Justice for Afghanistan?

The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants against senior members of the Taliban regime on the grounds that their persecution of women is a crime against humanity:

The international criminal court’s chief prosecutor has requested arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader and Afghanistan’s chief justice on the grounds that their persecution of women and girls in Afghanistan is a crime against humanity.

It marks the first time the prosecutor has built a case around systemic crimes against women and girls, legal experts say. It is also a rare moment of vindication for Afghan activists, who over the last three years have often felt abandoned by the international community even as Taliban oppression deepened.

[...]

Karim Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, said in a statement that the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, are “criminally responsible” for ongoing persecution of girls, women, the LGBTQ+ community and their allies.

Good. And not just because of Afghanistan. There's also Iran and Saudi Arabia, and of course the US is increasingly going full-Gilead. And while none of those countries are parties, establishing a principle in international law that gender persecution is a crime against humanity will still enable their regimes to be held to account in future under other legal jurisdictions. Members of the Republican Party might not be able to take European holidays ever again.

Justice for Gaza?

The New York Times reports that the International Criminal Court is about to issue arrest warrants for Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over their genocide in Gaza:

Israeli officials increasingly believe that the International Criminal Court is preparing to issue arrest warrants for senior government officials on charges related to the conflict with Hamas, according to five Israeli and foreign officials.

The Israeli and foreign officials also believe the court is weighing arrest warrants for leaders from Hamas.

If the court proceeds, the Israeli officials could potentially be accused of preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and pursuing an excessively harsh response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, according to two of the five officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

The Israeli officials, who are worried about the potential fallout from such a case, said they believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is among those who might be named in a warrant. It is not clear who might be charged from Hamas or what crimes would be cited.

Good. Israel is clearly perpetrating genocide in Gaza, as well as committing other war crimes and crimes against humanity. And as their ultimate political authority, Netanyahu bears legal responsibility for those crimes. He must be held to account for them. Israel is hardly going to do that themselves, so international justice is what we're left with. That process may be slow and imperfect, largely amounting to stigmatisation and a de facto lifetime travel ban from all civilised nations, but its what we've got, and it seems better than the alternatives.

Still chickenshits

After a month of watching Israel bomb hospitals and murder children and threaten starvation, ethnic cleansing, and nuclear strikes in revenge for a terrorist attack, Chris Hipkins finally seems to have discovered his conscience:

Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins has called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, saying "the violence and the killing has to stop".

He has stressed that he has made the announcement as Labour leader, not caretaker Prime Minister.

But Hipkins said it had become "untenable" for him to remain silent.

"It runs against Labour Party values to see the horrific scenes we are witnessing without calling for a ceasefire," he said.

Its good to see - better late than never – and likely to be popular. But at the same time it was rather undercut by (incorrect) reports yesterday that the US had brokered the ceasefire Hipkins was calling for. Leading to the suspicion that rather than actually standing up for "Labour Party values", Hipkins was just being a spineless little yes-man, going with the international flow, as usual.

Once upon a time the Labour Party had leaders who didn't have to wait for a month to do the right thing. We wouldn't have had this craven bullshit under David Lange, or Helen Clark (or, for the Boomers, Norman Kirk). But those days are clearly long gone. And Labour wonders why no-one believes in them anymore? Its because these days, they don't seem to believe in anything other than their own careers. They're chickenshits all the way down.

Finally

Last month, we learned that Australia had agreed-in-principle to Aotearoa's offer to resettle refugees from Australian concentration camps. And today, Australia finally accepted it:

In a major about-turn, Australia has accepted New Zealand's long-standing offer to take 150 refugees a year for three years from detention centres in the Pacific.

The deal aims to rehome some of the thousands of refugees who have arrived in Australia by boat, and been placed in detention in line with the country's policy.

The original offer was made by then-prime minister John Key in 2013 and has continued to be extended by his successors Bill English and Jacinda Ardern.

Australian authorities have rejected the proposal until now, citing concerns that the refugees could claim Kiwi citizenship and then travel into Australia freely.

Australia's solution to that problem has long been a demand that we permanently deny their victims citizenship. Obviously, this has been unacceptable to the New Zealand government. And it looks like we got our way: the refugees won't be denied residency or citizenship. Further, while Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi has said that Australia's border decisions are a question for Australia, he's also said that we expect all kiwis to be treated equally - suggesting there may be diplomatic consequences if they try any continued victimisation.

Obviously, this deal could have been made nine years ago when it was first proposed. The fact that Australia refused over illusory, racist fears, and then tortured these people for nine years, is something Australian politicians need to be held accountable for.

Send Putin to The Hague

The International Criminal Court has formally opened an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine, after being asked to by 39 countries:

The prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague has announced that he will launch an investigation into possible war crimes or crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

Karim Khan said that although Ukraine was not a member of the ICC, it had awarded jurisdiction to the court. He said that there was grounds to open an investigation based on a previous preliminary investigation on Crimea and the Donbas published last year, and on current events in Ukraine.

“I have already tasked my team to explore all evidence preservation opportunities,” Khan, a British lawyer, said.

Which is good, because war crimes and crimes against humanity are undoubtedly being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and they need to be prosecuted. But thanks to a quirk of the Rome Statute, the real crime here - the crime of aggression ( "the supreme international crime" which "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole") - will not be part of the investigation. Neither Ukraine or Russia is a party to the Rome Statute (though Ukraine has accepted jurisdiction), so the ICC cannot prosecute for aggression. Which means firstly, that we need to reform the Rome Statute so that it can; and secondly, that until that happens, we will need a special-purpose tribunal to prosecute this crime and hold Putin accountable.

Read the fine print

The Herald reports that after nine years, Australia has finally accepted Aotearoa's offer to resettle people from its offshore concentration camps. Which sounds like great news. Except there's a catch:

The deal was confirmed "in principle" in the Australian Senate this week but awaits further negotiation, including Australia seeking a guarantee there would be no "backdoor" for the people transferred to come to Australia.

Australia is obsessed with the idea that people who have the temerity to request asylum from them can never be allowed to set foot there (apparently they think they're such a great country that people will still want to visit their dry racist shithole even after being tortured by them for nine years). Refugees in New Zealand of course are eventually granted citizenship, which means a right to travel to and live in Australia. Australia's "solution" to this is to ask us to continue to oppress its victims on their behalf by denying them citizenship. Successive New Zealand governments have continuously told them that that's not happening, which is why this has taken nine years. But shuffling this fundamental disagreement behind an "agreement in principle" doesn't make it go away, and its likely that Australia's desire for a "guarantee" will continue to hold things up. So we probably shouldn't expect any concentration camp victims any time soon, unless we rescue them ourselves.

Australia could of course solve this problem itself, simply by exercising its right to refuse entry at the border in the unlikely event that any of its victims show up there again. The fact that they are instead seeking to make us complicit in their oppression speaks volumes about the moral character of their government. Aotearoa shouldn't have a bar of it. Once we accept these people, they're part of the whanau, and we should not cooperate in any way with their abuser.

(Australia's offshore detention regime has been found to constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and is unlawful under international law).

Guantanamo: Twenty years of shame

Today (US time) is the 20th anniversary of the opening of America's gulag at Guantanamo Bay. The US has kept people imprisoned without trial - sometimes without even charges - for twenty years now. Most of those kidnapped by the US have since died or been released, but 39 remain (18 of them cleared for release). Ironicly, one of the "reasons" for their continued detention is to protect "classified information", specifically information about how the US tortured them: to stop them from telling their stories. Human rights abuse is being used to "justify" further abuse.

I was wondering what to write about this, so looked back. Here's what I wrote ten years ago. The only thing that has changed since then has been the numbers.

As for what needs to happen: the prisoners should be released, and those responsible for their detention, from the Presidents and politicians who set it up and kept it open, the military officers who supervise it and run its kangaroo "courts", down to the lowliest guard, need to be put on trial for crimes against humanity. Anything less, and we're just inviting them to do it again.

Justice for Brazil?

Brazil has been one of the countries worst-hit by the pandemic, with over 21 million confirmed cases and 600,000 deaths. Much of the blame for that can be squarely laid at the feet of its president, Jair Bolsonaro, who put the economy first and let the disease spread unchecked, while opposing mask-wearing and vaccination and denying the disease was serious. Hundreds of thousands died as a result of his choices. And now, Brazil's Senate says he should be prosecuted for it:

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, should face murder charges for his role in the country’s “stratospheric” coronavirus death toll, a draft report from a senate inquiry into Brazil’s Covid crisis has recommended.

The 1,078-page document, published by Brazilian media on Tuesday afternoon, is not due to be voted on by the commission until next week and could yet be modified by senators.

But the draft text paints a devastating portrait of the neglect, incompetence and anti-scientific denialism many believe has defined the Bolsonaro administration’s response to a public health emergency that has killed more than 600,000 Brazilians.

Bolsonaro’s “deliberate and conscious” decision to delay buying Covid vaccines needlessly condemned thousands of citizens to early graves, the report claims.

Bolsonaro is an extreme case, but he's not the only leader whose deliberate choices or depraved indifference caused mass-death (Boris Johnson is another good example). And these people should be held accountable for those choices, through criminal prosecution under domestic or international law. Its not like its a foreign concept in our constitutional tradition - Charles I was tried and executed for exactly this (his chosen means of causing mass-death being war).

So hopefully Brazil will follow through, and charge and try Bolsonaro. Even if a trial results in an acquittal, it would set a useful precedent for political accountability, and hopefully make politicians more cautious before choosing mass death over saving lives.

Argentina returns the favour

In the early 2000s, Argentinian victims of the Dirty War, denied justice due to a local amnesty, sought justice in Spanish courts, who obligingly convicted agents of that country's dictatorship of crimes against humanity under Spain's "universal jurisdiction" law. But Argentina wasn't the only country with a repressive dictatorship which engaged in crimes against humanity and then wrote itself an amnesty: Spain was like that too! And now, Argentina's courts are returning the favour, indicting a former Spanish Minister forf murder for their role in the Franco regime's crimes:

An Argentinian judge investigating cases that happened during the Franco dictatorship in Spain has indicted a former Spanish minister on four counts of homicide.

Judge Maria Servini de Cubria, sitting in Buenos Aires, issued the ruling against Rodolfo Martín Villa, 87, interior minister between 1976 and 1979.

The judge wrote that she considered Martín Villa “the prima facie perpetrator criminally responsible for the crime of aggravated homicide, repeated on at least four occasions, of which Pedro María Martínez Ocio, Romualdo Barroso Chaparro, Francisco Aznar Clemente and Germán Rodríguez Saíz were victims”.

This is good: the crimes of the Franco regime are still unaddressed, thanks to their self-serving amnesty, and it has allowed fascist attitudes to persist throughout their government. In Argentina, international trials helped open the door for rejection of the amnesty and for justice to be delivered at home. And hopefully the same will happen with Spain.

An accomplice to war crimes

That's the only way to describe MFAT, who are merrily approving weapons exports to help the United Arab Emirates' ongoing crimes against humanity in Yemen:

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade approved the export of weapons systems sent to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) despite officials warning they could be used in Yemen.

Since 2016, at least seven export permits have been approved for military equipment sent by New Zealand companies to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, both of whom are accused of war crimes over their military intervention in Yemen.

At least 100,000 people have died in Yemen's civil war, which has also displaced millions and pushed the country to the brink of famine.

As the story makes clear, this is not a matter of ignorance. MFAT knows the weapons will be used in Yemen, which makes their export both a violation of our export control regime. And they know that what is happening in Yemen is a crime against humanity. But they seem willing to ignore both to enrich the immoral weapons industry (and in fact seem to see that, rather than enforcing international law, as their major role).

This is not acceptable, either legally or politically. And MFAT needs to be held to account for it.

US policing is a crime against humanity

US Police kill around a thousand people a year. Roughly half of them are black, a rate three times that of their proportion of the population. US policing is racist and murderous. And that makes it a crime against humanity:

The systematic killing and maiming of unarmed African Americans by police amount to crimes against humanity that should be investigated and prosecuted under international law, an inquiry into US police brutality by leading human rights lawyers from around the globe has found.

[...]

In a devastating report running to 188 pages, human rights experts from 11 countries hold the US accountable for what they say is a long history of violations of international law that rise in some cases to the level of crimes against humanity.

They point to what they call “police murders” as well as “severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution and other inhuman acts” as systematic attacks on the Black community that meet the definition of such crimes.

They also call on the prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague to open an immediate investigation with a view to prosecutions.

But who to prosecute? Individual officers who commit these murders, obviously. The superiors who excuse, cover up, or merely look the other way on murder are also guilty, under the principle of command responsibility. But there's also the politicians who provide them with legal impunity, both at a state and federal level, all of whom have a legal duty to prevent crimes against humanity, and by conspicuously failing to do so (and in some cases, explicitly excusing and encouraging them) are effectively co-conspirators. This report should put them all on notice: either the US sorts its shit out, stops murdering black people and starts holding historic criminals accountable, or the international community will.