Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

[INTRO TUNE]

Stephanie: 00:10  Hi Janet, 

Janet: Hi Steph, 

Stephanie: So last year, about six weeks ago now, we were at the ICC Annual Meeting the ASP.

Janet: 00:17  My God, that’s a lifetime ago, considering everything that’s happened in between, but yes, I do remember, I did see you then.

Stephanie: 00:24  And we managed, with the support of the NGO REDRESS, to have a chat to three survivors of international crimes who were at the ICC annual meeting, to also have their voices heard.

Janet: 00:35  Yeah, it was really interesting. The context was that on the very first evening of the ASP, the Assembly of States Parties, the annual meeting, there was this survivor-led event with five or six different people talking. They were all completely different situations, different investigations, different stages of engagement with the court. For example, there was one survivor from Armenia, and that’s a country that’s only just joined the court, and there’s no actual case. There was another from Kenya, and that’s completely over. The post election violence cases are gone. So it was a really mixed group, but it was interesting, because all of them are finding the difficulties, but the interesting ways to actually engage with the court.

Stephanie: 01:20  Yeah, and you know, for all the ICC says about engaging with victims and being the first court to really listen to victims and survivors, it is really difficult for these survivors, victims, NGOs, to work with the ICC. Many human rights NGOs were at the court’s birth in Rome, but this is a court that belongs to states, and it is run by legal professionals. So over the years, how survivors find ways to tell the court what they need and what they want and what they could offer has often been complicated and wrought with a lot of confusion about what the court says it does and then what actually happens.

Janet: 02:01  Yeah, I think we need another whole podcast at least, to describe even just the range of acronyms for the different victims sections and parts of the courts that have victims as part of their mandate. But nevertheless, there are a whole group of NGOs who are part of the victims rights working group, and I was approached by REDRESS, the torture survivor organization, along with FIDH, who represent a whole bunch of different human rights organizations around the world, and the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, the CICC. And together, they all suggested, I think – Sorry I probably am missing out some of the NGOs who are involved behind the scenes as well – I have in mind that, sorry, I think that Synergy for Justice was also there. So if you were involved, and I haven’t mentioned you, I apologize. But they all suggested that we could actually meet the survivors who are coming to the ASP and ask their perspective. I thought that that would be useful, and we put on the table with all of them how tough is it to engage with the court and what is it that they actually want?

Stephanie: 03:12  So before we hear from them, let’s introduce our guests. The first is Oleksandr Maksymenko. He is an electromechanical engineer, a public leader and a journalist, and during the full scale invasion by the Russian Federation of Ukraine, he spent six months under occupation and endured civilian captivity and torture. Now he is an active advocate as a survivor of violence, and he is a member of the network of men of Ukraine who survived captivity and torture, known as Alumni.

Janet: 03:44  And we also have Luis Carlos Díaz, who is a journalist, a cyber activist and a human rights defender. And he’s a survivor. He’s from Venezuela. I’d met him before when he came to The Hague a couple of different times, and he’s really been engaged with the ICC for a few years. He was himself captured by the Maduro regime, and now he lives outside Venezuela, as we know. I think it’s something like 9 million different people do at the moment from Venezuela. We should stress because Venezuela is so high up in the news that we recorded this in December before all that has happened directly to Maduro, his removal, and goodness knows, by the time we put this out, what will have happened by next week. But listening back to what Luis Carlos had to say, I thought that it’s really in terms of the ICC, it’s plus ça change. The ICC is officially still engaged, but who the investigations are targeting, and exactly what is going on is not completely clear, so I still think it’s really good to hear directly from Luis Carlos.

Stephanie: 04:55  Yeah, and for more on Venezuela and whether that move to capture Maduro was legal, and we’ll put in the show notes a link to other episodes that deal with that. Our last guest was Elizabeth Atieno. She is the mother of a child born out of conflict related sexual violence, the post election violence in Kenya that was the subject of an ICC investigation and cases which both failed. Elizabeth now advocates for justice, especially for recognition and inclusion of the rights of children born of conflict related sexual violence, which are an often neglected group in justice and reparation efforts. So let’s listen to this recording from December at the ASP. 

[MUSIC]

Introduction

Janet: 05:43  We’re recording, and we’re here. I attended two days ago. I think it was the event that you had for survivors, where you were speaking to a huge room of people, this room, in fact, I think, or the one next door, absolutely full of people who wanted to hear all of your stories. There’s this sense that this is one of the first times that it has, there’s been, a survivor-led event at the ICC. So we wanted to try to reflect what that, what that, means for everybody. So maybe we could ask you to introduce yourselves in terms of a little bit of your story, not everything, because there is a lot to say and how that means that you are engaged with the court. So who would like to start?

Elizabeth Atieno: 06:29  Thank you so much. I’m Elizabeth Atieno. I’m from Kenya, but I am here today with Synergy for Justice, and I have been talking over the years for justice for women who have gone through sexual violence, and particularly those who have gone through sexual violence in conflict in my country, Kenya, during the post election period, in 2007/2008, because I am survivor, and I was sexually violated, I was gang raped during the conflict, and I got a child out of that. So mine is to speak for women, not just men, not just in Kenya, for reparations and justice to women who are survivors of sexual violence in conflict, and also children born out of sexual violence and conflict.

Stephanie: 07:19  Luis Carlos, how did you come to be here at the ICC, and what is your story on how you came here?

Luis Carlos Díaz: 07:26  I have been here before. I’m Luis Carlos Díaz. I’m a human rights defender. I’m a journalist in Venezuela. I have been here before, like a human right defender in the past assembly, but this was my first time talking like a victim in this space. My case was in 2019, I was detained by the government. It was arbitrary detention. I was under forced disappearance in a torture center, clandestine torture center, and then they made the awful things, and they raid my house, and they robbed me everything, and even they stole my life, I was a journalist in a radio in Venezuela and and then I cannot do it again, because the government or the dictatorship. 

The cases in Venezuela are really complex, because we have had several conflicts since 2014 – the crimes against humanity – and then in 2017 we have more protests and more repression. And then in 2019. So it’s a long story of people who are being under suffering because the crimes of the government are really, really awful. The court opened an investigation in 2021, so our process, you know, it’s a new thing, because in America, we don’t have any other case in any other country, only Venezuela, and we don’t have any reference about this system. In Venezuela everybody was working with the Inter-American justice system, and this was really, really good, but it is a system who opens processes against the states. So this is the first time that we are talking about the individual responsibility of the perpetrator. And to me, it’s complex, because I’m a victim. I live this like a survivor, but at the same time, I need to think in ways to tell the story to other victims and to media and to NGOs, because we need to create a new environment of histories, to understand how is the process and how to be part of the cooperation of the work of the ICC.

Oleksandr Maksymenko: 09:24  … My name is Oleksandr Maksymenko. I am from the city of Kherson, south of Ukraine. Before the full scale invasion of the Russian army in February 2022, I was a regular civilian person. I had my own job, my family, my children and grandchildren. I was working as an expert, and was also actively engaged in civil society work. In February, 2022 the occupiers came to my land, to my city, and our peaceful life was broken. I lived under occupation for several months. At the time, a peaceful civilian person was kidnapped from my house, put into the biggest illegal detention center in Kherson, and was detained and tortured. I don’t want to go into the details about what kind of torture I went through. It was really difficult, different types of torture, sleep deprivation, breaking my feet, hurting my body and arms, lack of sleep, lack of food, and most importantly, the electric torture. But the most terrifying was the sexualized torture, which was used especially against men. We came to the conclusion that the Russians used this system of physical and psychological torture to break the spirit of the people, because many 1000s of men went through captivity, and many of them experienced serious conflict related sexual violence. As a person, I lost everything. I lost my peaceful life, my home, my job, I now live on a small pension. So there’s only one thing that’s left for me, it’s my desire to obtain justice. We united into a network of human beings, an organization of men who have been tortured, and we are actively involved in civil society work, both in Ukraine and all over the world. Our dream is that the highest responsible end up in prison.

Survivor’s Engagement with the ICC

Janet: 11:34  How are you engaging with the court? Are you giving your story again and again? Are you gathering evidence? You know, what way are you managing to engage with this court?

Oleksandr Maksymenko: 11:47  I’ll be brief. Almost nothing is visible. No one in Ukraine really understands what the ICC is. Most Ukrainian citizens have heard the abbreviation ICC, but they don’t know what it is. In our search for justice, we tried many different international mechanisms and tools and came to the conclusion that the United Nations cannot help us achieve our goals. We now understand that the ICC is our main hope to achieve justice, and the ICC itself is not doing enough so that people know about it and what it does, our civil society organization sent a communication to the office of the prosecutor, but we only managed to do that thanks to the assistance from international non governmental organizations that support survivor organizations. So thanks mostly to REDRESS and other organizations, we were able to come to The Hague and come to the ICC and speak with different people and actually see what it is. I was here in October, also thanks to redress. I was able to come to the ICC and speak with different sections of the ICC, and now we are able to have some direct cooperation, but this is all thanks to our own initiative, thanks to our own research, and I believe that the ICC must do more on its own to reach

Stephanie: 13:20  Elizabeth, can I ask you? Oleksandr explained that he feels that it’s very much his own, the own, initiative that got this case, or his case, under the attention of the ICC. You have been engaging with the ICC for over a decade on Kenya. Do you have the same experience that it’s always you who has to come to the ICC and try to get them to do things. Or is your engagement different with the ICC?

Elizabeth Atieno: 13:48  Number one, let me clarify that I haven’t engaged with the ICC before, even during the Kenyan cases, I never engaged with the ICC. I came in connection with the ICC during the victim strategy and it happened that there was going to be the victim strategy review, and there were no victims to speak. Then at that time, I had already started working with Synergy for Justice, and I understand that Katya told them that no survivor is in the least to speak. You know, during the review, and Lisa Palfart of Synergy for Justice wrote to me and asked me if I would want to speak. That was my first time to even talk in an event, in an event of the ICC. What I’m trying to say is that the whole time that Kenya had its case here, survivors did not have the opportunity to engage with the ICC. At that time, engaging with the ICC was, a was a privilege for very few. You know. So for me, how do I feel about it now? I feel like maybe it could be a little bit late that we no longer as Kenya have a case here. Our cases collapsed. But I want to believe that all is not lost. All is not lost, because if we, for me, I always say that I don’t speak just for myself. I would want to speak so that the woman in Palestine, a woman in Ukraine, a woman in Congo, would get justice and they will, their dignity restored. So for me, right now, I’m really focused my engagement to the ICC. It’s on a basis of now more victims and survivors involvement in the processes, and specifically for me, is the involvement of survivors and victims in different organs of the court, the outreach team, the Trust Fund for Victims, the OTP, you name them, you know. And I say this because it is now time for the court to create an environment whereby survivors would feel that the ICC is meant for them. Because survivors and victims feel like survivors is meant for perpetrators. But then again, what we should ask ourselves is, why was the ICC built? for whom was the ICC built for? Because for me, I believe that the ICC was built and it was meant for victims and survivors. It is an avenue that was meant for survivors and victims to come and seek redress, to come and get justice seek, healing seek, and reparations, you know, but that has not been the case. 

And I think now it is time to continue with the engagement of how the ICC can open its, its, doors for, for. better involvement and meaningful not just involvement, but meaningful involvement of victims and survivors in all its processes, so that it can have better delivery to survivors and victims, for victims to understand how does the ICC functions, and for them to also know that there is someone with them. Yes, it might take time, but at the end of the day that there is someone who is willing to walk with them, that there is someone who is willing to listen, and there is someone who is willing to address the harm that they have suffered. 

Stephanie: 17:34  So you have come to the ICC as a journalist, but you were also a victim at the same time, and initially, you didn’t engage with the ICC as a victim, but only a journalist. How do you feel about engagement with the ICC as a victim, and do you see a big difference in how they deal with media and how they deal with victims?

Luis Carlos Díaz: 17:56  First of all, the Venezuelan situation is in the investigation stage. It is an open investigation, so the prosecutor office never talk with victims inside Venezuela, because inside Venezuela, you have a dictatorship that kills people. They kills victim. They have persecution system even outside the country, because we have been people killed in Chile and other countries. So for security reasons, they don’t have communication or direct communication with the victims, and that’s a bad situation for everybody, because a lot of people feel orphan, feel alone. So they have the human rights defenders and the NGOs, who are doing the job of companion, of documentation and to explain. But not everybody is under the umbrella of an NGO. Not everybody is organized. Not everybody has a group of victims. So you have a lot of people under the radars. So it’s a problem. But at the same time, the ICC has the VPRS, the office who works with victims on reparation. They create a formulary forum to the victims in 2023 to receive recommendations and some opinions of the people in Venezuela. So we get engaged of that process, and the result of that question, of that consultant, was more than 2000 forums. It was amazing, more than 8000 victims talked in that forums. So we never read everything, because it was a secret and private communication to the judge. But the report that was public is amazing, because we felt that first of all, we are not alone, and then we we are not crazy, because. Some people are telling what’s happening to them, and we are recognizing some patterns of the state terrorism that they use like a method, because the Venezuelan dictatorship has an issue, it’s that they kill people or detain people or torture people to stop the regime change, to stop the freedom of the country, to stop the possibility of build a democracy. They want to remain in power, and they can take any cost as possible, because they have impunity, and they has a lot of money, and also they have people who support them, like Russia, China, Iran, Syria – the past year now it’s not an ally – Belarus, North Korea, but also, but also some lefty movement in Europe, in North America, in Latin America, and that’s awful to us, because even is it, bad thing is hypocrisy to watch, to see people from the Communist Party in some European countries supporting Maduro, when the Communist Party in Venezuela was erased by Maduro, and we have communist people in jail being tortured by Maduro. So it’s idiotic, you know, that type of support. So we are facing these threats. We are dealing with a propaganda pro Maduro everywhere. But at the same time, we are 1000s and 1000s of victims. And Venezuelan are, in this moment, 9 million migrants in the world, 9 million. We are more than the Ukrainian and I’m so sorry. We are more than the Syrians. We are more than a lot of countries and we don’t have a war, we have a socialist dictatorship, and nobody cares about us. So the ICC is, in this moment, our only place to have a trial, the only place to seek for justice. We are pushing this process. 

So what are the methods? the advocacy, the protest, the people sending documents, the people reporting in United Nation, because we have a fact finding mission, people doing the job, the hard job, to help in this process. And we are waiting for the ICC. We are waiting for the prosecutor office.

Victim’s Perception of the ICC

Janet: 22:16  You said that you felt kind of vindicated when you saw so many victims give their details into the court, but Venezuela is very kind of fluid political situation. Just as we speak – the beginning of December – we know, you know, there’s a lot going on. So who knows what situation it will be by the time we we put this out, you know, in one hour even. But I’m wondering to what extent for you, the ICC is kind of become part of the political debate, and how that is affecting victims, their perception of this court ?

Luis Carlos Díaz: 22:53  That’s a great question, because the first movement of the dictatorship, the first movement of Maduro, was to receive the ICC in Venezuela, they received Karim Khan, and before Fatou Bensouda, the first prosecutor they received, they talk, they take pictures, they show to the people, like they control the ICC, like they have the situation under control. And even that they were friends. That was propaganda, because they control the media, they control the TV, they control the radio. So the NGOs in the, in the social media, who was explaining to the people, Hey, this is fake. This is a staged cooperation. They are lying to everybody when they say that, ‘Oh, we are making this cooperative system is a complementarity, we want to to help the court with with the things’, because in every communication, every formal communication of the government, they deny the crimes. They say no in Venezuela, we don’t have persecution because that crime doesn’t exist in our constitution. It’s ridiculous. They say no in Venezuela, we don’t have enforced disappearances, because, in the constitution it is illegal the enforced disappearances, so it never happened, and we are looking for friends, looking for family every day. In this moment, we have more than 150 persons that we don’t know where are they. We have foreigners in jail in Venezuela, foreigners that are hostage of Maduro from 25 different nationalities, and a lot of them are enforced disappearance. In fact, we have a new pattern, totally strange, that is people who were in jail, the families visiting him before, and now the government – or the dictatorship – moved them to other sites, and nobody knows where are they. So they are like new disappearance, new first disappearance. We don’t know even how to document that, because we don’t know where is these people. So when you see a report talking about this type of thing from the United Nations, or from the prosecutor office, or for the VPRS, first of all, you put names to the things that the government did to you in your body. To me, it was a relief when an expert took me, you know, in my shoulder, and say, Hey, you were tortured. All right. You were tortured. It was like, like, like, opening a box, like, oh, this has a name, and then to explain that the torture and the bad treatment and the humiliation is not less in the strong, it’s the same crime, has the same level, you feel like, Oh, wow. And then when you understand that this is a crime against humanity because they want to break you and break your neighbor and break your family and break the society, you understand how the crime works and how the criminal works, because even we feel that it’s not a crime about about the dissident in Venezuela, it’s a crime about any person in the world who wants freedom. That’s why I hurt my partners, and I feel the same in my skin, because we live or we pass through the same things, because the same thing is the power without counterparts, the power who are not to serve to the people is the power used to remain the dictatorship in power that’s like, like a light to understand what’s happening here. So we need the ICC to stop the crime or to make justice.

Stephanie: 26:24  Oleksandr, do you have the same experience that telling your story to the ICC also gives it a name and a category for what has happened to you?

Oleksandr Maksymenko: 26:35  … Yes, of course, without a doubt, when we were all released from the prison, we turned to our local law enforcement in Ukraine to tell them about our experience. But we quickly realized that they don’t know how to investigate these crimes and the torture that happened to us. The survivors of torture didn’t understand what to tell investigators in Ukraine. Those who went through torture, didn’t know what to pay attention to. The investigators didn’t know what to ask. That’s why the investigation is of very low quality. It’s only thanks to international human rights organizations that we started to realize how we need to work with these cases, how we need to provide detail of our testimonies for these types of crimes. And then we started teaching our own prosecutors. And of course, when you give a statement, when you speak about what happened, when it goes on paper, it’s not like you feel like it’s getting easier for you, but you start feeling a certain kind of strength, a sense of purpose, and you’ll start feeling your own agency and the direction you are taking in your life. A big thanks to the International Criminal Court for investigating in Ukraine now, investigating these types of crimes, but also educating our national authorities on how to work with these crimes. Such a joint effort gives results, and as you rightly mentioned in your question, for the person who went through this type of crime, it helps to feel better. To be able to continue living again, they need to talk through this experience, to express it. And after that, there is only hope. And the hope is that the ICC will finish this investigation and will lead it to its logical conclusion. We are ready to help with whatever we can, but our hope is for justice.

Janet: 28:33  What I’m hearing is this sense that also somehow the ICC by naming what has happened, by describing what has happened, by providing a kind of a framework within which what has happened can be processed. It can be helpful to victims. Would you agree ? that the ICC by naming what the individual crime is, by saying that it amounts to torture or that it is a sexual offense, that it’s, it’s not just, quote unquote, not just rape, just quote unquote, that it’s more than that, that it’s that it’s more substantial for people, that it belongs in a whole framework of international crimes, that that can also be helpful to victims? I was wondering whether, I don’t know you personally, or maybe the victims that you have worked with, whether people have that same feeling that this is worth it to be able to understand what has happened to us?

Elizabeth Atieno: 29:32  Thank you so much. I would agree with my colleagues that for the court to come out and say clearly, a torture is a crime. Sexual Violence is a crime. And identify it as a violence that no human should go through, and acknowledging it is an awful thing for anybody to go through. I totally agree, it gives some sense of relief that somebody has acknowledged, you know. But the problem mostly is the ICC. Like in in the case of Kenya, there was the acknowledgement that there was sexual violence, but in my country, nobody has ever acknowledged that there was sexual violence. A case was filed in court in 2013 and REDRESS was part of the organizations that were supporting victims and victim’s participation in the case, public litigation case 122. It took from 2013 to 2020 – that is six years. So six years, go back to 2007, how many years are those? I mean, ICC acknowledging it is good, but the people who are supposed to be responsible for me is my government. ICC is just an avenue, and I appreciate it, but the people who have to be accountable and responsible is my own state, the people whom I pay my taxes to, they are the ones who can take away that pain and accept and say, Liz, you were sexually violated, and we are sorry because we failed you, because we were supposed to be protecting you, and we didn’t. We were not there for you, and you had to go through that. I was raped when I was 16. I was gang raped when I was 16. The people who did that to me threw me in the river, and because they thought I was dead. If my own country, my own government, can come and make it clear the way you’ve said that they are, that the ICC, has acknowledged that you people have suffered this kind of, you’ve suffered torture, admit that in that country, indeed there was genocide, there was state sponsored execution. For me, if my own country would say that to me, to just acknowledge that I went through pain. For me, that will be the best thing ever, that we are sorry. We are sorry it had to happen that way. And now we are willing to repair the damage. Because definitely, I cannot go back to to my 16 years. So much has happened, and my years, my childhood was taken away from me. We cannot go back there, but they can do repair. They can try and work things out. They can try and help me. They can tell me we can take care of this child, we can give her an identity, we can give her what she needs. Because for me – I will be talking about it today in a panel – the stigma that children affected by sexual violence in conflict face, and I will be talking about also their needs. They need legal, they need medical, they need psychosocial, they need emotional support, they need an identity, they need so much, and those needs have to be addressed. So for me, it will be good that the ICC, because in our cases, the ICC acknowledged that, but our country never did, and for me, that was quite disappointing, that somebody and outside would acknowledge my pain, and you, who is supposed to be acknowledging it, is not willing and not interested whatsoever. That is quite painful. It is.

Luis Carlos Díaz: 33:38  I feel that I’m –  in this struggle – I am learning a lot from Elizabeth and Oleksandr and other experience, because Elizabeth talk of a process who has ended and ended bad, and she was one of the victim who was left behind. So in the case of Venezuela, we are the beginning of the process, and we felt that that is not enough, that we need to do a lot of things that we are lifting a lot of things outside, but I’m feeling also that we don’t have enough tools to deal with the crimes that we are facing off. I’m going to put you two different examples. One of them is Alexander is talking about sexual abuse of men under custody. We receive those type of crimes in Venezuela, because Maduro’s regime do it against the military. They humiliated their own people. They they rape their own partners to humiliate. So when these these cases come to us, we don’t know what to do, because it’s totally new to us. It’s like they are they doing that type of things? And yes, they’re doing that because they are punishing their own people who are under rebellion or are suspected of rebellion, but also they do that to children in jail. Past year, we talked with mothers who were in cry and in crisis and depressed. Because when she was talking with with her children the past year, Maduro’s regime has 220 children in jail. A lot of them were electrocuted and raped by the by the police, with a permission, with total impunity. We are facing with that type of things, and it’s totally new to us, totally new. But the Elizabeth thing is that we are receiving some information about the sexual violence against women, and we have a lot of cases. But in the last report of the fact finding mission in Geneva, they told a new thing – that it was never in our radar. The government are doing sexual slavery of political prisoners. They are doing forced prostitution of political prisoners. Even they are sharing the price of the service in with other people in jail to abuse of the political prisoner. And we are receiving that information. We don’t know what to do, because it’s so awful. We don’t have enough NGO for this. We don’t have enough partners in other countries, and we are facing a bad thing. It’s that, thanks to the propaganda system, and thanks to this type of discourse, who is like, well, I am against Donald Trump, so I am supporting Maduro. Thanks to that, we found people who deny the crimes, are negationist of the crimes, and they don’t believe us. So that’s why we need people who say, Yes, this is happening, and then we are going to do the the trial. That’s that’s the thing, because you feel that they are cutting your flesh with this type of information. It’s brutal.

What the Guests Would Like the Listeners to Take Away

Stephanie: 36:35  We know that international justice takes a long time, and cases at the ICC take a long time. We understand that you want the ICC to have a trial in your case – a Ukraine trial – but we know we have to wait for that for a while. In the meantime, what would you want people who listen to this podcast to take away from it? What is the message that you want to give them

Oleksandr Maksymenko: 37:02  … First of all, I have to say that when I speak, I don’t just speak for myself. I speak for many, many 1000s of victims and for us, the most important thing is that the international community recognizes that crimes committed in Ukraine are crimes against humanity. Recognizes that Russia is a state aggressor, and recognizes that the highest responsible in Russia must be punished. We understand that will take a long time. We are ready to go through this, not just to wait, but also to be active. We recognize that it will take as long as it takes. The most important thing is achieving

Stephanie: 37:50  Luis, what do you want people to take away most or to understand most while you wait for this case to be opened?

Luis Carlos Díaz: 37:58  Oh, this is great. Venezuelans, like citizens, we are made of hope. We are people who believe in democracy and freedom, and we want to everybody understand that our fight for that, our fight to bring down the Berlin Wall in Venezuela, made everything in the civic and democratic path, everything. We made elections. We made elections without conditions. We made a lot of protests – the government shot us – we made other protests. We made an international impression about the country. We do advocacy in every international mechanism. We are doing everything. We are playing in all the, all the boards, you know, like different chess boards for the fighting. But we feel that we are not being enough supported by other democracies in the region, because with the Venezuelan case, the corrupt system is so big that they can pay for campaigning in other countries. Hugo Chávez was amazing doing that. He bought a lot of people with the oil money in Argentina, in Brazil, in Colombia, in different countries, in Bolivia, a lot of countries. And that type of things create impunity and create accomplish with crimes. So we need to break also that. We need to break that system. 

The other thing that is important is that we are nine millions outside the country. It is a third part, but it can be bigger. And it can be bigger if the people allows to Maduro remain in power, if the democracy of the region protect Maduro. I don’t know why, because in Latin America you have three dictatorships: Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. But if other governments in Latin America supports Maduro, and I’m talking about Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Luiz Inàcio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Sheinbaum in Mexico, they are supporting Maduro. If that government do that, the authoritarian regimes and the authoritarian practices are going to expand to other countries because other political, other people are learning, are taking notes and saying, Oh, I can kill the opposition. Oh, I can, I can torture the other parties. I can persecute citizens to, to deny the change in my country. So it’s, it’s an expensive phenomenon. So it’s not only what’s happening in Venezuela to the Venezuelans. Now this is a phenomenon who are contaminating all the region, all Latin America. And at the same time, we have 25 different countries with hostages in the hands of Maduro. I’m talking about 20 Spanish citizens, 21 Colombian citizens, one guy from the Czech Republic that nobody knows where is he, and I’m asking for him every week. Two Netherlands, two Germans, a lot of people from Portugal, from Italia, and we are waiting for that government because it’s not possible that the, that the hostage diplomacy is more most strong, that the democracies you know, the hostage diplomacy who Maduro applied to other countries is awful, and they are silenced. They are doing nothing for their own people.

Stephanie: 41:17  Elizabeth the ICC has closed the Kenya case. What can people listening to this podcast do for you and for victims in Kenya still seeking justice? What do you want them to know?

Elizabeth Atieno: 41:31  I want them to know that we are human beings. We have suffered harm that has never been addressed. The fact that our cases collapsed here, it does not bring our pain and suffering to an end. I want them to know that there’s still a need to address the issues and the suffering and the harm that we have suffered. I want them to know that we want reparation. I want them to know that we have never moved on, we have never forgotten. I want them to know that we still exist. We are not just a number. We are not statistics, but we are real human beings with real experiences that can never leave us. We still have got scars. They never healed because our cases here collapsed. We still want accountability. We still want justice. We still want reparation, and I want them to know that we will continue speaking and we will continue fighting until our voices are heard. Thank you so much.

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Janet: 43:01  Well, I think we should also say thank you very much to all three of our guests as well for giving up their time.

Stephanie: 43:08  Yes, and it was very busy for them, that whole ASP, it was busy for us, but it must be extra busy also, if you have to tell your story and the, then the emotions that come with that, if you’re a survivor of this kind of violence. But one really shown through in these talks with them is that they are so different and they have so much in common at the same time, they’re very different people who very different things happen to, but they have very common experiences, and what the court does and how you have to engage with it does have a common thread. So it was really interesting to see that across situations and people.

Janet: 43:46  For me, it’s also the sense that I have –  here we are in 2026 now –  is that I am doing the same stories that I was doing five years ago, and even having the same questions about how this whole world should work that I had 25 years ago as I first engaged with it. And it’s really, I mean, this sense of it doesn’t seem to get much, much better for people like these survivors. What is better is that they are better organized now, and that the western, the global north NGOs, are really engaged with them, and I think there’s a lot more equality there now, but an institution like the ICC is still not listening directly, I think, and understanding exactly what they need.

Stephanie: 44:36  Yeah, I think that is the big challenge of all these courts. What are you doing it for? Are you doing it for some abstract idea of justice to ease your conscience, or are you doing it for the people on the ground? And if you say that you’re doing it for the people on the ground, shouldn’t you be listening to them about what they want and how they want it, rather than how you think they should want it?

Janet: 45:00  So maybe one of our themes for the year, as we go on, is to really start to try to think alongside all of these different organizations again and again and ask them what, what they want from on the ground. So if you’ve got some thoughts on that, get in touch with us, and we’d like to hear from you. Thank you. 

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Janet: 45:20  Just to say that if you are enjoying this podcast and you’d like to give us a bit of extra support, you can head over to our Support Us page where you can give us a tip, or you can follow us on Patreon, and you can download our newsletter. And we really appreciate everybody who gives us a bit of extra support there.

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This was asymmetrical haircuts, your international justice podcast, created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg. This episode was created in partnership with Justiceinfo.net,  an independent site covering justice efforts for mass violence, and with the Hague Humanity Hub. You can find show notes and everything about the podcast on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating and spread the word.