Sunday, December 21, 2003



Instructive

The Iraqi war crimes tribunal established to try Saddam Hussein and other Ba'athists is taken boilerplate from the Statute of Rome - the ICC which the US vehemently opposes:

"It's very instructive that the Iraqi Governing Council decided to literally cut and paste the definitions of the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for their tribunal from the International Criminal Court statute," Richard Dicker, head of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch, said Friday.

[...]

"It's the ultimate irony that the U.S. government, which is the greatest obstacle to the ICC today, helped oversee the drafting and inclusion of the very crimes from the very court that it treats as anathema into the language of the Iraqi Special Tribunal," Dicker said.

That's because the US is not opposed to trying people for war crimes as such; they're opposed to impartiality and the idea that they would be subject to it, along with everyone else.

It's also instructive to note that the Iraqi statute appears only in English, and has not been translated into Arabic... making the puppet status of the IGC crystal clear. Hell, Iraqis don't even need to be able to read their own laws in their own language..

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