ONLY HUMAN: Looking for Sparks of Justice

[struggle4progress]

By Kathleen Peratis

In 2002, President Bush said, "We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced." But this year he nominated John Bolton to be America's representative to the U.N., a man who has said treaties are not legally binding, calling them mere "political obligations."

The United States continues to get away with being shocked, shocked that torture took place in its facilities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, in dozens of American detention facilities around the world, and in at least half a dozen Middle Eastern and South Asian countries notorious for torture to whom we outsource our terrorism suspects. Not even a smoking gun, an order approving illegal interrogation methods, put Ricardo Sanchez, a lieutenant general and the former head of coalition forces in Iraq, in the dock. Which must have been good news for everyone above him in the torture chain whose heads he might then have been motivated to deliver to an alert prosecutor.

The United States shunned international justice for the trials of Iraqi bigs, opting instead for a so-called "Iraqi-led tribunal" in which access to lawyers from the time of arrest is not guaranteed, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is not required and the death penalty is not banned. <snip>

Taken together, it is indeed a bleak picture: an administration that views the ICC as part of a march toward world governance rather than as the best chance to ensnare monstrous abusers who will otherwise not be held accountable by any national justice system. <snip>

http://www.forward.com/articles/3141