The recent capture of Ratko Mladic in Serbia is, as Geoffrey Robertson writes in The Age, also part of the Nuremberg legacy: that no one can escape their responsibility for a crime, particularly those against humanity. Robertson, whose book “Crimes Against Humanity” is a must-read on international criminal justice goes on to observe:

Focus on this war crime will discomfort those who might have prevented it – especially the UN, which refused to authorise the air strikes that would have stopped Mladic’s advance, and the Dutch government, which insisted on vetoing them to protect its cowardly battalion that was meant to be protecting the town but which immediately surrendered to Mladic and handed over to him the thousands of Muslims who had sought refuge in the UN compound. The moral nadir of UN/NATO ”peacekeeping” where there is no peace to keep is the photograph of Mladic blowing his cigar smoke in the face of the spineless Dutch colonel while in the background those his battalion should have protected were taken off to the killing fields.

The Universal Periodic Review is the United Nations Human Rights Council’s new mechanism to verify the human rights performance of all 192 UN Member States based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and any human rights treaty the Member State has adopted. The review is now in its fourth and final year for the first cycle of reviews.

Austria and Australia are both up for review in the last week of January 2011: Austria on Australia Day, January 26 and Australia the next day, January 27.

The documents on Austria can be found here, for Australia click here.

The Austrian NGO Coalition for the review can be found here.

The Austrian Daily Salzburger Nachrichten published the following cartoon by Thomas Wizany on the occasion of People’s Republic of China President Hu’s State Visit to the United States:

President Obama is holding a board that depicts Mr. Hu with his name – Hu – underneath, the shape of a person with the description “man” underneath and an arrow to the right, the bottom line reading Hu + Man + Rights. President Hu looks at the board quizzically.

It seems like yesterday that the then-Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, raged against the latest increase of the world’s people who go hungry jumping to 820 million. With the crisis deepening daily, the FAO’s announcement of one billion people in the world going hungry is sidelined as a statistical fact in an environment that fails to acknowledge the hardest hit on its door step: compare Barbara Ehrenreich’s coverage of those “too poor to make the news.”

“The fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger,” Article 11 of the Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights has been endorsed by no less than 160 countries world wide.

The first trial of the International Criminal Court in The Hague starts today. It will – as a first in international law – ensure the participation of victims of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo,who stands accused of having committed, as co-perpetrator, war crimes consisting of enlisting and conscripting of children under the age of 15 years and using them to participate actively in hostilities.”