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	UN concerned about extrajudicial killings in Ecuador by Philip Alston UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial executions   19 July, 2010   A senior United Nations investigator says murders by gang members and hired killers in Ecuador are rising steadily, while the number caught is falling.   Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial executions, said that for every 100 killings, only one perpetrator was convicted. Mr Alston described a "vicious circle of impunity which left Ecuadorians feeling increasingly insecure".   But he said the government was attempting to address the problem. Speaking in Quito, the UN rapporteur pointed out that the murder rate in Ecuador had doubled since 1990, to 20 killings per 100,000 inhabitants, and in some areas was five times higher.   He said the police rarely carried out "serious or sustained investigations of killings", and that they did not seem to pursue a murder case seriously once they had decided it was a settling of accounts by criminal groups.   He also singled out Ecuador''s prosecution service, which seemed "more concerned with public relations than with convicting major criminals", and the judicial system, which was "almost universally condemned for its inefficiency and mismanagement".   "Hired killers are paid as little as $20 to ''solve'' a problem, but they can confidently expect to get away with murder because the criminal justice system functions so badly," said Mr Alston.   The UN rapporteur said he was concerned about the spillover of the conflict in Colombia into Ecuador, creating a situation where civilians became trapped between the armed forces, rebels and criminal gangs.   "The Ecuadorean military is not well-equipped to deal with the situation, and as its relations with citizens have soured, its reliance on abusive tactics to obtain information has increased," he said.   But he also said the government of Rafael Correa had attempted to address the situation by introducing extensive reforms to the constitution and to human rights legislation.   Mr Alston called on the government of Ecuador to ensure that cases documented by the official Truth Commission, which examined human rights abuses over the past three decades, should become the subject of effective criminal investigations. Visit the related web page
	Thousands gather to remember Srebrenica massacre by AFP & news agencies Bosnia   12 July, 2010   Tens of thousands of people have gathered in Bosnia to commemorate the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslims by Bosnian Serbs and bury 775 newly identified victims.   The massacre, the worst single atrocity on European soil since World War II, is the darkest episode in the violent break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.   Men passed green-draped coffins from hand to hand towards freshly dug graves. Sobbing women murmured prayers as they kneeled among rows of white marble gravestones.   Hatidza Mehmedovic, 58, said she came to bury her husband and two sons, killed when they were aged 18 and 21.   "Now I can only fight for justice to be served.. I waited for them to return alive.. I could not believe such a crime could have been committed.. It was not only my sons, thousands of people were killed. I don''t wish on any other mother to have to live through this."   Nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in the days following the fall of the Srebrenica enclave, designated a UN safe area, to Bosnian Serb troops on July 11, 1995.   The massacre has been deemed genocide by the UN war crimes court and the International Court of Justice. The victims were shot and dumped in mass graves, then reburied haphazardly in more than 70 sites in a bid to cover up the evidence.   Bones exhumed by forensic experts over the past few years were reburied in Potocari after identification through DNA testing.   The presidents of all the states that made up the former Yugoslavia were present for the commemoration, including Serbia''s president Boris Tadic.   His presence is a sore point for many survivors who say that Ratko Mladic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb wartime military commander charged with genocide by the UN war crimes court, is believed to be hiding in Serbia.   "He should be ashamed to come to Potocari as long as he hasn''t arrested the most wanted war criminals, Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic," Ms Mehmedovic said.   For many years Belgrade denied the scale of the bloodbath but this March, following an initiative by Mr Tadic, the Serbian parliament passed a declaration condemning the massacre and apologising to victims and their families.   The alleged mastermind behind the Bosnian Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing and the Srebrenica killings, political leader Radovan Karadzic, was arrested in Belgrade in 2008. He is on trial for genocide before the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.   US President Barack Obama described the Srebrenica massacre as "a stain on our collective conscience".   In a statement read for him in the Bosnian town, the US president admitted the failure of the international community to protect the enclave, and said those responsible must be pursued, "there can be no lasting peace without justice".   He urged "the prosecution and arrest of those that carried out the genocide", adding: "This includes Ratko Mladic who presided over the killings and remains at large."
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