UK Political Coordinator Fergus Eckersley, speaking at
the UN Security Council meeting on Iraq, said:
Thank you President. I would like to thank the Special Adviser
for his latest report and for all the work of the UNITAD team.
The United Kingdom continues to value UNITAD’s important
contribution to holding members of Daesh accountable for their
appalling crimes.
We welcome the progress that UNITAD has made since the last
briefing. As we’ve heard, it has concluded reports on two
critical issues: sexual violence against women and girls, and the
development and use of chemical weapons by Daesh. It has
delivered 80 field missions and digitised a further five million
records.
And we welcome UNITAD’s important capacity-building work
including training on witness protection and victim-centred
approaches to evidence collection, as well as supporting mass
grave excavations.
All of this is vital to bringing justice and accountability for
victims and survivors while supporting the Iraqi government in
its modernisation of judicial processes and of investigatory
work.
We strongly encourage UNITAD and the Government of Iraq to find a
way forward for third party evidence sharing, as this Council
requested in resolution 2697, which is so critical to ensuring
members of Daesh cannot escape impunity by fleeing abroad.
We also encourage UNITAD to continue working with the Iraqi
authorities to improve evidence sharing and to plan for the
future. However, we do recognise the sharing of sensitive
evidence is not straightforward, as it is often subject to, among
other things, the consent of witnesses.
We hope the upcoming report of the Secretary-General will provide
clarity on these matters so that the Council and Iraq can
properly understand what evidence has been and can be shared, and
how the Council, UNITAD, and the Government of Iraq could make
further progress on this. It is critical that the evidence
collected by UNITAD continues to be available for prosecutions of
international crimes.
President, we all agree here on the importance of accountability
for Daesh’s crimes. We owe that to the victims as the Special
Adviser has said.
For our part, the United Kingdom is committed to working closely
with the government of Iraq and the United Nations to ensure
UNITAD’s unique work is used effectively both in Iraq and around
the world.
We are grateful to the Special Adviser and his Team for their
dedicated efforts in pursuit of accountability. And we stand firm
in our continued international efforts to deliver justice for
Daesh’s atrocities.
