Italy must immediately arrest Rwandese indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

News Release Issued by the International Secretariat of Amnesty
International *

17 July 2001
EUR 30/003/2001
122/01

EMBARGOED Tuesday 17th July - 10.00 GMT

According to statements made last week by the Chief
Prosecutor of the ICTR, the Italian authorities have refused to
fulfill their obligations under international law to implement an
international warrant issued by the ICTR for the arrest of a
Rwandese national resident in Italy. The individual has
reportedly been indicted by the ICTR on charges of genocide and
crimes against humanity and the arrest was requested as a
preliminary step in his transfer to the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania.

Although not named publicly by the Tribunal, the
individual in question has been widely identified by the
international media as a Rwandese Roman Catholic priest, Father
Athenase Seromba, alleged to be complicit in the deaths of 2,000
Tutsis crushed to death with bulldozers at the Parish of Nyange
in Kibuye on 16 April 1994. Amnesty International does not,
however, have confirmation that this identification is correct.

The Italian authorities have indicated that their refusal
to cooperate with the ICTR=s request is on the grounds that,
under Italy=s domestic legislation, there is no legal basis to
proceed with the arrest and that the Italian government would
have to issue an ad hoc decree in order to carry out any such
arrest.
Article 2 of UN Security Council Resolution 955 of
November 1994, which established the ICTR directs that Aall
States shall cooperate fully with the International Tribunal@ and
under Article 28 of the Statute of the ICTR Italy is obliged to
comply without delay with any request from the ICTR for the
arrest and surrender into its custody of any person indicted by
the Tribunal.

There is no exception under international law whatsoever
to this obligation for states that have failed to enact national
legislation. Indeed, it is a fundamental rule of international
law, as reflected in Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on the
Law of Treaties, to which Italy is a party, that "[a] party may
not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification
for its failure to perform a treaty." The Republic of Serbia
recently recognized this obligation when it surrendered former
President Slobodan Milosevic to the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, even though there was no
national or state law expressly authorizing his surrender.

AI urges the Italian government to fulfill its
obligations under the UN Charter to implement a Security Council
resolution and its other obligations under international law --
including the Genocide Convention, to which it acceded in 1952 --
to ensure that the perpetrators of serious human rights
violations are brought to justice.