SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Russia's full-scale invasion in Ukraine, the war between Israel and Hamas, the Civil War in Sudan. All of these conflicts have allegations of atrocities, and under U.S. law, the U.S. Justice Department has the authority to investigate and prosecute war crimes. With the Biden administration coming to an end, NPR's justice correspondent Ryan Lucas looks at what the Department has and has not done to hold perpetrators accountable.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Congress passed the U.S. War Crimes Act in 1996. It gives the Justice Department jurisdiction to prosecute violations of the laws of war in American courts. It sat unused for nearly three decades, until Attorney General Merrick Garland made this announcement in December 2023.
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MERRICK GARLAND: As the world has witnessed the horrors of Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, so has the United States Department of Justice. That is why the Justice Department has filed the first ever charges under the U.S. War Crimes statute against four Russia-affiliated military personnel for heinous crimes against an American citizen.
LUCAS: The Russian soldiers allegedly abducted and tortured an American civilian in Ukraine. The Department announced a second war crimes case just last month, against two former Syrian intelligence officers for allegedly conspiring to torture detainees, including U.S. citizens, held by the regime of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
STEPHEN RAPP: I'm very pleased that we finally had prosecutions under the War Crimes Act, which has been on the books for some 27 years and really hadn't been used.
LUCAS: Stephen Rapp is a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice.
RAPP: I'm very pleased to see that it applied not just in the Ukraine context but also in the Syrian one, and I hope in others.
LUCAS: Those prosecutions have made headlines, but the department's efforts extend beyond that, says Eli Rosenbaum, a former federal prosecutor who spent much of his career hunting down Nazis long after World War II.
ELI ROSENBAUM: Under Attorney General Garland, there has been a concerted effort to pursue justice in the wake of human rights violations, atrocity crimes, war crimes, at a level, I think, never before seen in the department.
LUCAS: One example of that is a special unit set up by Garland and led by Rosenbaum until his retirement, that investigates alleged Russian atrocities. Rosenbaum also points to the support the Department has given to Ukrainian authorities to help them in their own war crimes investigations, and to Garland's appointing a special prosecutor for the crime of aggression. War crimes are notoriously difficult to investigate and prosecute, in part because access to evidence and witnesses can be challenging.
In a statement, a Justice Department spokesperson said war crimes cases are incredibly complex to bring, but said they are important to ensure accountability for these horrendous crimes. Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, says the Department has taken steps in the right direction, but not enough.
OONA HATHAWAY: They said all the right things, they made some of the right moves, but then it's been a little bit surprising that there's been so little to actually come out of it.
LUCAS: She says there was a lot of hope that the Department would do more, given the current armed conflicts in the world. She points to the Civil War in Sudan, where the Biden administration recently declared a paramilitary group has committed genocide. She also points to the conflict in Gaza. Hamas killed some 1,200 people in its October 7 attack on Israel and took more than 200 hostages. Israel responded with a military assault that has killed more than 46,000 people, according to Gaza's health ministry. Hathaway says the department has come under criticism for its failure to investigate possible war crimes by both sides in the conflict.
HATHAWAY: I think some of that is warranted, that there's a responsibility to actually investigate and to look at whether those cases ought to be brought forward.
LUCAS: U.N. rights officials have accused Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes, and the International Criminal Court prosecutor has requested warrants for leaders on both sides of the conflict. Israel says its actions have been lawful.
For its part, the Justice Department has brought terrorism charges against six Hamas leaders, but the Department has done nothing - in public, at least - to investigate or prosecute possible Israeli war crimes, as the White House has maintained its firm support for Israel's war effort. The Department's lack of action on the Gaza conflict has not gone unnoticed.
LEILA SADAT: I think it's really disappointing, let's put it that way.
LUCAS: Leila Sadat is a professor of international criminal law at Washington University in St. Louis.
SADAT: I think it detracts from the global standing of the United States when the United States tries to argue that what it's doing is enforcing international law. Because immediately, you'll get a pushback saying, well, why are you enforcing international law in some situations but not in other situations?
LUCAS: In other words, it opens the U.S. to accusations of not being even-handed. At the same time, though, Sadat says the cases the U.S. has brought are important, and just because victims of alleged war crimes in Gaza aren't receiving justice, doesn't mean that victims of Assad's regime in Syria or Russia's war in Ukraine shouldn't either.
Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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