In a landmark judgment, a former member of the committee Islamic State A German court found him guilty of genocide because he bought a 5-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave and then died under the scorching sun with chains.
The Frankfurt District Court also convicted Taha Al-J guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes and bodily harm that caused death. The 29-year-old man was sentenced to life imprisonment and ordered to pay 50,000 euros (£42,600) to the girl’s mother.
The German news agency dpa quoted the presiding judge Christoph Koller as saying that this is the world’s first genocide conviction for the role played by individuals in the systematic persecution of the Islamic State organization. Yazidi Religious Minority.
The court stated that the judge concluded that Al-J — whose surname was not disclosed due to privacy laws — was intended to wipe out the Yazidis, thus constituting genocide.
The defendant’s lawyer had Denies allegations against its customers, He passed out briefly when the sentence was pronounced on Tuesday.
His german wife is Sentenced to 10 years in prison last month About the girl’s death.
The girl’s mother survived in captivity, testified in both trials and participated as a co-plaintiff.
“This is the moment the Yazidis have been waiting for,” said Amal Clooney, a lawyer who is the mother’s lawyer. “Seven years later, I finally heard the judge declare that they had suffered genocide. Watching a man face justice for killing a Yazidi girl-because she is a Yazidi.”
Zemfira Dlovani, a member of the German Yazidi Central Committee and lawyer Zemfira Dlovani, also welcomed the verdict.
“We can only hope that this will be a milestone in subsequent cases,” she told The Associated Press, noting that thousands of Yazidi women had been Enslaved and abused Through IS. “This should be the beginning, not the end.”
The United Nations says the Islamic State has attacked the ancestral home of the Yazidis in the north Iraq There was a genocide in 2014, and the 400,000-person community of the Yazidis was “all displaced, arrested or killed”. Among the thousands captured by the Islamic State, boys were forced to fight for extremists, men would be executed if they did not convert to Islam — usually executed anyway — women and girls were sold into slavery.
According to German prosecutors, Al-J purchased a Yazidi woman and her five-year-old daughter Radar as slaves at an Islamic State base in Syria in 2015. The two men were captured by militants from towns in northern Iraq. Fluttershy was “sold and resold as slaves several times” by the group in early August 2014.
The defendant took the woman and her daughter to his home in Fallujah, Iraq, and forced them to “be in accordance with strict Islamic rules for their homes and lives,” while giving them enough food and beating them frequently to punish them. indictment.
Prosecutors claimed that at the end of 2015, on the day Al-J reached 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in the sun, the girl was chained to the railing of the window and she died as a result. The punishment was allegedly because the child wetted the bed.
Al-J was arrested in Greece two years ago and extradited to Germany.
The German authorities took over the case based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allowed the country to try particularly serious crimes, even if these crimes occurred elsewhere and have no direct contact with Germany.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad herself is also a survivor of the atrocities committed by the Islamic State. She said that the verdict is “a victory for genocide survivors, survivors of sexual violence, and the entire Yazidi community.”
She said in a statement: “Germany is not only raising people’s awareness of the need for justice, but is also taking action to this end.” “Their use of universal jurisdiction in this situation can and should be replicated by governments around the world. .”
