Nobody knows anything about the organization investigating the Kunduz hospital tragedy

There's no doubt the US air strike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 3 was a tragedy. But was it a war crime?

Ten medical staff and 12 patients died, some of them burned alive in their beds, as a US warplane made repeated strikes over the course of about an hour.

The organization which ran the hospital — Doctors Without Borders, or MSF — says it had given the US the coordinates of the hospital multiple times, so they say the attack was a war crime.

Washington and Kabul have launched their own investigations.

But MSF says that is not enough. It has formally requested an international investigation by the Swiss-based International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC).

The what now?

When MSF made the announcement, even veteran journalists had to Google it.

“I’ve been a Geneva-based journalist for a very long time,” says the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes. “And reporting on aspects of international law and the Geneva Conventions for a very long time, and I was there when MSF announced this, and we were all scratching our heads.”

The IHFFC was set up in 1977 under the Geneva Conventions at the height of the Cold War. It was meant to be a tool to investigate violent acts to find out what happened, with a view toward avoiding an escalation. But the Commission did not get enough signatories until 1991 for it to be actually established.

The IHFFC was and is “a tiny little body of 15 experts in international law,” says Foulkes. “Some of them are former military lawyers; some of them former human rights lawyers, all based in the Swiss capital, Berne, supported by the Swiss government, which tries to take initiatives on humanitarian issues.”

There are problems, though: the Commission has never carried out an investigation in its 24-year history. 

All parties are required to approve the Commission taking a case. In this instance that’s the US and Afghanistan. Some suggest it should also include the Taliban, but others say not, as it’s not a State. “There’s pressure on the US to agree,” says Foulkes.

The IHFFC has no prosecutorial powers, and its findings are not published, but instead presented confidentially to the warring parties.

So how does MSF get justice from such a process? 

Well, it doesn't exactly. Foulkes says she thinks its main goal is to raise awareness of the growing problem of attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, ambulances and so on, and to put pressure on warring parties around the world, including the United States, to do more to keep medical facilities and personnel safer.

She points out that the United States might be nervous: President Obama called the head of MSF to personally apologize for the attack, less than two hours after MSF announced its request to the IHFFC to investigate.