Former Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan. A group of 22 TDs and Senators has called on the Government to recognise as genocide ISIS’s persecution of minority communities including Iraqi and Syrian Christians and Yazidis.
In a letter drafted by The Iona Institute, Aid to the Church in Need and Church in Chains, the politicians urge the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Charlie Flanagan, and the Government “to make an immediate referral to the UN Security Council with a view to conferring jurisdiction upon the International Criminal Court so that perpetrators can be brought to justice”.
Signatories to the letter include every Labour TD, Green party leader Eamon Ryan, Fianna Fáil Foreign Affairs spokesman Darragh O’Brien, and Fine Gael Seanad spokesman on Foreign Affairs, Joe O’Reilly.
Destruction
They state there is clear evidence that actions of the so-called Islamic State towards minority communities include mass murders, assassinations of Church leaders, torture, kidnapping for ransom, sexual enslavement and systematic rape of girls and women, forcible conversions, and the destruction of churches, monasteries, cemeteries and Christian artifacts.
The nature and extent of ISIS’s actions has become clearer as it has been pushed back from Mosul, revealing evidence of its actions.
The group noted that Britain’s House of Commons and the US House of Representatives had both unanimously asked their Governments to denounce ISIS’s actions as genocide, with the European Parliament passing a similar resolution by an almost unanimous vote.