After last year’s announcement of the sudden and premature closure of the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD), which is scheduled to end its operations in September 17th 2024 due to funding and political challenges, many analysts highlighted the adverse impacts this decision could have on the lives of survivors in the region.
UNITAD’s mandate includes filing ISIL criminal cases and their evidence to stay on records. As of June 2024, these amounted to 40 terabytes (TB) of data, 28TB of which had been transferred to the Iraqi government in March 2024 in a vow to hand it over its mandate. This data is constituted of testimonies, digital forensics, and more, and is analysed using 3-D laser scanners, labour market information systems (LMIS) and AI, amongst other tools.
In addition to evidence management, UNITAD’s mandate also includes the provision of psychosocial support within the Witness Protection and Support Unit (WPSU), the investigation of specific attacks and invasion committed by ISIL in Iraqi soil—especially those targeting minority groups such as the Christian and Yazidi populations, the cooperation with NGOs, and the promotion of global and transnational accountability for ISIL crimes.
This closure comes at a time where the international community is increasingly sceptical of the potential to hold war criminals accountable. The failure to successfully sanction the Assad regime Syria, which has now normalized ties with many of its neighbours, has left many analysts disillusioned from the current legal mechanisms in place to punish war crimes.
Whilst right groups have criticized this sudden closure which risk jeopardizing the progresses made towards accountability in the region, the popularity of restorative criminal justice (as opposed to retributive justice, based on punishment), both at the individual and geopolitical stage, has simultaneously been increasing, including in the context of rehabilitating former terrorist fighters.
The rationale behind restorative justice relies on the perception of the concept of punishment, be it in education or law enforcement alike, as representing an outdated method relying on lower Pavlovian tendencies for achieving behavioural modification. Instead, restorative justice advocate highlight the importance of dialogue and repair. Critics of restorative justice, on the other hand, remark that it can allow criminals an easy way out for getting away with crimes which disproportionally benefit them after feigning to agree with their victims and prosecutors.
Of course, both methods are not mutually exclusive. Some argue that they must be used in combination for optimal effects, or that at least one must be enforced in the event the other one would be out of reach. In the case of severe criminal misconduct, such as terrorist activities, a combination of methods might be best practice.
Considering that the remaining ISIL sleeper cells in Syria are currently acting as breeding ground for future Islamic terrorism due to the transnational limbo state the former fighters and their family found itself in in terms of repatriation and retributive justice, one might wonder if the implementation of educational and psychosocial intervention facilitating the potential for post-conflict restorative justice in the region might not constitute an important step forward, as was argued by the journalist and Rojava Information Center founder Matt Broomfield. Indeed, whilst UNITAD’s closure will likely slow down the process of holding perpetrators accountable and identifying the victims lying in mass graves, prioritizing de-radicalization in the absence of sufficient resources to do both might prove more beneficial to the community insofar as it weakens the likelihood that such crimes happen in the future. In other words, the first approach is past-focused and the second future-focused.
As such, the closure of UNITAD can be seen as representing a drawback for retributive justice specifically inasmuch as it understands ‘accountability’ as punishing terrorist fighters for their crimes, despite some of their work also consisting in identifying corpses in mass graves in order to offer important clarity and psychological closure to the family members of missing persons. The handing over of its mandate to the Iraqi government, which already issued restorative imperfect yet promising policies such as rights for reparations against the crimes of ISIS (more specifically, the Yazidi Survivors Law), could have the benefit of centralizing reconstruction efforts which could lead to better coordination, albeit reasonable concerns over governmental corruption and mismanagement remains. Considering the inevitability of UNITAD’s closure, identifying and investing the new strategic benefits of this transition to the Iraqi government could prove a more resilient and adaptive method to pursue justice for survivors than exhausting energy fighting against the current.
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