GENEVA, August 3, 2024 – Today marks the 10th anniversary of the genocide and other atrocity crimes committed against the Yazidi community and other minority groups by former members of ISIS in Sinjar, Iraq. Ten years ago, around 5,000 Yazidis were brutally executed and roughly 6,800 women and children were kidnapped for slave trade. Today, still close to 3,000 are missing and 400,000 Yazidis remain displaced.
Since then, important justice initiatives have been established and are now at the forefront of justice and accountability efforts for the Yazidi community. This includes civil society organizations (CSOs) such as Nadia’s Initiative, led by 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Nadia Murad, and Yazda, a community-led initiative advocating for the rights of Yazidis survivors and offering programs to aid and enable them.
Justice Rapid Response (JRR) is committed to lifting the whole justice ecosystem by deploying highly technical expertise to build the capacity of CSOs involved in documentation efforts and transitional justice initiatives.
Through its partnership with Yazda since 2017, JRR has been working to strengthen its capacity in documenting gross human rights violations and international crimes. Over the years, JRR provided, among others, child rights and legal expertise as well as sexual and gender-based investigators.
As key milestones in the justice process promoted by Yazda, June and December 2023 should be remembered. In June 2023, a German court confirmed the third conviction of an ISIS member for genocide perpetrated against the Yazidi community in Iraq and Syria since August 2014, demonstrating how effectively Yazda responds to requests from national prosecutors for information to build criminal cases.
In December of the same year, 400 Yazidi-Americans filed a lawsuit in the United States against French cement and construction conglomerate Lafarge S.A. for conspiring to provide support to the “terrorist and genocidal campaign” conducted by ISIS.
This is a landmark civil case brought against a private enterprise by the Yazidi victims and survivors who are seeking to obtain justice and financial compensation for the harms suffered. This filing was supported by many organizations, including Iraq-based Yazda, which facilitated the gathering of all of the 400 victims’ interviews.
More recently, JRR also supported Nadia’s Initiative in partnership with the Global Survivors Fund to build the capacity of the survivors’ network they helped establish and expand it further. It was also an opportunity for JRR to find solutions to enhance the participation of the survivor’s network in transitional justice processes and accountability mechanisms for international crimes.
A key contribution from Nadia’s Initiative worth highlighting was its participation to the elaboration of the Global code of conduct for the gathering and use of information about systematic and conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), the now well-known Murad Code. This Code will now serve as a guide of best practices for all justice actors wishing to document CRSV in a victim-centred approach.
The path to justice for the Yazidi community is a long an enduring path, but many CSO are leading the fight against impunity for the crimes committed. JRR is committed to the promotion of Yazidis’ rights and access to justice and will continue providing technical support to innovative victim-centred justice initiatives.