By Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post. (photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash)
More than 400 individuals who fought with the Islamic State terror group in Iraq and Syria have returned to the United Kingdom without facing prosecution, according to a new report by Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights.
The committee said no IS (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) fighters have been successfully prosecuted in the U.K. for war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity.
The JCHR report, published last week, states that despite the U.K.’s recognition of these crimes — particularly its genocide of the Yazidi community in northern Iraq that began in 2014 — there has been no domestic accountability for these international offenses.
“The UK Government has formally recognized that the acts committed against the Yazidi people by Daesh were acts of genocide. However, despite this recognition, there have been no successful prosecutions of Daesh fighters in the UK for international crimes, including genocide,” the report states.
“To remedy this concerning reality, we recommend several changes to policy and law to achieve greater accountability of Daesh fighters for their crimes. The focus of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service have been on investigating and prosecuting individuals for terrorism offenses, rather than international crimes, which include genocide and war crimes. We call for a fundamental change from an approach focused only on terrorism offenses to one that considers terrorism offenses alongside international crimes.”
The committee criticized the current focus of law enforcement and prosecution authorities on terrorism-related charges, which it said fail to address the nature and scale of IS atrocities, including murder, rape, sexual enslavement and torture.