Modified Law and Criticism
Six human rights groups (Amnesty International Belgium, La Ligue des Droits de l'Homme (League for the Rights of Man), Liga voor Mensenrechten (League for Common Rights), la Fédération Internationale des Droits de l'homme (International Federation for Human Rights), Avocats sans Frontières (Lawyers without Borders) and Human Rights Watch) called that loss of the universal jurisdiction component "a step backwards in the global fight against the worst atrocities."
Human Rights Watch outlined the reduced scope of the law:
- Belgian courts will only have jurisdiction over international crimes if the accused is Belgian or has his primary residence in Belgium; if the victim is Belgian or has lived in Belgium for at least three years at the time the crimes were committed; or if Belgium is required by treaty to exercise jurisdiction over the case. The new law also considerably reduces victims' ability to obtain direct access to the courts - unless the accused is Belgian or has his primary residence in Belgium, the decision whether to proceed with any complaint rests entirely with the state prosecutor.
Read more about this topic: War Crimes Law (Belgium)
Famous quotes containing the words modified, law and/or criticism:
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)