Montag
12-09-2008, 10:09 PM
At last, some teeth in human rights
ERNA PARIS
December 9, 2008
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081209.wcorights10/BNStory/specialComment/home
excerpt:
When the General Assembly of the newly born United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948, an emotional Eleanor Roosevelt predicted that the idea of inherent rights would "creep like a curious grapevine into the consciousness of peoples around the world."
Was she right? In principle. The Holocaust was the immediate inspiration for the document, the first of its kind, and millions have since been educated about these abuses. But without international commitment to take action to defend human rights when necessary, the seminal declaration remained largely theoretical.
In 2006, this disconnect was addressed (again, in theory) when the Security Council adopted the Canadian-inspired doctrine known as "responsibility to protect," which commits the world body to protect civilian populations from genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity - in other words, to enforce established international law. R2P, as it is known, was the offspring of the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, which had as its stated goal the rescue of Albanians from ethnic cleansing.
The successful Kosovo intervention remained controversial because it was organized outside the UN's aegis, and because non-military targets in Serbia came under fire. The possibility of future humanitarian interventions was further undermined after the new doctrine was spuriously associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Human rights are always vulnerable to politics, a point that has been proved repeatedly since R2Ps's adoption.
Despite periodic steps in the right direction, the unfortunate reality since 1948 has been six decades of human-rights failures. In May, Amnesty International reported that people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries. They face unfair trials in at least 54 countries; they cannot speak freely in at least 77.
The abomination of the Guantanamo Bay prison, where a democratic superpower has held people without charges, twisted international and national law in order to torture them, then tried to convict them in unfair military commissions incarnates this lawlessness and impunity.
But there is, fortuitously, another side to this disheartening ledger: the recent re-emergence of international law. Perhaps we should call it humanity's faint-hope clause.
Since the early 19th century, nations have simultaneously tried to temper war with law. The road has been bumpy, but beneath the surface, the legal framework remained intact.
It was enhanced at Nuremberg, where the victorious Allies chose trials over summary executions, and where the idea of individual responsibility for crimes against humanity was first codified. It deepened with the strengthening of the Geneva Conventions to protect civilians as well as prisoners of war. Law became the default choice again in the 1990s after sanctions and other tools of international diplomacy failed so spectacularly to stop civil wars. It was then that the UN created ad hoc courts to try the major perpetrators of atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda. Soon there were international courts for the conflicts in Sierra Leone, East Timor and Cambodia.
Some of these tribunals have been more successful than others, but the idea of including prosecutions as a component of postconflict peacemaking has been gaining acceptance. The courts are creating important new law through their cases, including criminalizing sexual crimes against women when carried out as a weapon of war. They are mandated to confront the historical impunity of the powerful, as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia demonstrated when prosecutor Louise Arbour indicted Slobodan Milosevic. There were problems with his trial, but the fact that the dictator's life ended during a judicial process, not after an amnesty or a targeted assassination, was a triumph.
But nothing the world has seen can match the potential of the International Criminal Court, which will begin its first trial next month. Unlike the Nuremberg Tribunal or the ad hoc courts, the ICC is the world's first permanent independent tribunal, with a mandate to prosecute the core international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and major war crimes. It is supported and administered by more than half the countries in the world, a court of last resort that will spring into action only if a presumed perpetrator's country of citizenship refuses to prosecute or is structurally unable to mount a fair trial.
Its profile is skyrocketing. Four trials are pending, 300 people are in its witness protection program and there have been 960 applications for victim participation. Investigations are taking place in six countries.
ERNA PARIS
December 9, 2008
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081209.wcorights10/BNStory/specialComment/home
excerpt:
When the General Assembly of the newly born United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948, an emotional Eleanor Roosevelt predicted that the idea of inherent rights would "creep like a curious grapevine into the consciousness of peoples around the world."
Was she right? In principle. The Holocaust was the immediate inspiration for the document, the first of its kind, and millions have since been educated about these abuses. But without international commitment to take action to defend human rights when necessary, the seminal declaration remained largely theoretical.
In 2006, this disconnect was addressed (again, in theory) when the Security Council adopted the Canadian-inspired doctrine known as "responsibility to protect," which commits the world body to protect civilian populations from genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity - in other words, to enforce established international law. R2P, as it is known, was the offspring of the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, which had as its stated goal the rescue of Albanians from ethnic cleansing.
The successful Kosovo intervention remained controversial because it was organized outside the UN's aegis, and because non-military targets in Serbia came under fire. The possibility of future humanitarian interventions was further undermined after the new doctrine was spuriously associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Human rights are always vulnerable to politics, a point that has been proved repeatedly since R2Ps's adoption.
Despite periodic steps in the right direction, the unfortunate reality since 1948 has been six decades of human-rights failures. In May, Amnesty International reported that people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries. They face unfair trials in at least 54 countries; they cannot speak freely in at least 77.
The abomination of the Guantanamo Bay prison, where a democratic superpower has held people without charges, twisted international and national law in order to torture them, then tried to convict them in unfair military commissions incarnates this lawlessness and impunity.
But there is, fortuitously, another side to this disheartening ledger: the recent re-emergence of international law. Perhaps we should call it humanity's faint-hope clause.
Since the early 19th century, nations have simultaneously tried to temper war with law. The road has been bumpy, but beneath the surface, the legal framework remained intact.
It was enhanced at Nuremberg, where the victorious Allies chose trials over summary executions, and where the idea of individual responsibility for crimes against humanity was first codified. It deepened with the strengthening of the Geneva Conventions to protect civilians as well as prisoners of war. Law became the default choice again in the 1990s after sanctions and other tools of international diplomacy failed so spectacularly to stop civil wars. It was then that the UN created ad hoc courts to try the major perpetrators of atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda. Soon there were international courts for the conflicts in Sierra Leone, East Timor and Cambodia.
Some of these tribunals have been more successful than others, but the idea of including prosecutions as a component of postconflict peacemaking has been gaining acceptance. The courts are creating important new law through their cases, including criminalizing sexual crimes against women when carried out as a weapon of war. They are mandated to confront the historical impunity of the powerful, as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia demonstrated when prosecutor Louise Arbour indicted Slobodan Milosevic. There were problems with his trial, but the fact that the dictator's life ended during a judicial process, not after an amnesty or a targeted assassination, was a triumph.
But nothing the world has seen can match the potential of the International Criminal Court, which will begin its first trial next month. Unlike the Nuremberg Tribunal or the ad hoc courts, the ICC is the world's first permanent independent tribunal, with a mandate to prosecute the core international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and major war crimes. It is supported and administered by more than half the countries in the world, a court of last resort that will spring into action only if a presumed perpetrator's country of citizenship refuses to prosecute or is structurally unable to mount a fair trial.
Its profile is skyrocketing. Four trials are pending, 300 people are in its witness protection program and there have been 960 applications for victim participation. Investigations are taking place in six countries.