A senior United Nations official warned incumbent Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo and other senior officials on Friday they may be held criminally accountable for human rights violations. A dispute between Gbagbo and rival candidate Alassane Ouattara over who won the presidential election on November 28 has plunged the West African state into turmoil and UN experts have reported killings, disappearances and arbitrary detentions.
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-- Eurobond payment might be missed
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said on Friday she had written to Gbagbo and other senior officials "to remind them ... that they will be held personally responsible and accountable for human rights violations resulting from their actions and/or omissions, according to international human rights and humanitarian law."
The international criminal justice system developed in the past 15 or so years had provided a means of accountability that did not exist before, she said in a statement issued in Geneva. A Gbagbo spokesman said he could not immediately comment.
Gbagbo has defied almost unanimous pressure from world leaders to had over power to Ouattara, widely recognised to have won the election. Gbagbo's camp has rejected UN-certified electoral commission results that declared Ouattara winner, sparking a standoff in which scores of people have been killed.
As uncertainty grew over which of the rival governments set up by the two claimants was in charge of state accounts, Ivory Coast was hours away from missing an international debt payment due on Friday. Ouattara's government said the cash had run out and Gbagbo's offered no guarantees.
Gbagbo's newly hired French lawyer Roland Dumas, a socialist politician, former foreign minister and ex-head of France's Constitutional Council, told journalists said they would "re-establish the truth about the elections". The West African regional bloc ECOWAS has threatened to use force to oust Gbagbo if he does not leave quietly. Rebels still running the north of Ivory Coast since the civil war in 2002 and 2003 have said they would join any intervention.
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