(Tom: This is but one of too many such stories.
It is why we need to spread respect, tolerance and peace among men.
Please do what you can to forward the message of Human Rights so we may eradicate such abuses.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
Some great tools to help do that can be found here:
https://www.youthforhumanrights.org/)
On the morning of November 30, 2021, in a courtroom in Frankfurt, a judge read out a verdict that no court anywhere had ever delivered before.
The defendant, an Iraqi former ISIS member, was guilty of genocide.
The specific crime: the death of a five-year-old Yazidi girl named Reda. He and his wife had purchased Reda and her mother as slaves in 2015. As punishment for wetting the bed, he had chained the child to a window in the open sun in Fallujah, Iraq, in heat that reached fifty-one degrees Celsius, and left her there until she died. The mother survived. She testified.
It was the first time any court anywhere in the world had convicted any member of the Islamic State of genocide. It was the first time any court anywhere had ruled in law that what was done to the Yazidi people was a genocide.
The institutional path that made it possible to use that word, in that courtroom, six years after Reda died, runs straight back through the United Nations to a twenty-two-year-old Yazidi woman who, in December 2015, decided not to speak in generalities.
Her name is Nadia Murad. She was born in Kocho, a Yazidi village of about seventeen hundred people in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq.
On August 3, 2014, ISIS fighters surrounded Kocho. They separated the men from the women, took the men to the edge of the village, and shot them. They took the older women and shot them too. Among the dead were six of Nadia’s brothers and her mother. The younger women — Nadia among them — were loaded onto buses and driven to Mosul. There, they were sold.
She was twenty-one years old. She would spend the next three months in captivity, passed between captors under what ISIS called sabaya — sex slavery — until, in early November, she found a door left unlocked and ran. A Muslim family in Mosul, at enormous risk to themselves, sheltered her and helped get her out. She crossed into northern Iraq, then a refugee camp, then Germany, which granted her asylum.
She was, by every standard the world recognizes, free.
She was also, by every standard the world recognizes, free to be silent. Most survivors of mass sexual violence are silent. Nadia Murad chose differently.
On December 16, 2015, she walked into the chamber of the United Nations Security Council, accompanied by the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, and described what had been done to her and her community. She did not speak in generalities. She did not use the diplomatic euphemisms — gender-based violence, crimes, abuses. She used the names of things. She said the women had been sold. She said the children were as young as nine. She said her mother had been executed. She said what had been done to her.
Then she made the demand the testimony had been built to make: international recognition that this was a genocide, and prosecution of the people who had committed it.
The room was silent. The transcript exists in the UN archives.
Here is the part that turns a speech into law.
Vague testimony, by design, cannot become evidence. A genocide conviction in a court of law requires testimony specific enough that a judge can rule on intent, on system, on patterns of conduct. Nadia’s testimony, and the testimony of other survivors she helped gather in the years that followed, was specific enough to do that work.
In 2016, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry formally determined that ISIS’s treatment of the Yazidis met the legal definition of genocide. The United States, the European Parliament, and the UK Parliament reached the same determination in the same months. In 2017, by Security Council resolution, the UN established a specialized investigative team — UNITAD — whose job was collecting evidence to courtroom standard, so prosecutions could one day take place.
In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege, for their work to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. She used the acceptance speech to remind the room of the women still missing.
And in 2021, in Frankfurt, in a case in which Amal Clooney represented Reda’s mother, the architecture caught up with the testimony.
There have been further German convictions since. There are open prosecutions in other countries. UNITAD’s investigative files have been used in courts where the crimes themselves happened in Iraq but the accused was found in Europe, under universal-jurisdiction laws that allow genocide to be tried wherever the perpetrator turns up.
Nadia Murad is thirty-two years old now. She continues to travel, to testify, to run Nadia’s Initiative, which rebuilds water systems, clinics, and schools in Sinjar — the region she came from. By the most recent figures, more than two thousand eight hundred Yazidi women and children are still missing or held in captivity. Mass graves are still being excavated.
The first time a court used the word genocide for what was done to her people, the year was 2021. The first time anyone said it in a chamber where the law could hear it was December 16, 2015. The woman who said it was twenty-two.
She did not speak in generalities.
