 I'm Jay Finell, and this, of course, is ThinkTech with Elgalian Yorca, who lives and works for Project Expedite Justice in Geneva, Switzerland. He joins us from Geneva. Welcome to the show, Elgalian. Thank you, Jay. Thank you for having me. So we're talking about trying to get the United Nations to deal with impunity. And I guess that question assumes there is a fair amount of impunity going on in the world, and I sure agree. And impunity leads to repetition, doesn't it? Can you talk about what impunity we're talking about here? So we are talking about how the Security Council, so one of the main organ of the United Nations, came to considering impunity as a threat to peace and security. As we know, the Security Council is mandated by the UN Charter to deal with threat to peace and security in the world. And it started from, let's say, a very strict and restrictive approach on what is threat to peace and security to a much broader one. And in 2006, it included impunity as a threat to peace and security. So that's one of the topics I wanted to discuss with you today. Yeah. Well, let me take my assumption to you, and that is impunity means impunity from investigation and prosecution of, I'm just putting it together with Project Expedite Justice, from investigation and prosecution of war crimes. And Lord knows, you can quote me on this, we have plenty of war crimes in this world today, and the number of war crimes per capita per country seems to be increasing. So is that what we're talking about impunity from investigation and prosecution of war crimes? Exactly. It's about violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. And as you said, I think it's an objective of the Council. But as we know today, the Council is very limited in its own capacities to be in a position to deal with international crisis. So the Council has raised a lot of expectations when including fighting impunity and justice into one of the reasons it would act and take decisions. But as we see the Council status now, it seems that we are probably far away from that objective. You must have a very frustrating job. We talk about this, but there's this strange relationship, which I would like you to tell us about, between the United Nations and the International Court. And what is happening with that? It doesn't sound like it's actually functioning. But my last information was that not a single prosecution had taken place with regard to what we all know happened in Bukha and other places in Ukraine. And that when the Israelis submitted a war crimes complaint with regard to October 7th, it wasn't even really accepted. So I don't know if the United Nations has either the process or I guess the facility to actually deal with war crimes that we in the world, all around the world, know have happened. What is wrong? I may start first by the word frustration that you used. You might not know that I'm a former police commanding officer and I'm actually an investigator. So when you talk about frustration, that's something that you learn very quickly to deal with when working with the police, because actually your job is to document, to arrest, to investigate. But your job is not, also you bring that people to justice, but your job is not to judge. So basically, you're part of it. You're part of this justice process. And frustration is about like the result, the outcome. It's about what's being done with all the evidence that you collected with all the interviews that you conducted during all very long investigative process. It can be very long. And I actually, I watched also the discussion that you had with Pascal Giorno, who is a former ICC official. And I know that you're asking the same question. So for my part, as an AVC getter part, I would say that frustration always exists because you're only part of the process. Well, this is a question I might hold until the end of our interview, but given your comments, maybe I'll ask it right now. What can be, what should be done? Do we need to have another United Nations? Do we need to have another World War, so another United Nations to come from the ashes and be more effective? It's a very sad assumption, but I've heard it many times. And I won't exclude it as a possibility, obviously, considering the status of the world today. But I would say from let's say my own experience, I've been working formally as a UN expert on sanctions for the UN Security Council for 12 years. So I've seen the Security Council from my, again, my own perspective during all those years. And I'm not sure that we can change it because actually the UN is what the community of member states is. And we won't change that. I mean, like those countries are, those countries, they are sovereign countries, and they are what it, they are. You can, you can have this feeling. And I think it's normal, because when you look at what's happening today, you must have this feeling of, this is not right. But then you can dismantle the UN and try to start from ashes, something that may look better on paper. But at the end of the day, those members of that future organization will still be member states and those sovereign countries, those member states, you cannot change them. That's true. It's a reflection of the reality. What are we going to do about it? The problem is that, you know, when you have at least two members of the Security Council who are going to veto everything that doesn't suit their interests and doesn't allow them to do what they want to do, which could be very bad things, you lock it up. And so from a moral point of view, from the point of view of the UN charter, you're stuck because of that. And I don't know if the General Assembly has the power to change it. I've kind of doubt it, either legally or politically, it just can't do it. So the result is we have what we have. What do you, how do you say that in French? It is what it is. Sartre must, Sartre must have said something like that. Voila. On us, on us. And actually, in French, what you would say is you have what you deserve. And I think it comes by also to nature as human beings. And that's probably part of us, maybe, that is also reflected at the higher level because, well, just like humans being headed by other humans, we put them somehow in this position. So that's why UNESCO merits, as we say in French. Well, you know, what's interesting is that we, and including me, we think of the United Nations as impeded by the rule of the Security Council. So you know that Russia and China are not going to vote for anything that interferes with their aspirations. But there's another point, and I would like to ask you about it, is if you have this monumental failure of moral suasion, okay, at the Security Council, that affects the actions of the United States with regard to smaller countries, less influential countries, but countries that do have similar moral problems. And so, you know, what you get is not only decisions that favor China and Russia, you get decisions that are skewed about any place that has a moral issue. Am I right? Yeah, I think you're right. But again, the question is whether these countries with a more with a stronger maybe moral posture, what legitimacy they would have to kind of impose their own moral to the rest of the world? And that's the question that an issue we always had at the UN. For example, in my own situation, as a national from a Western country, I've been always asked about like, why is your perspective being sort of imposed on others through Security Council decisions and resolutions? And that's a good question. And when you look at what China is planning for the future to shape the international community, they want to shape a community with different communities, actually. So there won't be one international community sharing the same values and sharing the same kind of moral, but there will be several communities. And the only, let's say, maybe the only common that put all these communities together is the fact that we are living on the same planet. I want to turn to recent history and the fantastic action, not of the Security Council, but the General Assembly, on two resolutions. One resolution was to, see, I don't think it had ever gotten made. The resolution I'm thinking of was only hypothetical, to condemn Hamas for murdering 1,400 people and maiming how many others. That really, really brutal murderous, completely unacceptable human conduct. That was never condemned either by the Security Council, which wouldn't anyway, because Russia is involved, but also by the General Assembly. And the representative of Israel stood up there and said, it's wrong, you people, how come you can't do that? And now you want to go for peace, essentially stopping Israel from defending itself, because in his view, this is a long-term defense. We are defending ourselves by repetition of exactly the same thing. And when Hamas continues to fire rockets every day and continues to shoot at the Israelis and continues to hold the hostages as bait, and it's on people, the Palestinians as bait. Now you want peace. You want peace after you never condemned the original act. It's wrong with you people. And then Guterres gets up and he says, yeah, we need peace. We have to stop all this. But he never said anything about the massacre. What's wrong with this picture? I do not feel that Guterres is adequate here. I don't know about the rest of the General Assembly, but I don't think the General Assembly has done the right thing, or that it can be respected for the ability to do the right thing. And I'm really wondering whether in the course of the last month, the United Nations has lost more influence and credibility around the world, with right-thinking people who care about the future of humanity. Your thoughts? I think what you're saying also illustrates a failure from what's been kind of leading the international community since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And that's us. And I think the illustration of this failure is the fact that nowadays, there is no this kind of block of countries standing by those values and role that you mentioned earlier. And I think that reflects the fact that we fail in leading by example. And today, I think that we are just kind of facing the consequences of the window of 30 years, let's say 20 to 30 years that we had to lead by example, the rest of the world and the international community as a whole. And today, we are just, I think in my opinion, just paying the consequences of that failure. What we call the global south. It includes a lot of democracies. It includes a lot of countries that you believe. And actually, when you visit these countries, you realize that they share the same values, but they are not following anymore, let's say, the Western countries in those battles. You know, I don't know why, but this conversation makes me think of Rwanda where there was a legitimate genocide. You know, genocide is a word that's really used inappropriately. And we talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians. It's not appropriate. It's a misuse of the term. But in the case of Rwanda, it was a legitimate genocide out there to kill each other. And what was remarkable about it is the United Nations had the blue helmets in Rwanda. But it didn't use the blue helmets. And there was only blue helmets. There was nothing beyond that. This would not have been the first and only time in Africa where that happened. There were other incidents where the United Nations and the blue helmets were there. But they didn't do anything. And they didn't use force at all. But given the fragmentation of the world today on so many levels, I wonder if, in a perfect world, the United Nations was capable of using force, that the blue helmets had blue rifles. And they could stop outrageous things. In the name of all nations, wouldn't that be the way it should have worked, might have worked in the future? Actually, in an ideal world, the United Nations would have its own blue helmets and do not rely on what we call TCC, which are conservative countries. And actually, in the UN Charter, the UN had its own force with maritime ground forces. They were all together in a command under the command of the military chief of staff of the UN. This is what we planned after the Second World War, because we were in a position to realize that we needed to have this, let's say peacekeeping force as neutral as possible and just being under the command of the international community through their representatives at the Security Council. But actually, just two years after 1947, this whole project plan fell apart because of already what we named afterwards the Cold War, the opposition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But we had planned, we had planned of having a neutral peacekeeping force able to be deployed in cases of conflict around the world. That's too bad, because if it had been permitted to proceed, it could have put out a lot of fires all these years, not necessarily fires where the U.S. is directly involved, but other fires elsewhere, other countries, small countries with terrible things were going on. I'm thinking of the killing fields in Southeast Asia and so many other places. So here's the problem though. Right now, and you will have a better handle on this than me. Right now, there are a lot of hotspots. Right now, there are a lot of places where human rights are being violated in the most brutal way. It seems like it's the new thing and it is emerging. I don't have a handle on why. That's probably a geochemical answer to that, biochemical answer to that. But we seem to have violations of human rights hither and yon in little countries and big countries on every single continent. I don't know why that is. And so project expedite justice and lots of other NGOs, nonprofits around the world are doing what you're doing. You're investigating. You're talking to witnesses. You're documenting what's happening. The problem is you can document it. I mean, as lawyers like to document things in the hope that somewhere, sometimes, somehow, they will be able to present all that evidence to a sympathetic judge or jury and get a human response. But it's harder now to get a human response. I know the project expedite justice has gone, for example, to France, which has allowed some litigation there. And that's a good thing where banks and other multinationals have violated human rights or assisted others in violating human rights. And France will hear the case. That's great. But in large part, the evidence that you collect, you are only collecting it because you think somebody will ultimately listen. But the availability of somebody who will listen seems to be diminishing too. And United Nations is not one of those places. And maybe it's individual members of universal jurisdiction. Maybe it's some other place, which arguably has jurisdiction over the violator. When you collect evidence, Orynian, and you fill up your trial book, so to speak, with the witnesses and legal briefs and what have you, who in your mind are you doing it for? Very good question. And I think when you do it, when you document, when you collect all those evidences, actually, you don't know what will be the final, if there is the final user of this judicial process procedure. So you do it because as an investigator, you just, this is the way you contribute to, let's say, a greater good. Like, it's a kind of humanity philosophy. And this is something that you want, that's going to be your contribution to the world. So basically, you do it as you apply your methodology, because you know that if you don't, whatever you do will be useless. So that's, I would say that's just something, and again, that's going to be your contribution. And you have done your part of the job, and you do not, you don't have to be frustrated because you know that part of it will be probably useless, and will not end in any judicial proceeding. So I think that's, yeah, that's something, again, that has to do with frustration, as you mentioned earlier. But if I may just come back to your first comment on why we have all this crisis popping up in so many different places, I think that maybe one of the difference is in the past, we have some kind of major, let's say, powers that would fight each other, what we call again, the Cold War. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we started to, again, have this residual conflicts. And then we would have, let's say, kind of come in a shared view on what we should do. This is where the UN deployed the greatest number of peacekeepers, this is where the sanctioned regimes also were implemented. And actually, even in that context, we were not able to solve all this crisis, even without that global competition that was not there anymore. Actually, the example that you gave about the genocide in Rwanda is a very good example because there was no global competition in 1994 when it happened. So there was no political diplomatic reason why we would fail in that context. So again, are we designed to fail somehow, or is it something that cannot work in different contexts? So I think that's a good question, also, we should ask ourselves. Yeah. Again, what comes to mind here in this conversation is what happens if the United Nations is ineffective in dealing with conflict, in dealing with crimes. Then people take it in, people meaning countries, take it into their own hands because they could be really ticked off, or they could feel that unless we do something about this, it'll happen again. And we cannot afford to have it happen again. And I'm thinking of the Adolf Eichmann kidnapping. Was it in Argentina? I don't remember, for sure, when they brought him back and made him stand trial in Israel. That was not with the blessing of the United Nations or any other international organization. And after the murders in the Munich Olympics, the Israelis went out there and assassinated nearly every terrorist who had been involved in those. And again, the purpose was not so much vengeance as it was. We don't want this to happen again. Can't do this. We're giving you guardrails. We are not going to permit you to do this. And if you do this, this is what happens to you. Again, without any blessing by the United Nations or any other multinational organization. And you could say, I mean, this is really perverse, but you could say that Vladimir Putin is doing to Ukraine because he thinks he needs to take matters into his own hands and attack a neighbor. And then there's nobody he can go to to settle his score, to settle his beef. On the other hand, the flip side of that is China and the South China Sea. It went to the International Court, and the International Court ruled against China. China didn't even show up, even though China was a party to that agreement, the law of the sea. And at the end of the day, China has ignored the ruling of the International Court on jurisdiction in the South China Sea. So I think what you have, aren't the same thing, isn't it? We like you until you disagree with us and then we're going to do whatever we want, meaning that the United Nations and its accessory organizations don't really have the clout to make its own rulings happen or to have people all upon it to deal with this impunity problem, to deal with people who do not have acceptable values. So I say to myself, as we go forward here, you have these various instances, I haven't listed them all, with the United Nations because it's not doing anything, it's actually allowing other people to take matters into their own hands. This is not a good thing. You know, in theory, when you're part of a community, you follow the rules. So international law is based on consent. So those are the limits to the use of force, but actually those limits, the only way to have it respected, the only reason why states comply with those limits and with international law, it's because they are part of this community. So that's the thing with the UN. We believe that the UN should be the kind of the enforcement force or the kind of sheriff of the world to enforce international law, but actually that's not the way it should be. The way it should be is that all the member states of this community should be by the rules because they belong to that community. And this is where actually the UN rule is somewhat a bit, let's say, misunderstood in a way because we expect from the UN to do something that it cannot do because again, and we come back to how this discussion started. Again, the UN is what member states are and that's yeah, that's something we cannot change. So is it okay if I made a suggestion? Of course, that's for sure. No, but I'm making a suggestion for your reaction, of course. So in the first days and when anything happened in Gaza, Hamas would be right ready, immediately ready to make international statements about how their people had been abused and this and that and they succeeded. I mean, for example, in the case of the hospital or the parking lot in two weeks ago, they misstated it completely, but they immediately made their statement globally and everybody thought it was the fault of the Israelis when in fact it was Islamic Jihad that blew up the parking lot in the hospital and killed all those people. And so you say, hmm, first to the media is a real important thing and Hamas understands that and it understands about propaganda and getting to the media right away and setting it up so that people are sympathetic. And that has resulted in enormous and inappropriate, often inappropriate protests around the world everywhere. Sometimes those protests have been spontaneous, but I suggest to you other times they have not been spontaneous and that terrorist money has generated the protest because that works for the terrorists. But here, just this week, this week is fresh and the Israelis have started to stream on YouTube interviews of the families and friends of those who were massacred and they didn't do it before and it's a cultural thing. They don't like talking about the dead. They don't like showing you dead bodies and parts of bodies and that sort of thing and even now they're reluctant to do that. But at least now what's happening is the Israelis are giving you interviews with people who were wounded or who were in danger of being killed or whose friends and family and children were killed. So say, well, that's good because they're catching up maybe to the public relations campaign of Hamas, which has been showing you people in Gaza that have been wounded or whatever, hurt for weeks. And I say to myself, good, but they're late. Privacy is everything. Now, you have this trial book under your arm and it's full of witness interviews and probably a lot of video interviews and legal briefs and what have you, making the case, whatever this may happen, that there are war crimes going on, atrocities, violations of human rights. And you're keeping it under your arm. You're waiting for a moment. I'm not referring specifically to you or Project Expedite Justice. I'm talking about investigatory bodies, whatever NGOs or nonprofits might be involved. You have all this information, but you are reluctant to share it as the Israelis have been reluctant to share it with the world. Instead, you get this myopic view of Katera's who I don't think he understands. I don't think he's good at this. And what the problem is, not only can you not present it to a trier of fact, a judge or a jury, at least in the foreseeable future, but the world never hears about it because you're reluctant to put it out there. And I suggest to you that maybe what the United Nations should do and investigative organizations like Project Expedite Justice and others should do is put it out there and not worry about offending people's sensibilities. Just tell them the truth. Why don't you do that? Why doesn't the United Nations do that? Actually, what the example you're giving is a very good example. It's a very good illustration of, again, frustration. But that frustration is more related to time because justice takes time. And before justice is done, you have that investigation phase which also takes time. And actually, when you look at the time that people is now giving to what's happening, it's live. So basically, we have a live interest in events on what's happening. So that's why you get all this fake news propaganda spreading because actually, we do scroll on the smartphone looking for news and we won't take the time to read about facts, to read about what could be the truth. So that's a very good example. But even, let's say, if Project Expedite Justice had an Israel-Palestine program, even if you start documenting on the spot, meaning you have access, you have the capacity to conduct the interviews in good conditions, even if you could do that investigative work and you start documenting, you do this fact-finding exercise which is an investigation, very definition. So then you collect all these evidences and then you still need to bring that to a judge, to a justice court that will be the only one in the position to decide what could be the truth, again, from that justice perspective. So it takes time, it's a very long process and it's against today the need of having information immediately all the time on, you see how we can switch from one conflict to the other. It looks like these conflicts were happening in the past, it would take years and years before losing people's interest in that conflict. No, it seems that it can move very fast of switching attention from one conflict to the other. But that won't change the time that you need to bring people to court and to investigate and to establish a truth. That's too bad because in the case of Donald Trump versus Jack Smith, Smith never talks about his evidence. Donald Trump gives you his perverse view of the evidence and criticizes the institutions and he does that immediately. And so the impression on the judge, the jury, and the public is coming from Donald Trump, not from Jack Smith. And so times of the essence, I would suggest, even though it takes a while to investigate. Anyway, so we're about out of time already. We're about out of time already and I wonder if you have any closing comments you want to make about what we've been discussing. Actually, yes. Because if you don't mind, the initial topic, I want to discuss what about like how you can fight immunity with UN sanctions. And sanctions are a tool which is different from justice. Sanctions, it's a political decision which is taken about a security council within a regime that it creates and it's much more flexible and it's much more, let's say, responsive. So that's why it's a different way to approach fighting impunity compared to international justice or the international criminal court. But maybe that's going to be another discussion we could have in the near future. Yeah, I like to do that because I think sanctions is an art form and it's very easy to do sanctions that don't have an effect. So we have to refine and create nuanced sanctions that actually do have an effect where we can bring everybody together to join as one voice on the sanctions. That's another conversation. Well, thank you, well, Radhiana. I really appreciate the discussion. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Jay. Aloha, a tutela. A bientou.