Hiding Behind the Coalition

Failure to Credibly Investigate and Provide Redress for Unlawful Attacks in Yemen

The armed conflict in Yemen, which escalated in March 2015, continues to kill, injure, and displace thousands of Yemeni civilians. As of August 2018, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) had documented the killing of 6,592 civilians and the wounding of 10,470 in Yemen, with airstrikes by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition causing the majority of the verified civilian casualties. Many millions more suffer from shortages of food and medical care. Despite mounting evidence of violations of international law by the parties to the conflict, efforts toward accountability have been woefully inadequate.

In August 2016, the coalition, then consisting of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, and Qatar, announced the first results of the coalition’s recently created investigative mechanism, the Joint Incidents Assessment Team (JIAT). JIAT originally consisted of 14 individuals from the main coalition members. It has a mandate to investigate the facts, collect evidence, and produce reports and recommendations on “claims and accidents” during coalition operations in Yemen.

In this report, Human Rights Watch examines the way JIAT has investigated coalition compliance with the laws of war and civilian harm through a post-strike analysis. The report finds that more than two years after JIAT began investigating coalition airstrikes, its public findings continued to display many of the same fundamental problems of the body’s first findings. The limited information available to the public shows a general failing by JIAT – for unclear reasons – to provide credible, impartial, and transparent investigations into alleged coalition laws-of-war violations.

To illustrate some of Human Rights Watch’s concerns regarding JIAT’s work, this report describes factual and legal discrepancies between JIAT and Human Rights Watch reporting and analysis in 17 strikes. JIAT’s public conclusions raised serious questions regarding the ways in which JIAT is conducting investigations and applying international humanitarian law. Others, including the UN Panel of Experts, Amnesty International, and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders), have reached similar conclusions about JIAT’s failings following their own inquiries into other strikes investigated.

Over the past two years, JIAT has failed to meet international standards regarding transparency, impartiality, and independence. Established in the wake of mounting evidence of coalition violations, the body has failed even in its limited mandate to assess “claims and accidents” that occurred during coalition military operations. JIAT has not only conducted its investigations without a transparent methodology, but appears to have regularly failed to conduct a thorough laws-of-war analysis in its investigations and produced flawed and dubious conclusions. JIAT appears only to have investigated coalition airstrikes, but not other alleged violations of international law by coalition members, such as UAE abuses against people in detention.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/08/24/hiding-behind-coalition/failure-credibly-investigate-and-provide-redress-unlawful

Hiding Behind the Coalition