“Crime is a legal concept, and whether someone has committed a crime or not cannot simply be judged by various commissions, but only by a court of law. In domestic law, murders, thefts, and other criminal acts are ruled on by domestic courts, while in international law, this is done by international courts, and within the United Nations, this is the International Court of Justice in The Hague,” explains international lawyer Dr Miha Pogačnik.
A three-member independent commission of the United Nations has concluded that Israel is committing four of the five acts of genocide listed in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Palestinian enclave. “These include killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately creating living conditions intended to bring about the total or partial destruction of the Palestinian population, and measures intended to prevent births.”
Former President of the Republic of Slovenia, Danilo Türk, shares the opinion of the independent investigative commission of the UN Human Rights Council, which concluded that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Meanwhile, the Israeli side rejects the findings of the report, calling them distorted and false. “Much has already been said about the genocide taking place in Gaza, and this UN commission is among the latest to confirm this fact,” Türk said in an interview with the Slovenian Press Agency (STA) regarding the commission’s findings, reiterating his position that genocide in Gaza is a fact. “This has already been established by many experts on these issues, especially in Israel itself, and by Israeli citizens and experts living in the USA, so this report and its findings come as no surprise.”
Türk considers it important that past findings on the matter have been confirmed by an authoritative opinion from a credible UN body. “This is new, and of course, this fact will influence the future understanding of the events surrounding Gaza during this period. However, we should not have overly high expectations.”
Israel rejects the commission’s findings
In response to the report’s findings, the Israeli Foreign Ministry stated that it was a report by “Hamas representatives known for their openly anti-Semitic views.” “The report is based entirely on Hamas’s lies, which others wash and repeat,” the ministry said on the social network X.
“These fabrications have already been thoroughly refuted, including in an independent, in-depth academic study by BESA (the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies), which refuted all false claims of genocide,” the ministry said, according to the Times of Israel, adding that the authors did not even attempt to respond to the clear findings of the BESA study. “Israel categorically rejects this distorted and false report and calls for the immediate dissolution of this commission of inquiry,” they added.
The UN Human Rights Council is not a legal body
We decided to ask international lawyer, Dr Miha Pogačnik, for his opinion on the matter. “Basically, in any situation where there are human casualties anywhere in the world, it is good that there are various monitoring mechanisms in place to ensure that the public knows what is happening in the world and to try to ascertain what the situation is really like,” Pogačnik explained in his introduction, adding that the UN Human Rights Council is not a legal but a political body composed of representatives of member states, and that the independent commission reports to the political body.
“What would probably be key to understanding the whole situation is that a non-legal body, i.e., a political body or fact-finding body, cannot issue qualifications about legal institutions. Genocide is an international crime, and only a judicial body can determine whether an international crime has been committed. Just as in domestic law, where whether you have committed murder cannot be decided by a commission, but only by a court,” he explained further.
According to him, only the International Court of Justice in The Hague, as the sole and principal judicial organ of the United Nations, can authoritatively rule on legal institutions and whether or not an international crime of genocide, as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Crime of Genocide, has been committed. Everything else is just a political assessment. “We will have to wait for the International Court of Justice in The Hague to rule on this.”
He also noted that there is nothing wrong with such bodies existing. “They could have also worked on other cases, not just this one. They could have worked on numerous cases of killings, many more numerous ones committed by Arabs against Arabs, in Syria, Yemen, and similar places, but this is something that was politically motivated at the international level, and then this commission, which I believe tried to do something, met.” In his opinion, it is good that the eyes of the world are focused on this case. It is always better to have more monitoring than less, but it is necessary to understand what this means. In other words, the commission’s findings do not yet mean that genocide exists.
Ž. N.
