Strasbourg, 17/05/2002 (Agence Europe) - In Strasbourg on Thursday, adopting by 254 to 29 with 31 abstentions the report by Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne (British Liberal) on the situation in Iraq eleven years after the Gulf War, the European Parliament called on the EU Council and the Member States to urgently take all necessary measures to ensure that Iraqi leaders responsible for "serious violations" of international humanitarian law in Iraq or elsewhere are brought before an ad hoc international court. It insists that the Iraqi government must cease supporting a policy of suicide bombings and start supporting a policy aiming at a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis (see EUROPE of 26 April, p.26).
The EP feels that such an international court could be based either on a Security Council resolution (Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter) or on treaties to which countries concerned or injured countries are party. Meanwhile, the EU is called upon to set up a bureau to investigate human rights violations in Iraq to collect the necessary eye witness reports and draw up an official register of actions "perpetrated by the Iraqi regime". The EP also called on the Council and Commission to prepare an active strategy involving: detecting and freezing Iraqi leaders' illicit financial assets; refusing to allow Iraqi leaders to travel to Member States; stepping up democracy in cooperation with the Iraqi community in exile; supporting the experiment in democracy of the Kurdish government in northern Iraq; constantly exerting maximum pressure on the Iraqi regime to limit the repression of the Iraqi population and start putting an end to mass executions, arbitrary arrests and international deportation and ethnic cleansing in the Kurdish region under Iraqi control; and ensuring long-term protection for the Iraqi population, particularly the Kurdish and Shiite Communities.
The EP calls on the United Nations Security Council to pursue the efforts launched by the previous Director General of the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons), José Bustani, to get Iraq involved in the chemical weapons convention (whereby chemical weapons arsenals and production sites must be destroyed). It notes the official statement by the Iraqi foreign minister whereby Iraq is ready to return Kuwait's national archives, in co-operation with the UN, seeing this as a positive development in relations between the two countries. The EP stresses that all peaceful means have to be used to achieve the immediate restoration of the democratic rights of the Iraqi people and minorities in Iraq, rejecting unilateral military action not covered by any United Nations Resolution.