says JOHN LAUGHLAND
report by CHRISTOPHER JAMES (at The Hague) Posted: March 3, 2005
In fact the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) undermines important Nuremberg principles set after World War II, Laughland told ICDSM activists at the campaign's Hague legal conference (26/2/05).
The ICTY was a classic example of how the New World Order, as proclaimed by George Bush Sr in 1990, has “radically reformed” the legal basis of international relations in favour of powerful nations such as the United States, he explained.
Today’s ‘war on terror’ is a “perfect illustration” as ‘terror’ is, by definition, a criminal activity whereas war is an inter-state activity.
"It’s obvious that the ICTY comes directly out of this logic – comes directly out of this transformation of the free association between states which used to constitute international law into something resembling the criminal procedures of a [unitary] state.
"One of the many perversities of the Hague tribunal is that it does not operate on what the law is, but on what it would like the law to be – a form of behaviour which is about as perfect an expression of lawlessness as one can imagine.
"Anybody who looks at international law – the International Court of Justice, customary international law and the facts of the world can see that this is a rogue tribunal and therefore ought to be dissolved."
The ICTY has fashioned its image on the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg in an attempt to win legitimacy, right down to a similarity of name. However, that is where comparisons end, says Laughland.
Whereas Nuremberg held ‘crimes against peace’ (for example, the German invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland) to be the primary war crimes for which leading Nazis were tried, the ICTY has no such statute (ruling out prosecutions of NATO leaders for their 1999 aggression against Yugoslavia) and rides roughshod over the basic principle of national sovereignty in place of an easily manipulated ‘human rights’ agenda.
Those who champion vague concepts of ‘human rights’ over international law are misguided because “that is not a judicial reasoning that is, at best, the reasoning of a vigilante,” says Laughland.
“The Nuremberg jurisprudence actually based itself on [national sovereignty] because the Nazis radically questioned, both in their acts and their writings, the notion of state sovereignty.
“The Nazis invoked over-riding concerns for human rights when they declared war and invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland,” supposedly to protect the human rights of German minorities, he added. "The entire Nazi war effort had as its starting point the doctrine of humanitarian intervention.
"The primary crime of which the Nazis were accused and were convicted was the crime against peace – the crime of planning and executing a war of aggression.”
In fact, Nuremberg expressly ruled out the kind of tribunal set up by the UN Security Council at the ICTY. It stated that no such court can be set up to judge alleged crimes in a sovereign state where independent government holds power [as is the case of the former Yugoslav republics today]. Nuremberg was legitimate because the Nazis had temporarily, but unconditionally, surrendered German sovereignty to the victorious allies at the end of World War II.
“Of all the many perversities of the Milosevic trial, none is perhaps more striking than this extraordinary charge that he was pursuing a Greater Serbia. I can only think that this comes from the attempt to impose the Nuremberg jurisprudence on what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
“It’s almost like putting a large-fitting suit onto a small man. Obviously the Nazis were accused and convicted of creating a Greater Germany and so it seems almost as if the people at The Hague have attempted to take the Nuremberg jurisprudence off the peg and tried to fit it onto the events of 60 years later.”
