Kurdistan Center for International Law (KCIL) in collaboration with the Public Information and Outreach Section of the International Criminal Court (the ICC) on 15th Feb. 2021 organized a virtual meeting for twenty Kurdish scholars, lawyers, law practitioners, and law students with the ICC. The Kurdish delegate was welcomed by Ms. Giovanna Rosso then she introduced the functioning of the ICC, and its jurisdictions to the Kurdish delegate.

During the meeting, KCIL submitted a letter to the president and the prosecutor of the ICC, KCIL asks the Court as the first and the only permanent international court with having jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for responsibility of core international crimes, which plays a crucial role for bringing justice for the victims and ending impunity, to focus on the victims of the most serious crimes in Kurdistan as a defenseless and the biggest nation around the world without their own state.

The letter explains situations of the people of Kurdistan which “since 1920s by the Treaty of Lausanne and the Treaty of Sykes–Picot which were imposed by the then superpowers against the will of the people, denied them the right to self-determination, divided them, and annexed them to four non-Kurdish states”. The letter specifies some crimes in recent history, says “the principles and the rules of international criminal law have been violated to persecute the people of Kurdistan. Such violations have included the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The people of Kurdistan suffered from the Anfal campaign, chemical attack, ethnic cleansing, brutal repression, denial the right to citizenship, mass displacement, mass atrocities, military adventurism, cultural destruction, destruction of livelihood, arbitrary arrest, torture, enforced disappearance, pillaging,  and sexual violence by states and non-state actors. It is also including the deprivation of political, civil, cultural, economic, and social rights, prohibition of their own language and their national events. All these heinous crimes which mostly prohibited under the Rome Statute”, then KCIL asks the ICC to be the voice of the valuable people and extends its jurisdiction and triggering mechanisms beyond the current system in order to be accessed by every individual victim and no one shall be behind.

Another part of the discussion focused on the crimes of Daesh and the Yazidi genocide, the legal advisor of the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC, Mr. Rod Rastan explained in detail the cases of the Daesh crimes and the jurisdiction of the Court in Iraq. Then the participants asked the court for the possibility of membership in the region and the federal governments in a state that is not a member state of the Rome Statute, Rod Rastan explained in detail, saying that according to the current system of the ICC, it is impossible that a federal region within a non-member state to be a member state of the Rome Statute, the Kurdish delegate asked the Court to revise the Rome Statute in order to a stateless nation to be a member state.

It is worth mentioning that the meeting lasted for an hour and a half, and both sides stressed that such meetings and exchanges are necessary and will continue in the future.