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A Vision for the Future ?
On 6 January 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressing Congress on behalf of a nation that was moving inexorably toward full participation in World War II, said " ..... we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way - everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour - anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium, it is a definite basis for a world attainable in our own time and generation... Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere."(7)
This splendid vision is unfortunately further away than anytime since 1945. But it is still a worthy goal, so let us fight for it !
A central book in the fight for international law and order is
PHILIPPE SANDS: Lawless World America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules. ALLEN LANE/Penguin Group, First published 2005 ISBN 0-713-99792-3.
"For the time being ... international law continues to be seen as a means of opening overseas markets and protecting America's international investments. This is good international law. " (as seen from the USA) Sands, p. 226.
The Reagan/Bush Sr. Administration [started a] War Against International Law, continu ed by the small Bush and Obama is removing the last traces - well he is even pulling the US Constitution out of force. Obama is taking the power of judge and executioner of foreigners AND American citizens. (US Kills Over 120 People In 2 Days, Press TV, 03111.) (Liaquat Ali Khan, Murder as Instrument of Foreign Policy, 031111). - President Obama has openly deployed murder as an instrument of foreign policy. Soon after assuming office, Obama authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to plan and execute the murder of terrorists and other enemies, regardless of whether they are U.S. Citizens. Ali Khan is professor of law at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka. Kansas and the author of A Theory of International Terrorism (2006). He writes: "The legitimization of extra-judicial killing is a disturbing development in international law as other nations are certain to follow suit. In pursuit of pre-meditated murders, the collateral damage (the killing of the obviously innocent) has been extensive. The claim that such murders can be executed with electronic precision, though false, serves as an incentive for other nations to develop drones to perpetrate their own surgical assassinations. For now, however, the CIA enjoys the monopoly over drone kills. ... In 1948, the CIA was transformed into a paramilitary organization, empowered under law to engage in "propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion against hostile states through assistance to underground resistance movements and guerillas." Ever since, the CIA has engineered world events for U.S. hegemony. The murder policy under the CIA aegis is by no means an Obama invention. Over the decades, the CIA has spearheaded what Vice President Dick Cheney once described as the "dark side" of the United States. Previously, however, the murders vere covert, not to be openly admitted. In the 1960s, the CIA planned the murders of "communists who threatened the free world". ... Covert murders were planned to shield the President from the attendant foreign policy fallout and the moral discomfort emanating from cold-blooded strategies. Notably, the President chairs the National Security Council (NSC), the supreme body that empowers the CIA to conduct covert operations. .... The "dark side" freely informs the foreign policy. The audacity of murder has gained depth and momentum. The President does not think twice about the moral implications of boasting a drone kill. ... These [the murders af bin Laden, Anwar Awlaki, the Gaddafi motorcade] are no longer the CIA secrets that the Senate needs to investigate as it did in the 1970s. This time, the fascination with murder has metastasized. It is bipartisan. Except Ron Paul, Republican Presidential candidates endorse the murder of "terrorists" who threaten "our way of life." ... upon the execution of a successful murder, President Obama walks to the podium to express joy in a causal tone of voice. Many politicians join the happy hours. Congratulations are exchanged. The corporate media invites the public to celebrate the great news. This is the most vivid moral collapse of a nation that brazenly talks about human rights and universal values. The American people cannot choose to be silent. They must restore the nation's moral dignity."
This policy which is mainly finding its victims in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia is also an attack on the sovereignty of these states - giving them the right under international law to defend themselves. By this alone the policy is clearly counter-productive.
First and foremost we need that the USA accept to be bound by treaties, conventions, and other international standards as any other country.
America's double standard infuriates the rest of the world ! (9) By 2004 it no longer infuriates the UK government, which argues that Human Ringhts Law is impossible in free Iraq - in the High Court process by Baha Mousa et al., IOL, 310704.
A strict application of legality in international affairs - (no secret murders, no military interventions except those based on direct UN resolutions - no instigation of ethnic violence etc.) - will be the best protection against terrorist attacks. There should be individual punishment of people proved guilty, no collective punishment of groups.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the USA under the present administration will even keep within the boundaries of the American Constitution (The detention of 1000 immigrants, without releasing even their names to the public. The Ashcroft raids to round up another 5000. The evisceration of the 4th Amendment, so that the police no longer will need to show You a warrant to enter Your home; they may even sneak in when you're not there and neglect to tell You about it. The defence secretary sets the rules for trials, including "modes of proof" for trying foreigners in foreign countries suspected in terrorist cases). All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions.
The concentration camps for suspected Taliban and Al Quaeda fighters on Guantanamo and at Bagram Air Base, is also in violation of any international law, including those set up after WWII as a response to Roosevelts vision. See also Humans Rights Watch's letter to Donald Rumsfeld, 29 May 2002.
It is somewhat ironic, that when the ONU General Assembly in december 1987 adopted a resolution (42/159) against terrorism, one country, Honduras, abstained, and 2 voted against (USA and Israel) (6)
The Bush administration even suspends military aid to countries not willing to exempt Americans from prosecution at the International Criminal Court, which does create difficulties in the cooperation with the British - a critical article on that by Mark Seddon was seen in The Guardian, 300603. You cannot as Jack Straw deplore the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi and accept the detention - incommunicado - of Tariq Aziz.
By June 2004 the US government offers an unusual compromise - as they refuse to abide by the Geneva Conventions and let Saddam Hussein go by the turnover of "sovereignty" to the Interim Government of Iraq. They will keep him, but let the legal custody go to the IGI, The Guardian, 220604.
Executive Director, American Center for International Law, Evan Augustine Peterson III: "Was the Iraq war legal, or illegal, under international law", Information Clearing House, 170904, is a short and clear discussion of the main points, including references to deeper analysis.
It works to demand the law applied to American officials also. Rumsfeld cancels a trip to Germany after bein sued in Germany for war crimes by Center for Constitutional Rights (DPA 210105)
"10 questions the senate should ask John Bolton" by Phyllis Bennis, IPS, 080305.
The Montreal Convention on Civil Aviation states in Article 7: "The Contracting State in the territory of which the alleged offender is found shall, if it does not extradite him, be obliged, without exception whatsoever and whether or not the offence was committed in its territory, to submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution. Those authorities shall take their decision in the same manner as in the case of any ordinary offence of a serious nature under the law of that State." This concerns any kind of action endangering civil air traffic. In spite of this Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch and their accomplices have not been prosecuted for the downing of Cubana Flight 455 on 061076. (110406, CounterPunch)
160406, ICH. Mike Whitney: "Iran's demand that its rights [according to article I & II in the NPT] be respected is in fact a defense of the basic principle which underscores civilization itself; that even the weakest among us can take refuge in the law. The Mullahs are right to think that that is a principle worth fighting for."
Now more than ever: a global movement for global justice, by Jeremy Brecher in ATTAC Newsletter "Sand in the Wheels", 101, 241001:
"The Bush Administration is already moving to make the new international coalition not just a coalition to protect against terrorists but also a coalition to protect against the critics of unrestrained economic globalization.
This same kind of understanding must now be applied to global conflict. The September 11 attacks show that the era is over in which nation states - even the world's single military superpower - can protect their people. There is no longer such a thing as national security -- security must be global to be secure. Broad human interests require limits on the use of violence by anyone in the world, whether they initiate their attacks from caves in the wilderness or from war rooms in national capitals."
Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States
The Definition of Aggression
The USA should participate fully in the World Conferences Against Racism.
The USA should stop any breach of the Geneva Conventions protecting prisoners of war (whether they be american or foreign)
EU (and other trade partners) should demand US to join and respect these treaties as a precondition to any further trade arrangement the USA requests.
The international community can advance rule by international law by acting against key US actors - corporations e.g. in trade and investments decisions. Consumer activism is recommended (The boycott in 1995 of French wine did have some effect)
When the USA has signed a treaty/convention/other internationally binding document the next problem will be to attain observance. That actually is what international law and order is all about.
'It sends the message that the United States has been the biggest violator and thrasher of international law in the post-war period," Richard Du Boff, a professor emeritus of economic history at Mawr College in the state of Pennsylvania, told IPS, 081205).
170207, ICH, Michael Parenti, Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World. "The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor."
See also USA og Tortur
"A school of US academics holds, that the US can pick and choose the international conventions and laws that serve its purpose... This puts American international leadership at stake.." 4
It is not acceptable, that a terrorist attack, no matter how heinous, committed by non-state actors, is classified as an act of war, which could justify an attack on some other country - unless that other state's responsibility for the attack has been unambiguously established (5).
In one respect the President has already exceeded his powers. His call for "Osama Bin Laden dead or alive" violates Section 2.11 of Executive Order 12333, which states in plain English: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." No doubt the vast majority of Americans would like to see Osama bin Laden dead, but that is not the point. The point is that if the prohibition against assassination, enacted at the request of Congress in 1981 by none other than President Reagan is to be ignored, it must first be repealed by this President in consultation with this Congress. Repeal by Presidential speechwriters is not in the best American tradition and sets a most dangerous precedent. (5).
The intelligence organisations should be kept on a short line. Preferably bound up on international conventions and efficient national control. Legality is important.
The same standards should be valid for all. Hans Olsson suggests(2) that the world community should neutralise the "terrorist countries" with stocks of chemical weapons, and establish no-flight-zones in USA until all American chemical weapons are destroyed. He also suggests bombing of pharmaceutical industries. Sure this was ironical. But still.
We should demand that the USA live up to it's human rights promises, and 19. January 2001, Amnesty International report:
"Serious human rights violations persist within the USA, particularly in relation
to the criminal justice system:
-- Police brutality, racism, torture and ill-treatment in jails and prisons continue to be
widely reported;
-- Electro-shock weapons and other restraints continue to be misused by police and
corrections officials;
-- Cruel conditions still persist in segregation units;
-- Detained children and asylum-seekers are still ill-treated
-- Juvenile offenders still face the death penalty."
"Violations - in Texas and elsewhere - have included the low quality of legal representation afforded to poor capital defendants, racial bias, and the execution of the mentally impaired and of juvenile offenders."
The USA is about to carry out its 700th execution since resuming judicial killing in 1977, Amnesty International warned 1 March 2001 "The fact that it is violating human rights standards in the process only adds to the deepening shadow being cast on its international reputation by its relentless resort to this outdated punishment." These international standards are notably the 1989 United Nations (UN) Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra- legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions and the 1991 UN Manual on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions.
ON March 31st 2004 The International Court of Justice ruled that the USA violated the rights of 51 Mexicans on death row and ordered their cases be reviewed. ... The Court was considering a suit filed by Mexico claiming 52 convicted murderers weren't given their right to assistance from their government.
It is not the only case os US disrespect for the 1963 Vienna Concention, which guarantees people accused of a serious crime while in a foreign country the right to contact their own government for help.
USA should pay all it owes UNO - not just a part of it.
UN ICTY in Hague: "must do more to dispel the perception, that it is the instrument of any one power or nation.
Nearly ½ of the world population (87 countries) experienced some kind of US sanctions. This in spite of the UNO Charter's second article declaring a principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. The security council has a mandate to sanction, when there is a threat to international peace and security.
The US media never mention the state terrorism exercised by the USA on other countries. Since 1945, the United States has intervened abroad 67 times, causing 12 million deaths, about half by overt action (Pentagon) and covert action (CIA). These are practically unknown to most Americans, and rarely mentioned, with the notable exceptions of Chalmers Johnson's book "Blowback" and Bill Blum's "Rogue state: a Guide to the Worlds Only Superpower". In addition 100.000 people die daily in the world from hunger and preventable diseases in the midst of enormous luxury and waste. (8 )
The USA denied the ICRC to visit Saddam Hussein from 13. december to 21. february (AP)
"The violence stems from injustice, because people feel they have been treated unfairly, whether that means military occupation, starvation under UN sanctions, whether it means that they have a dictatorship imposed on them, propped up by the West. This is why people turn to violence, because they have no other avenue left. (Robert Fisk)
310306, K Gajendra Singh gennemgår på ICH hypermagtens magthybris. "Bush's threat of war against Iraq for defying international law is absurd. Since coming into office, he has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world in past 20 years. The list is familiar, including but not limited to the withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, failure to ratify the Rio Pact on biodiversity, withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the pursuit ot National Missile Defense. It appears ready to violate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It opposed the ban on land mines and has sought to immobilize the UN convention against torture so that it could keep foreign observers out of its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay and hide its treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners. It has sabotaged the small-arms treaty and is opposed to new provisions of the biological-warfare convention. It experiments with biological weapons of its own and has refused chemical-weapons inspectors full access to its laboratories. It is opposed to the International Criminal Court and is coercing other countries to sign separate agreements not to charge US citizens. It has permitted CIA hit squads to recommence covert operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign heads of state. Even its threat to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN Security Council is a defiance of international law."
080406, Asian Tribune. USA stiller ingen kandidat til FNs nye Menneskerettighedsråd - formentlig fordi man frygter at han ikke ville blive valgt. Valget foregår ved skriftlig afstemning og der skal 99 stemmer til. USA stemte imod rådets oprettelse, sammen med Israel, Marshalløerne og Palau.
Justice has some qualities, which revenge does not carry (Otto Sørensen, Toreby)
The USA could be famous for applying double standards.
It is ok for the USA to instigate terrorism (bin Laden against the Soviet Union, UCK against first the Yugoslav, next the Macedonian government, the Contras against the Nicaraguan government).
5000 dead New Yorker's are reason for war, while the thousands of Iraqi children dying of diarrhoea because the USA sanctions prevent supply of chlorine for water treatment are hardly mentioned.
Also commercially the USA is playing by double standards.
South Africa and Brazil are sought denied the right to import generic medicines against AIDS - which is a real illness, counting thousands of deaths because of WTO/TRIPS patent rules, while an anthrax scare - counting below ten dead and easily treated by other medicines - gets senator Charles Schumer (D. N.Y.) out asking for invocation of 28 USA Sec 1498, allowing the federal government to purchase products for official use from manufacturers other than the patent holder. After this the federal government persuaded Bayer to deliver Ciprofloxacin at 1/3 of the ordinary price !!!
The WTO rules prescribes (or USA works to have them prescribe) privatisation of railways, nursing homes, hospitals and many other services, but in November 2001 the selected president decrees that Air security officers - which were employed by private companies in the USA - should in the future be federally employed.
Can India put in a side-request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the USA ? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the 1984 Bhopal gasleak that killed 16000 people. Arundhati Roy
The Greens/Green Party USA has a statement on 9-11: Just and Positive alternatives, which contains many sound ideas.
David Walsh: "The killing of [Saddam] Hussein's sons: The Nuremberg precedent and the criminalisation of the US ruling elite", 240703
Don't forget, when Nicaragua proposed a UN Security Council resolution demanding, that all countries (none mentioned in the text) should respect international law, this resolution was met by a US veto !!! (6)
On the Guantanamo concentration camp Amnesty cites in a press release, 241203, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (181203): "Under the governments theory, it is free to imprison Gherebi indefinitely along with hundreds of other citizens of foreign countries, friendly nations among them, and to do with Gherebi and these detainees as it will, when it pleases, without any compliance with any rule of law of any kind ... Indeed, at oral argument, the government advised us that its position would be the same even if the claims were that it was engaging in acts of torture or that it was summarily executing the detainees... It is the first time that the government has announced such an extraordinary set of principles - a position so extreme that it raises the gravest concerns under both American and international law".
Human Rights Watch writes 290104, that the US is still keeping an unspecified number of children (16 - 17 year old) in Guantanamo. The USA has in december 2002 ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Children setting 18 years as minimum age for participating in armed conflict.
UK manages a good amount of hypocrisy in its treatment of people engaging in war activities in foreign countries. Mark Thatcher in Equatorial Guinea, support for Chechen rebels. It is bringing some law and order to the system, that Blairs government will institute a licensing of mercenary firms - but the double standards remain. George Monbiot, The Guardian, 250105.
040205, UN human rights experts express continued concern about situation of Guantanamo Bay detainees.
230205, The Guardian reveals the full picture of how the government manipulated the legal justification for war, and political pressure placed on its most senior law officer. Elizabeth Wilmshurst said in her resignation letter: "I regret I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force without a second security council resolution.... I cannot in conscience go along with advice within the office or to the public or to parliament - which asserts the legitimacy of military action without such a resolution, particularly since an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances which are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law".
110305, Simon Tidall, The Guardian: "Global Sheriff is slowly gaining on the US and its cavalier way with the law". Tisdall mentions examples, where USA is giving in to law and order: war crimes in Sudan may be referred to ICC; US supreme court decided to abolish death penalty for offenders under 18; the White House bowed to a ruling by the Wolrd Court in The Hague, which said that the denial of consular assistance to Mexicans on death row in Texas was in breach of the 1969 Vienna Convention. To this comes the case of ACLU representing Afghan and Iraqi prisoners against Rumsfeld and the Agent Orange multibillion dollars class action. [I do not see, that the last 2 cases involves any change of government attitudes, OJ].
220305, Los Angeles Times, Mike Farrell. "Torture is certainly more indecent than 4-letter words, as is appointing a man renowned for perfidy to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies or putting an imperialist zealot in the United Nations." This month the government renunciated a decades old international treaty - The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The Convention gives any citizen the right to assistance from his country's consul should he get into trouble in another country. Reciprocally - what else. Now 51 Mexicans are placed on Death Row in the USA and denied access to their consul. Mexico has sued the USA at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. And Mexico won. And Ms Rice sent a memo to the United Nations, that the USA withdraws from the optional protocol !
2005, SANDS, p. 15 "Ironically, the retreat from the established international order coincided with the United States' ever greater dependence on the global economy, one area where respect for the rules was seen as vital."
171106, Reuters AlertNet, "Chertoff says US threatened by international law." What a point of view !
Israel is also cultivating double standards, maybe even more than the USA
Tanya Reinhart, professor at Tel Aviv University, writes in Yediot Ahronot after the murder of Yassin: "According to international law, the execution of any person in an occupied territory is not allowed. The Geneva Convention, born out of the horrifying experience of World War II, sets limitations on the use of force even in times of war. The convention distinguishes between war and a state of occupation. Its fundamentals are, first, that occupied people are "protected", and that the occupier is responsible for their safety. Second, it determines that the occupied people have the right to fight for their liberation."
080405, Human Rights Watch decries proposed military doctrin that formalizes "enemy combattant" status. Kenneth Roth: "Disregarding fundamental principles will in particular suggest that all provisions of the concentions are subject to unilateral modfication". "Joint Doctrine for Detainee Operations: Joint publication 3-63" contravenes the Geneva Conventions.
Center for Economic and Social Rights has made the report: "US violations of Occupation Law in Iraq", 100604.
Læs også Jeremy R Hammond, "Lessons disregarded: The US and cluster munitions", Yirmeyahu Review, 141004.
Nürnberg principperne (2 links til samme dokument, på forskellige servere) another link.
I recommend anyone to read Ward Churchill's introduction to his book: "Perversions of Justice. Indigenous peoples and angloamerican law", 220203 at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, Ca.
1. Clinton signed the protocol just before he left. But is must be ratified and Jesse Helms has promised to prevent that.
2. Sydsvenskan, 16. januar 2001
3. Carl Bildt: A second chance in the Balkans, Foreign Affairs, 2001, 80, 1, 148 - 159
4. Peter J Spiro: The new sovereignty, Foreign Affairs, 2000, 79, 6, 9 - 15 og SANDS.
5. Peter Weiss: War: Metaphor into reality, 24 September 2001.
6. Monde Diplomatique, decembre 2001, 10 - 11; text, 1984 mining of Nicaraguan ports and World Court ruling against it
7. Here cited from Peter H Raven: Presidential address: Science, Sustainability and the Human Prospect, Science, 2002, 297, 954 - 958
8. Johan Galtung & Dietrich Fischer, http://www.transnational.org/pressinf/2002/pf158_EndStateTerrorism.html
9. Max Castro, Miami Herald, 260703, her fra Informationclearinghouse
Kommentarer modtages meget gerne på e-mail: orla@jordals.dk
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