Alwaght- The Saudi-led coalition is avoiding international legal liability by refusing to provide information on its role in unlawful airstrikes in Yemen, Human Rights Watch says.
In a report issued on Friday, HRW said it wrote to the coalition and its current and former members urging them to release information on their investigations and findings of laws-of-war violations as required by international law. None have replied.
The coalition’s unwillingness to conduct serious investigations into reported violations of the laws of war was evident in its response to airstrikes on apartment buildings in Sanaa, the capital, on August 25 that killed or wounded more than two dozen civilians, HRW noted.
“No coalition member can claim clean hands in Yemen until all its members explain their role in scores of documented unlawful attacks,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “It borders on the absurd for the coalition to claim its own investigations are credible when it refuses to release even basic information like which countries participated in an attack and whether anyone has been held accountable.”
The coalition currently consists of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Sudan; Qatar withdrew in June.
The Saudi-led coalition started a bloody aggression on Yemen in March 2015 to oust the popular Ansarullah movement and restore to power fugitive Abdul Rabbuh Mansour Hadi who resigned as president and fled to Riyadh. The Saudis have failed to achieve their stated objective and are now stuck in the Yemen quagmire while indiscriminately bombarding the impoverished stated on an almost daily basis.
The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates more than 10,000 civilians have been killed and 47,800 wounded since the Saudi-led aggression on Yemen. Independent estimates put the death toll of the Saudi-led aggression on Yemen at over 13,000 mostly civilians including women, children and the elderly.
