According to the Financial Times a summit to discuss the proposal will be held in Stockholm in early June. Sweden proposes international tribunal to try ISIS fighters, Mikael Damberg, Sweden’s interior minister said in an interview with the Financial Times in London.

The Swedish government is seeking support from European allies for a new international tribunal to prosecute ISIS fighters and military personnel for war crimes perpetrated in Iraq and Syria, the crimes against Yazidis and other prosecuted minorities in Iraq and Syria.

Mikael Damberg, Sweden interior minister, has visited counterparts in UK and the Netherlands to lobby support for the proposal and cooperating with other EU members to discuss about ISIS crimes against humanity and establishing a tribunal court, ahead of a summit in Stockholm in early June to discuss the plan.

The interior Minister has suggested that the tribunal — which would be based in Iraq — could be modelled on the international courts established to prosecute perpetrators of the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

“We understand [a tribunal] is complicated, it is not easy to do. But we have a moral obligation to see if it is possible to make it happen,” he said.

In a previous statement, Justice and Migration Minister Morgan Johansson says to Swedish Radio Morgan Johansson also reiterated that Sweden will not help ISIS supporters to travel back to Sweden, but any who return on their own will be prosecuted. The government proposes to criminalise consorting with terrorists and participation in terrorism.

“This is a moral and symbolic issue — will the world and Europe just treat this [Isis] as another thing that happened?” Mr Damberg said in an interview with the Financial Times in London. “Or shall we have it written in the history books that we considered these as very serious crimes?”

“We would be closer to witnesses, closer to the Kurdish regional forces who have arrested [ISIS fighters]. So of course it is easier in the region,” he told the Financial Times. “A local court in a Swedish small town does not really know realities in Iraq or Syria, actually, and it is difficult for them to gather any evidence in the region.”

However, Sweden’s own dedicated war crimes unit — which secured the landmark conviction of a Syrian soldier who came to Sweden as a refugee for degrading treatment two years ago — is already pursuing prosecutions.

Mr Damberg said the unit was working on five separate prosecutions of fighters “with links to Sweden”. He said there were only a “handful” of Swedish nationals being detained in camps in the Middle East. In the meantime, there are questions over how long an Iraq-based tribunal might take to establish, and how it would be funded.
According to the Financial Times, the UK government has already expressed an interest in the proposal and the Home Office will send a representative to the summit. A department spokesman confirmed it was interested in seeking a collective solution for this case.

“People from around the world travelled to fight with [Isis] in Syria and Iraq. This is an international issue requiring a united response,” he said, well 900 Britons who left the UK to fight with ISIS, about 400 have come home to the UK, according to British police. But those who have continued to the end of the conflict pose the greatest threat if they return to the UK, one security official said.

Yazidis and others minority groups faced genocide in 2014 in Iraq by Islamic terrorist group called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria which is known as Daesh. Thousands of Yazidi people were displaced and captured by ISIS over 6000 Yazidi girls and women captured in hands of Islamic State. Women and children were separated from men, young girls were sold in open markets as captives and spoils of war by Islamic Jihadists in Iraq and Syria. Yazidi women were used as sex slaves by ISIS fighters.

ezidi24.com