Imperialism Didn't End. These Days It's Known as International Law

A one-sided justice sees weaker states punished as rich nations and giant corporations project their power across the world.

The conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, is said to have sent an unequivocal message to current leaders: that great office confers no immunity. In fact it sent two messages: if you run a small, weak nation, you may be subject to the full force of international law; if you run a powerful nation, you have nothing to fear.


While anyone with an interest in human rights should welcome the verdict, it reminds us that no one has faced legal consequences for launching the illegal war against Iraq. This fits the Nuremberg tribunal's definition of a "crime of aggression", which it called "the supreme international crime". The charges on which, in an impartial system, George Bush, Tony Blair and their associates should have been investigated are far graver than those for which Taylor was found guilty.


The foreign secretary, William Hague, claims that Taylor's conviction "demonstrates that those who have committed the most serious of crimes can and will be held to account for their actions". But the international criminal court, though it was established 10 years ago, and though the crime of aggression has been recognised in international law since 1945, still has no jurisdiction over "the most serious of crimes". This is because the powerful nations, for obvious reasons, are procrastinating. Nor have the United Kingdom, the United States and other western nations incorporated the crime of aggression into their own legislation. International law remains an imperial project, in which only the crimes committed by vassal states are punished.

In this respect it corresponds to other global powers. Despite its trumpeted reforms, theInternational Monetary Fund remains under the control of the United States and the former colonial powers. All constitutional matters still require an 85% share of the vote. By an inexplicable oversight, the United States retains 16.7%, ensuring that it possesses a veto over subsequent reforms. Belgium still has eight times the votes of Bangladesh, Italy a bigger share than India, and the United Kingdom and France between them more voting power than the 49 African members. The managing director remains, as imperial tradition insists, a European, her deputy an American. More

 

"The house is dark without them": Israel kills father and daughter as they water vegetables

Muhammad al-Hisoumi is mourned during his funeral in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya.(Ashraf Amra / APA images)

Said al-Hisoumi lost both his father and his sister when Israel bombed the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya earlier this month.

“My father [Muhammad Awad] struggled throughout his life up to 12 March 2012,” al-Hisoumi said. “At noon on that day, my father and my sister Fayza were bending down, working in a greenhouse right here, when an Israeli missile tore their bodies apart.” As he spoke, al-Hisoumi pointed to the spot where the Israeli missile struck.

Muhammad al-Hisoumi, a 72-year-old native of Beit Lahiya and his daughter Fayza, 30, were watering vegetables when an Israeli drone attacked their greenhouse.

This was part of an Israeli air offensive on the coastal territory that left 24 Palestinians dead and 74 injured, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights’ weekly report for 8–14 March, and damaged or 32 houses, a school, a Palestine Red Crescent Society center and a workshop.

The Israeli assault began on Friday 8 March, when Israel carried out the extrajudicial execution of Popular Resistance Committee leader Zuhair al-Qaisi.

In retaliation, Palestinian resistance factions began firing rockets at Israel, and Israel escalated its attacks on the Gaza Strip until a ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, was reached four days later. More

 

Israeli Forces Destroy Hundreds of Olive Trees and Two Wells in Surif

24 FEBRUARY 2012 In the early hours on February 23, 2012, a combined group of Israeli settlers and soldiers came to Surif, a Palestinian village near the Separation Barrier in the southern West Bank, and cut down 700 trees and destroyed two water wells.

Surif, a large community of 17,000 Palestinian residents, routinely faces large scale acts of destruction and harassment from Israeli settlers and soldiers.

In this attack, Israeli Forces entered the area between the hours of 2am and 6am and cut down 400 olive trees and 300 apricot trees belonging to Ishaq Abdel Fatah Al Qadi.

Ishaq and his family are counting on the support of solidarity activists all over the world in order to buy and plant new trees in his field so that they can support themselves off of the land as they have done for decades. More

The Carter Center Calls on Israel to Release Hunger Striker Khader Adnan

Atlanta…The Carter Center calls on the Israeli government to immediately charge or release Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, who was arrested on Dec. 17, 2011, based on "secret evidence" and has been held in administrative detention without charge.

Mr. Adnan has undertaken a hunger strike since his arrest 62 days ago and his life is in imminent danger. His grave medical condition has been verified by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

Mr. Adnan's case highlights the inconsistencies of Israel's administrative detention policies with internationally recognized rights to due process.

As of Jan. 15, 2012, Israel is holding 307 Palestinians in administrative detention. Read the Carter Center's recent statement on the administrative detention of elected Palestinian legislators. More

 

Power blackout in Gaza as Egypt stops fuel smuggling

 The Gaza Strip’s sole electricity station has become inoperative because Egypt has begun to crack down on fuel smuggling activities through their shared border, a Palestinian energy official in Gaza said Tuesday.

Gaza Energy Authority official Ahmed Abul Amreen said in a press conference that the authority cannot meet electricity demands for hospitals, educational facilities, and water and sewage stations. He said the amount of electricity Gaza receives from an Israeli company fulfills only 35 percent of the population’s needs.

Palestinian news agency Maan quoted Abul Amreen as saying that the power plant’s inactivity has brought the strip’s primary electricity source to a halt, noting that Gaza already suffers a great shortage in wattage supplies.

The official held Israel responsible for the crisis. He also called upon the Egyptian Parliament to back Palestinians and continue to support them with the necessary fuel supplies.

Abul Amreen said an energy authority delegation that recently met with Egyptian officials received pledges that fuel supplies would resume.

Abul Amreen also stressed that a drastic solution for Gaza’s energy crisis would be to include the strip in an electricity linkage plan approved by the Arab League more than two years ago. He urged that the project begin immediately given the availability of the blueprints and funds required.

For nearly two weeks, Gaza has been undergoing a worsening fuel crisis caused by a halt in supplies smuggled through underground tunnels traversing its border with Egypt. The conundrum has rendered 90 percent of local oil stations idle.

Israel supplies Gaza with about 120 megawatts of electricity a day, while the strip’s only power plant produces 60 megawatts. But since Gaza needs at least 270 megawatts, the strip suffers daily blackouts that can last for eight hours.

The Israeli and Egyptian closure of Gaza’s borders in 2007 severely restricted its fuel supply. Fuel was first smuggled through tunnels from Egypt and eventually used in electricity generation after a local engineer developed a refining process. The engineer was later abducted by Israeli intelligence agents during a trip to Ukraine, Maan said. More

 

French parliament report accuses Israel of water 'apartheid' in West Bank

 The French parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee published an unprecedented report two weeks ago accusing Israel of implementing "apartheid" policies in its allocation of water resources in the West Bank.

The report said that water has become "a weapon serving the new apartheid" and gave examples and statistics that ostensibly back this claim.

"Some 450,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinians that live there," the report said. "In times of drought, in contravention of international law, the settlers get priority for water."

The author of the report was Socialist Party MP Jean Glavany, who in the past served as agriculture minister under French President Lionel Jospin and as cabinet secretary for President Francois Mitterrand. More 

 

Confronting intimidation, working for justice in Palestine

If we had a wish list for 2012 as Palestinians and friends of Palestine, one of the top items ought to be our hope that we can translate the dramatic shift in recent years in world public opinion into political action against Israeli policies on the ground.

We know why this has not yet materialized: the political, intellectual and cultural elites of the West cower whenever they even contemplate acting according to their own consciences as well as the wishes of their societies.

This last year was particularly illuminating for me in that respect. I encountered that timidity at every station in 

the many trips I took for the cause I believe in. And these personal experiences were accentuated by the more general examples of how governments and institutions caved in under intimidation from Israel and pro-Zionist Jewish organizations.

A catalogue of complicity

Of course there were US President Barack Obama’s pandering appearances in front ofAIPAC, the Israeli lobby, and his administration’s continued silence and inaction in face of Israel’s colonization of the West Bank, siege and killings in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of the Bedouins in the Naqab and new legislation discriminating against Palestinians in Israel.

The complicity continued with the shameful retreat of Judge Richard Goldstone from his rather tame report on the Gaza massacre — which began three years ago today. And then there was the decision of European governments, especially Greece, to disallow campaigns of human aid and solidarity from reaching Gaza by sea.

On the margins of all of this were prosecutions in France against activists calling forboycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and a few u-turns by some groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Europe caving in under pressure and retracting an earlier decision to cede connections with Israel. More

Palestinian's in a Jewish state'

Palestinians living in Israel face institutionalised discrimination and segregation in a supposedly democratic state.

Israel’s crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories - like the settlements, the killing of civilians and the demolition of homes - are openly condemned in the West by human rights groups and others like never before. But as the peace process remains stuck, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu forces the issue of Israel as a “Jewish state” into the spotlight, understanding the situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel has become crucial to grasping the core of the entire conflict.

So-called “Israeli Arabs” have got it better than most Palestinians, who are either under military rule or forcibly excluded from their homeland. But the institutional discrimination they have faced since 1948 goes to the heart of the contradiction that Israel is “Jewish and democratic”.

Many people will concede that the military occupation of non-citizens for over 40 years is undemocratic. Yet, inside the pre-1967 borders, Israel is far from the “liberal democracy” central to the propaganda, in areas like land, planning, housing, immigration and state budgets. Rhetoric and policies associated with the far-right in Europe - like an obsession with “demographics” and birth rates, or boosting one kind of population in a given area to counterbalance an “undesirable” minority - are mainstream in Israeli politics.

In my new book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy, I unpack some of the core elements of how Israel’s Palestinian citizens have been treated since 1948. One aspect is the area of nationality and citizenship rights, as this short extract explains:

A poorly understood aspect of Israel as a Jewish state is the distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”, an issue confused by the fact that, in English, the two terms can often be used interchangeably. In Israel, “‘nationality’ (Hebrew: le’um) and ‘citizenship’ (Hebrew: ezrahut) are two separate, distinct statuses, conveying different rights and responsibilities”. Palestinians in Israel, as non-Jews, can be citizens, but never nationals, and are thus denied “rights and privileges” enjoyed by those “who would qualify for Israeli citizenship under the 1950 Law of Return”. More

UN expert concerned at poor living conditions of Canada's indigenous

20 December 2011 – 

An independent United Nations human rights expert has asked Canada to clarify what it is doing to address the “dire” socio-economic conditions of the Attawapiskat aboriginal community, noting that many of its members live in unheated shacks or trailers, with no running water.

James Anaya, the Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said in a news release that he has been in touch with the Canadian Government to voice his deep concern about the conditions of the Attawapiskat First Nation, which he said exemplifies the conditions of many aboriginal communities in the country.

The Attawapiskat First Nation is a remote community in northern Ontario comprised of about 1,800 members. Mr. Anaya noted that the poor living conditions are particularly serious as winter approaches the area, which faces winter temperatures as low as minus 28 degrees Celsius. “The social and economic situation of the Attawapiskat seems to represent the condition of many First Nation communities living on reserves throughout Canada, which is allegedly akin to Third World conditions,” he stated.

“Yet, this situation is not representative of non-aboriginal communities in Canada, a country with overall human rights indicators scoring among the top of all countries of the world.

“Aboriginal communities face vastly higher poverty rights, and poorer health, education, employment rates as compared to non-aboriginal people,” said the expert. More

Failure at Durban - Is There a Crime of Ecocide

There is increasing evidence of dangerous, possibly catastrophic, climate change approaching. The latest science leads to the conclusion that limiting climate change to a 2⁰C increase in average global temperature is now not possible. 

There always was, after all, only a 50% chance. Now it has become a question of which year the threshold will be breached, how high the temperature will rise, over what time period, and what the consequences will be for the planet. Twenty years after Rio – after the legislative framework for effective global coordination to combat climate change was set in place – we arrive at deadlock. The capacity of the global community to solve the over-riding global challenge has proven to be inadequate. The global interest has been torn to shreds by the mindlessly competitive pursuit of excessive national interests. 

The talk will now turn to ‘transition periods’, to ‘preparatory phases’, ‘voluntary targets’, ‘coordinated action’, and ‘bottom-up approaches’. Our national leaders will spin positively into 2012. The ‘realistic expectation’ will focus on the possibility of global agreement by, or after, 2020.

The realistic prescription, from the UN and research institutes, is that global emissions need to peak between 2015 and ’17.

Historians, assuming sufficient social stability for dispassionate analysis a half-century from now, will search for reasons for our collective failure during the critical twenty-year period, 1992 – 2012. They will conclude that human technology outpaced human institutional capacity for rational decision-making. National leaders responded, as constitutionally and politically obliged, to national interest. More

European members of Security Council condemn Israeli settlements, settler violence

The four European Union members of the UN Security Council on Tuesday strongly criticized Israel’s decision to speed up construction of settlements, which they termed a “wholly negative” development.”

The ambassadors from Britain, France, Germany and Portugal issued a joint statement branding the Israeli settlements in Palestinian occupied territories and East Jerusalem as illegal under international law. “We call on the Israeli government to reverse these steps,” the statement said. “The viability of the Palestinian state that we want to see and the two-state solution that is essential for Israel’s long-term security are threatened by the systematic and deliberate expansion of settlements.”

The statement, issued following the 15-country Security Council’s closed-door discussion on the situation in the Middle East, condemned Israeli settlers’ violence against the Palestinians, including the burning of the Nebi Akasha mosque in West Jerusalem and the Burqa mosque in the West Bank.

It called on Israeli leaders to boldly demonstrate political will and leadership to break the impasse in negotiations with the Palestinians. It called on both Israelis and Palestinians to agree on a package of proposals to settle security and border issues in order to advance negotiations toward ending the conflict.

The four countries reiterated support for the creation of a “sovereign, independent, democratic, contiguous and viable Palestinian state living in peace and security side by side with Israel.” More

The Robin Hood Tax

Demonstrators in Nice, France, last month urged the leaders of the Group of 20 nations to do more to help the poor.

They call it the Robin Hood tax — a tiny levy on trades in the financial markets that would take money from the banks and give it to the world’s poor.

And like the mythical hero of Sherwood Forest, it is beginning to capture the public’s imagination.

Driven by populist anger at bankers as well as government needs for more revenue, the idea of a tax on trades of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments has attracted an array of influential champions, including the leaders of France and Germany, the billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, former Vice President Al Gore, the consumer activist Ralph Nader, Pope Benedict XVI and the archbishop of Canterbury.

“We all agree that a financial transaction tax would be the right signal to show that we have understood that financial markets have to contribute their share to the recovery of economies,” the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, told her Parliament recently.

On Sunday, Mario Monti, the new prime minister of Italy, announced plans to impose a tax on certain financial transactions as part of a far-reaching plan to fix his country’s budgetary problems, and he endorsed the idea of a Europewide transactions tax. More