The Serious Crimes Unit was the official title given to an

elite In political and sociological theory, the elite (, from , to select or to sort out) are a small group of powerful or wealthy people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group. Defined by the ...

unit of

International Police The International Criminal Police Organization – INTERPOL (abbreviated as ICPO–INTERPOL), commonly known as Interpol ( , ; stylized in allcaps), is an international organization that facilitates worldwide police cooperation and crime cont ...

investigators during the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

1999 to 2004 mission in

East Timor Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor, officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, is a country in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the coastal exclave of Oecusse in the island's northwest, and ...

. The unit ultimately took over the investigation of

Human Rights Human rights are universally recognized Morality, moral principles or Social norm, norms that establish standards of human behavior and are often protected by both Municipal law, national and international laws. These rights are considered ...

violations alleged to have been committed in East Timor by

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

n and pro-Indonesian military forces during 1999, from the UN Mandate that began in February, 1999. The unit's cases were tried before the Special Panels of the Dili District Court. Many of the cases that were eventually handled by this unit included cases previously overseen by the UNTAET Crime Scene Detachment. One member of that squad of investigators, Karl Clark, played an intricate part in the Serious Crimes Unit investigations, and its eventual

prosecution A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the adversarial system, which is adopted in common law, or inquisitorial system, which is adopted in Civil law (legal system), civil law. The prosecution is the ...

war crimes A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hos ...

suspects. From 20 May 2002 it was part of the United Nations Mission of Support to East Timor and was scheduled to complete its investigations by the end of the year, after which it would continue to provide assistance to prosecutors. At the end of the UNMISET mandate the Serious Crimes Unit was to preserve a complete copy of its records. For part of its time the office was under-staffed, and in 2006 there was a wave of looting which destroyed some of the evidence against high Indonesian officials and scattered forensic evidence (human body parts) over the ground.{{cite news, title=Serious Crimes Unit office looted in Dili, date=31 May 2006, url=http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1652102.htm, author=Anne Barker, publisher=ABC Online, accessdate=2007-09-04

References

Law enforcement units Government of Timor-Leste