He thanked the European Parliament for acknowledging in its resolution of January 16, 2014 that “the ICT-BD tribunals played an important role in providing redress and closure for victims and those affected by the Bangladesh war of independence”.
The two-day conference organised to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide was chaired by Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders and attended, among others, by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.