With a sex trafficking, flesh peddling empire of favours, logistics and the good time to be had by the powerful, the gigantic scale ofJeffrey Epstein’s criminal network continues to disturb. The least savoury digital library on the planet, available through the offices of the US Justice Department as theEpstein Library, is being combed through with its 3.5 million items comprising 180,000 images, 2,000 videos, email and text correspondence, not to mention an assortment of miscellaneous material.
The combing process has come to displace the sheer gravity of Epstein’s dehumanising enterprise. Like a gold mine of ill-repute, slime and crime, researchers, journalists, political hacks and the purely voyeuristic are fossicking for material about the next public figure to be tainted. Agendas abound. The central agenda – ruined lives and the despoiled innocence of young women and girls, and their retraumatising with shoddily redacted files – has been eclipsed.
On February 17, a panel of United Nations experts appointed by the Human Rights Council issued a sharpstatementon the Epstein files urging a return to a focus on the victims. The members include, among others, Reem Absalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, George Katrougalos, independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, and Ana Brian Nougrères, Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy.
The documents revealed, according to the statement, “disturbing and credible evidence of systematic and large-scale sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation of women and girls”. The panel members took note of crimes “committed against the backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, extreme misogyny, and the commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls from different parts of the world.” A “global criminal enterprise” had “raised terrifying implications of the level of impunity in such crimes.”
The panel further proposed that the severe nature of the crimes required stern reclassification. “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.” Acts such as sexual slavery, rape, enforced prostitution, trafficking, persecution, torture or murder can fall within such a determination, and if so, would deserve prosecution in international and domestic courts.
Unfortunately, the Department of Justice shows little interest in pursuing any of those named in the files, let alone conducting genuinely impartial investigations. (Impartiality is not a strong suit of the Trump administration.)Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche,indismissive remarksmade early this month, observed that,
“There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs. But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.”
Just because the victims wanted “to be made whole” did not “mean we can just create evidence or that we can just kind of come up with a case that isn’t there”.
The bountiful nature of the Epstein files would suggest no evidence of any sort needs to be created, with the late financier and convicted paedophile most prolific in communicating with various associates on meetings, rendezvous and logistical matters. And there is that troubling failure to disclose the remaining 3 million files or so that remain sealed.
The panel experts relevantly insist that the allegations were so “egregious in nature” as to require “independent, thorough, and impartial investigation, as well as inquiries to determine how such crimes could have taken place for so long.” States were under an obligation to prevent, investigate and punish instances of violence against women and girls, including inflicted by private perpetrators.
Source: Global Research
