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BREAKING! More sanctions rain down from POTUS' playroom against those daring to hold a state accused of int'l crimes accountable. Clear goal: targeting a few to silence the many. Read how this architecture of impunity works and how to dismantle it: https://t.co/V53GfdTVnm #Sanctions #Accountability #Impunity #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

Sweden holds the same position. The @IntlCrimCourt carries out indispensable work to end impunity for the most serious international crimes, and it must be able to freely carry out its mandate. Sweden is a steadfast supporter of the ICC, including its independence and #Sweden #ICC #InternationalJustice #SE

I told Al Jazeera English why I believe Israel’s announcement that it is investigating some of its own crimes—including the killing of Hind Rajab—is nothing but a masquerade designed to deflect accountability and preserve impunity. Check the HRF statement https://t.co/ll1pmYRfit https://t.co/eOJNpghkdp #Israel #HumanRights #Accountability #IL

I told Al Jazeera English why I believe Israel’s announcement that it is investigating some of its own crimes—including the killing of Hind Rajab—is nothing but a masquerade designed to deflect accountability and preserve impunity. https://t.co/UjSdC0JmWg #Israel #Accountability #Impunity #IL

Behind every death toll is a name. A nurse. A driver. A colleague who didn't come home. On this #WorldHumanitarianDay, counting the dead is not enough. We owe them justice, accountability, and an end to impunity for attacks on humanitarians. https://t.co/0B1oo44ctx #WorldHumanitarianDay #EndImpunity #HumanRights #Nospecificcountriesarementionedinthetweet.

Rabaa: The Hour the World’s Conscience Stood Still On the anniversary of one of the largest single-day killings of protesters in modern history, one question remains unanswered: who will be held accountable? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands On 14 August, the anniversary returns of a day unlike any other in modern Egyptian history. Not simply because it was the bloodiest Egypt has known wars and massacres before and since ,but because it was the day a state chose to open fire on its own people in broad daylight, in front of the world’s cameras, and then let thirteen years pass without a single officer ever being held accountable. This article will not be a cold recitation of statistics, though the statistics exist, are documented, and are horrifying. It is an attempt to understand something deeper: how a square in the heart of Cairo, filled with tents, children, and worshippers, became the site of the largest mass killing the Arab world has witnessed in the past decade and why the echo of that day still reverberates in every Egyptian prison cell today. I. A Morning That Began Like Any Other For readers unfamiliar with the background: in July 2013, the Egyptian military, led by then-General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, removed Mohamed Morsy Egypt’s first freely elected civilian president, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who had taken office in 2012 following the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak. In response, tens of thousands of Morsy’s supporters staged an open-ended sit-in demanding his reinstatement. By 14 August 2013, more than twenty thousand people had spent weeks camped out at two Cairo squares, Rab’a al-Adawiya and al-Nahda, in a peaceful sit-in. They were not an army, nor a uniform bloc; they were entire families men, women, and children, some affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, many simply ordinary citizens who saw the restoration of elected legitimacy as a cause worth the risk. There were tents for sleeping, communal kitchens feeding the demonstrators, speaking platforms, and a small field clinic that no one imagined would, within hours, become one of the most terrifying places in modern Egyptian history. In the early hours of that morning, Central Security Forces and army units, under the command of then-General Sisi, began what was officially described as a "dispersal" operation targeting both sit-ins simultaneously. It was not a dispersal in any ordinary sense of the word. According to a year-long investigation by Human Rights Watch, it was a pre-planned operation that anticipated, from the outset, thousands of deaths. II. The Numbers the Regime Refuses to Speak The Egyptian government, to this day, cites a death toll of "over 600" for that single day a figure that, even at its official lowest, is horrifying enough to warrant an independent international investigation. But the field investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch, drawing on field hospital records, survivor testimony, and analysis of video footage from dozens of angles, arrived at a far more disturbing figure: at least 817 people killed at Rab’a Square alone, with the true toll likely exceeding 1,000, plus another 87 killed at the nearby al-Nahda Square. When the deaths from the weeks surrounding 14 August are added from the dispersal of the Republican Guard sit-in on 8 July, through the Mansoura Street killings, to the dispersal of an October 6 march the combined total reaches at least 1,150 deaths in just six weeks, according to Human Rights Watch’s meticulous documentation. This figure led the organisation to use a term not deployed lightly in international law: crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch described the Rab’a killings as "one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history." Not in Egyptian history alone in modern history as a whole. What happened at Rab’a is cited in international reporting alongside China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. This is the true scale of what the Egyptian state has spent thirteen years trying to minimise, justify, and reduce to a mere "security incident" in a news bulletin. III. "All According to Plan" When Mass Killing Becomes Administration, Not Chaos The title Human Rights Watch chose for its detailed report on the massacre deserves lingering on: "All According to Plan." This is not an emotive headline; it is a precise legal conclusion built on field evidence. According to the investigation, what happened at Rab’a was not a dispersal operation that spiralled out of control amid chaos or panic, as the regime later tried to portray it. It was a carefully planned operation that assumed, in advance, massive casualties. Then-Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim admitted, in a televised interview broadcast on 31 August 2013 just weeks after the massacre that his ministry had anticipated losses of "10 percent of the people" present at the sit-in, acknowledging that the number of demonstrators exceeded twenty thousand. By simple arithmetic, this is an official admission that the state anticipated, in advance, the deaths of roughly two thousand people and proceeded with the operation regardless. This is the true horror at the heart of the Rab’a story: it was not a security operation that spun out of control, but a conscious administrative decision, made in an air-conditioned room, with advance calculations, by men who knew precisely how many human beings would die under their fire and who proceeded anyway, or perhaps because of it. According to Human Rights Watch’s analysis, the objective was to send an unambiguous message: whoever challenges the new state will pay an irreversible price. IV. Snipers, Women, and Children The Faces the Reports Do Not Tell Behind every number in the Human Rights Watch reports lies a full human story, deliberately omitted from the state’s official narrative. The investigation documented how security forces opened fire from multiple angles, and how snipers positioned themselves atop buildings surrounding the square, targeting according to survivor testimony and analysed video footage any movement in the square, regardless of whether it was an armed combatant or a nurse trying to reach a wounded person. According to documented testimony, entire families had their tents burn over their heads as fire swept through the sit-in. Doctors and paramedics were killed while trying to pull the wounded from the line of fire. Most damningly of all, the documentation shows deliberate targeting of ambulances and field medical points meaning that wounded people who survived the first bullet then faced death by bleeding out, because anyone attempting to save them was themselves a target. This detail the targeting of medics is what elevates the event from "excessive violent repression" to what human rights organisations have described as a systematic crime. When security forces target those trying to save the wounded, they are not merely dispersing a sit-in; they are preventing witnesses from surviving to tell what happened. V. Thirteen Years of Total Impunity The most painful part of the Rab’a story is not only what happened that day, but what has not happened in the years since. From 14 August 2013 to today, not a single officer, of any rank, has been held accountable for the deaths of hundreds, or thousands, of Egyptians. Quite the opposite: the state has moved to entrench impunity through the force of law itself. Egypt issued legislation granting senior military officers immunity from questioning over any violations that may have occurred following Morsy’s removal a law specifically designed to close the door on any future judicial accountability, regardless of how political circumstances might change. Even the fact-finding committee established by then-interim President Adly Mansour to investigate the June and July events concluded, in its report issued more than a year after the events, that the sit-in’s leaders bore responsibility for the deaths, on the grounds that they had allowed weapons into the square even as the same report admitted, in a glaring contradiction, that security forces had failed to target only armed individuals, meaning they had fired indiscriminately on everyone: armed and unarmed, man and woman, adult and child. This is the pattern that has repeated for over a decade: as each anniversary approaches, official statements re-narrate the events and shift blame onto the victims, while the actual perpetrators — those who planned the operation, gave the orders, and pulled the trigger — remain free. Some now occupy the highest offices of the state. VI. Why This Anniversary, Why Now? A reader might ask: why revisit this story after all these years? Has the world not moved on to newer crises? The answer lies in the very nature of impunity. When a state is never held accountable for the largest massacre of protesters in its modern history, it does not simply "forget" the crime it sets a precedent, telling every future ruler and every future security apparatus: mass killing is possible, politically profitable, and free of cost. This poisonous lesson does not remain confined within Egyptian borders; its echo reaches every Arab capital contemplating how to handle its own opposition. More dangerously, this system of impunity did not stop at Rab’a’s edges; it is the foundation on which Egypt’s entire subsequent decade of repression was built: thousands of political prisoners, grossly unfair mass trials that produced death sentences for dozens of defendants in cases linked directly to the Rab’a events themselves, laws criminalising peaceful protest, a muzzled press, and a civil society hollowed of substance. All of it traces back to the morning of 14 August 2013, when the state learned that overwhelming force succeeds, and that the world will condemn for a few days, then move on. VII. Delayed Justice Is Not Forgotten Justice Despite more than a decade of official silence and impunity, the Rab’a case remains alive in international legal memory. Human rights organisations, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, continue to renew their annual calls for an independent international investigation, grounded in the legal principle that crimes against humanity are not subject to statutes of limitation: delayed justice is not forgotten justice. The victims who fell in that square were not numbers in a statistical report. They were fathers who left behind children too young, that day, to understand why their father would never return. They were mothers who, thirteen years later, are still searching for a clearly marked grave to which they can carry flowers, and young people who had decades of life ahead of them that they never got to live. Their memory does not fade with time; it grows with their children, who carry with them the same question their parents asked before they were killed: when will justice come? Conclusion: What Does This Anniversary Demand of Us? Every year, as the anniversary of 14 August returns, the same question resurfaces one the Egyptian state refuses to answer: who gave the order? Who planned the operation? Who decided that twenty thousand human beings deserved to be shot with live ammunition because they staged a peaceful sit-in? This anniversary is not a call for vengeance, nor an invocation of the past for its own sake. It is a reminder that justice, however delayed, remains a debt still owed. And that every instance of international silence over a massacre of this scale opens the door to the next one, elsewhere, under a different pretext, carrying the same lethal conviction: that the world will condemn for a week, then forget. We will not forget. And we will not stop asking the question that unsettles everyone who took part in that crime, regardless of the office they hold today: where is the accountability? Rab’a is no longer merely the name of a square in Cairo. In the conscience of everyone who believes in justice, it has become a test of the world’s conscience itself a test the world has not yet passed.

SHOCKING! Armed civilians surround a family's home for days, cut water/power, block food/medical aid while soldiers pray with them. If Palestinians did this to Israelis, they'd already be bombed to smithereens. But it is Qusra: perpetrators are Israelis. So impunity is inherited. #Qusra #IsraeliApartheid #HumanRights #PS #IL

De selectieve blindheid van Sharon Dijksma Toen ik las dat de Utrechtse burgemeester Sharon Dijksma bewust geen aangifte deed van de bestorming van de raadszaal door Pro-Palestina-demonstranten en Extinction Rebellion-aanhangers, dacht ik even: dit is het zoveelste voorbeeld van bestuurders die wegkijken, onderdeel van de selectieve rechtsstaat waarin wij inmiddels lijken te leven. Maar toen raadslid @yvonne_hessel wél aangifte deed, de @politie onderzoek instelde, het dossier naar @Het_OM stuurde en dat dossier daar vervolgens simpelweg 'zoekraakte', kreeg ik toch het sterke vermoeden dat er meer speelde. U denkt misschien: wat slordig dat zo'n dossier zoekraakt. En dat is zonder meer het geval. Dit is ambtelijke nalatigheid en onzorgvuldigheid met een hoofdletter. Maar wanneer u iets verder uitzoomt, ziet u misschien iets anders. Iets wat veel zorgelijker is dan slordigheid alleen. Het gaat namelijk om een patroon. Een patroon waarin ordeverstoorders die de bestorming van een democratische instelling tot politiek instrument maken, opvallend vaak op begrip of terughoudendheid van de overheid kunnen rekenen. Dijksma, als hoofd van de driehoek burgemeester, politie en Openbaar Ministerie, zei over de mogelijke celstraffen tot vier jaar: ‘Ik geloof niet dat er iemand is die dat hen wil aandoen.’ Maar dat is een opmerkelijke uitspraak voor een burgemeester. In een goed functionerende rechtsstaat bepaalt namelijk de rechter welke straf passend is, niet de burgemeester. En toch is dat precies de indruk die achterblijft. De ordeverstoringen in de raadszaal bleven zonder strafrechtelijke gevolgen, terwijl die daarbuiten wél werden aangepakt. En nu blijkt dat het dossier van de enige serieuze aangifte spoorloos is verdwenen? Ik zal hier niet beweren dat Dijksma deze aangifte persoonlijk achter een archiefkast heeft gegooid of door de papierversnipperaar heeft gehaald, daarvoor ontbreekt ieder bewijs. Maar de timing, de eerdere bewuste keuze om geen aangifte te doen en de uitspraak over celstraffen maken de geur van een beerput onmiskenbaar. En die beerput stinkt naar de morele rot van een burgemeester die kennelijk de grens tussen protest en intimidatie laat vervagen wanneer de daders de 'juiste' ideologie aanhangen. De bestormers van de Utrechtse raadszaal zijn geen argeloze activisten. Zij hangen het gedachtegoed aan van een terreurorganisatie die op 7-oktober 2023 een barbaarse pogrom uitvoerde: vrouwen verkrachtte, baby’s vermoordde, families levend verbrandde en gijzelaars meesleepte de donkere tunnels onder Gaza in. Zij maken democratische vergaderingen onmogelijk en verwachten vervolgens dat de overheid hen met fluwelen handschoenen behandelt. En Dijksma wekt op zijn minst de indruk dat daarvoor opvallend veel begrip bestaat. Vergelijk dit even met hoe dezelfde bestuurders reageren wanneer boeren, coronademonstranten of andere burgers, die niet binnen het gewenste ideologische kader passen, de openbare orde verstoren. Dan is de rechtsstaat opeens keihard, celstraffen geen taboe en de dossiers liggen prompt bovenop de stapel. In dit geval verdwijnt een aangifte in de verstikkende mist van de bureaucratie. Wie deze gebeurtenissen naast elkaar legt, kan zich moeilijk aan de indruk onttrekken dat hier meer speelt dan louter bureaucratische slordigheid: het is een keuze. Een keuze die een duidelijke boodschap afgeeft: als je de ideologie van de Palestijnse zaak omarmt, inclusief de ontkenning van Israëls bestaansrecht en de verheerlijking van 7-oktober, dan mag je de raadszaal bestormen zonder consequenties. Terwijl Dijksma zich presenteert zich als hoedster van de openbare orde en de rechtsstaat faciliteert zij kennelijk een climate of impunity voor wie de democratische instituties ondermijnt onder het mom van ‘klimaat’ of ‘Palestina’. Zij creëert daarmee precies de condities waaronder de extremisten kunnen floreren, als zwarte schimmel tegen een vochtige binnenmuur. Deze extremisten krijgen namelijk de zekerheid dat de staat niet zal optreden. En die constatering is vernietigend. Niet alleen voor de geloofwaardigheid van het Utrechtse gemeentebestuur, maar voor de rechtstaat, voor het fundamentele principe dat de wet voor iedereen geldt, dat iedereen voor de wet gelijk is. Zij spreekt over proportionaliteit terwijl zij de realiteit van intimidatie, de intenties van de activisten en de consequenties voor de democratie negeert. Dat is geen zorgvuldige afweging. Dat is selectieve blindheid. En het is vernietigend voor het vertrouwen in de rechtstaat. #Rechtsstaat #Democratie #Activisme

This guy participated in war crimes in Gaza, including the destruction of a school. He then mocked the victims and joked about the crimes. Today, he is in Utrecht, the Netherlands, participating in a debating event, where he continues to justify war crimes. His impunity ends now. #WarCrimes #Gaza #Impunity #GA #NL

I don’t want to hear any more talk about *Western values* We're a nation that sells weapons to #Israel,which is responsible for a #genocide in which at least 20,000 children have been massacred,and we grant impunity to one of the worst #WarCriminals in history This is who we are https://t.co/jRw763pTcY #WesternValues #Genocide #WarCriminals #IL

ALARM! Armed Israeli civilians are planning to storm the West Bank tonight. There is no justification, just crimes and impunity and this must stop. https://t.co/97Rjtq8vtk #WestBank #IsraeliCivilians #StopTheViolence #IL #PS

Utterly shocking but not a surprise. Impunity breeds hubris. All states and people who care for Freedom must rise up in defense of the ICC and int'l justice now, before it's too late. It's rule of law or barbarism. #ICC #InternationalJustice #RuleOfLaw #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.

As we remember the victims of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, we must confront a difficult reality that hate speech is on the rise – fueling discrimination, extremism & division. We cannot turn away from these warning signs. Let’s confront denial with truth & impunity with #Srebrenica #NeverForget #StopHateSpeech #BA

Equal before the law. Terms and Conditions Apply. During 12 years in New York I learned that justice doesn’t have to become corrupt to become unequal. It only has to become expensive. The latest Atlas of Impunity suggests this is no longer just an American story. My latest essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/nordicledger/p/equal-before-the-law-terms-and-conditions?r=mwsn6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The Atlas of Impunity ranks 172 countries by a single measure: how far the power of the state operates without accountability. The U.S. is currently the only wealthy democracy in the index that is moving up the list in terms of impunity. https://t.co/zpNzTctb7P #AtlasOfImpunity #Accountability #USDemocracy #US

The @UN Charter was born from catastrophe & the courage to build a better world. In times of uncertainty, injustice & impunity — that work is unfinished. Together, let us act as one to uphold the Charter, respect international law, strengthen the UN, and choose peace, justice & #UNCharter #Peace #Justice #Nospecificcountrycodescanbeidentifiedinthetweetprovided.