Tag Archives: international law

The narrative now is "Assad cannot be allowed to normalize use of chemical weapons."The US has already normalized the use of torture and illegal aggression.FiredoglakeWho’s Who Of American War Criminals And Torture Apologists Endorse Gina Haspel For CIA Director Kevin Gosztola | managing editor of Shadowproof Press and producer and co-host of the weekly podcast, "Unauthorized Disclosure"

"Preemptive war."CounterpunchIf John Bolton Is Right, Pearl Harbor Was Perfectly Legal Kara Love, attorney

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the cautionaryadmonition: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” Too often, we have ignored that warning. Gina Haspel’s defenders assert that her behavior conformed to procedures that senior CIA officials (and presumably the Bush White House) had approved. The international community rejected the “just following orders” defense that defendants invoked at the Nuremberg trials. Haspel’s defense is no...

DURING THE NUREMBERG TRIALS after World War II, several Nazis, including top German generals Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, claimed they were not guilty of the tribunal’s charges because they had been acting at the directive of their superiors.Ever since, this justification has been popularly known as the “Nuremberg defense,” in which the accused states they were “only following orders.” The Nuremberg judges rejected the Nuremberg defense, and both Jodl and Keitel were hanged. The United...

Back in September I presented a paper at a conference in Moscow on the topic of ‘Human Rights Reasoning and Double Standards in the Rules-Based Order.’ In this I pointed out that both Russia and the West claimed to be in favour of a ‘rules-based order’ and that each accused the other of breaking that order. The problem, I conjectured, derives from differing understanding of what the rules are and how they should be applied. Russia believes in a traditional, Westphalian, order in which...

Did you know that war propaganda is against international law? Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966, obliges states to impose certain restrictions on freedom of speech. The article was the product of a long debate among UN members. Countries from the Soviet bloc and many non-aligned nations, notably Brazil, were keen to include a prohibition on propaganda for war, and also to make it as...

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reaffirmed her country's position on the issue of the intervention of the Washington-led international “anti-ISIS” coalition in Syria, pointing out that its presence under the pretext of fighting terrorism is illegal due to not being approved by the legitimate Syrian government.During the weekly session on Thursday, Zakharova pointed out that there are certain parties who always try to exploit the humanitarian issue in Syria for political...