The Yemen Accountability Project (YAP), a student-led organization at CWRU, documents and analyzes war crimes and crimes against humanity that have occurred during Yemen’s ongoing civil war. YAP partners with the Public International Law and Policy Group and is a part of the Global Accountability Network, working alongside the Syrian Accountability Project and the Venezuelan Accountability Project.
About the Yemen Accountability Project
YAP was founded in 2018 as a cooperative effort between legal scholars, non-governmental organizations, students and other interested parties. The project’s members investigate and analyze open-source materials covering the Yemeni Civil War. Once the documentation is synthesized, the YAP team catalogs the information relative to applicable bodies of law, including the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Yemeni Penal Law, and other relevant treaties of international humanitarian law and customary international law. With this analytical base, YAP creates documentation products in a narrative and graphical format, as well as a trend analysis of ongoing crimes.
Professor James C. Johnson
James C. Johnson, YAP’s project advisor, is an adjunct professor of law and director of the Henry T. King Jr. War Crimes Research Office at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Professor Johnson was named prosecutor of the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2019 after having served as chief of prosecutions for the Special Court for Sierra Leone. In that role, he was involved in the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. Professor Johnson has worked with students to prepare research memoranda for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Military Commissions for Prosecution of Al Qaeda Terrorists, the U.S. Coast Guard and Interpol. He is also director of the International Humanitarian Law Roundtable and Managing Director of Justice Consultancy International LLC. He retired from the U.S. Army where he served 20 years as a judge advocate.