Though the World War II victors promised that the Nuremberg principles would apply not just to the Nazis but to everyone, today’s reality is that international law follows two standards: a lenient one for the West and its friends and a stringent variant for adversaries. This hypocrisy is now being institutionalized, Lawrence Davidson notes.
By Lawrence Davidson, Consortium News, Sept. 22, 1011
Back in February, I wrote an analysis on the subject of Universal Jurisdiction, which began:
“One of the really progressive acts that followed the end of World War II was the establishment of the principle of universal jurisdiction (UJ). UJ is a legal process that allows states that are signatories to various international treaties and conventions (such as the Geneva conventions) to prosecute alleged violators of these treaties, even when these violations are committed outside the country’s borders.
“This is particularly so if it can be demonstrated that the home government of the accused has no intention of bringing them to trial for the alleged offense. The assumption behind this principle is that the crime committed is so egregious as to be seen as a crime against humanity at large.
“In the wake of the Nazi Holocaust and other such crimes against humanity, UJ was accepted as a necessary and positive legal step by almost all Western nations.”
It has been 66 years since the end of World War II and the memory of the concentration camps has faded (except when invoked as a political tool by Zionists). Nor has the subsequent holocausts such as those in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia been sufficient to keep the issue of crimes against humanity front and center in the governmental minds of the great powers.
Peace and Justice Post 
September 24, 2011 at 7:35 am |
For what it is worth, I circulated the original article by Davidson on facebook. I considered the article important enough to be worth sharing, because it highlights a important issue – the erosion of international law.
The major imperialist powers are not only enforcing a double standard whereby recalcitrant third-world leaders are subject to international law but the political leadership of the imperial powers are exempted, but are also changing their domestic laws to render their actions immune from prosecution. We must all raise our voices to expose the predatory criminality of our national ruling classes, and the crimes they commit must be subjected to universal jurisdiction. In other words, Obama, Blair, Cameron, Sarkozy, Bush Senior and Junior, must be prosecuted for war crimes, mass murder and terrorism.
And let us stop misusing World War Two analogies to justify US wars abroad. Every time the US policymakers wish to promote an imperial adventure, the images of World War Two are invoked. This only debases the sacrifices made by the generation that fought fascism and Nazism during WWII, but also disguises the intentions of the imperialist powers in a hypocritical cloak of respectability.
LikeLike