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RIGHTS
Call to Try Bush
By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Feb 2, 2009 (IPS) - Now that former U.S. president George W. Bush is an ordinary citizen again,
many legal and human rights activists in Europe are demanding that he and
high-ranking members of his government be brought before justice for crimes
against humanity committed in the so-called war on terror.
"Judicial clarification of the crimes against international law the former U.S.
government committed is one of the most delicate issues that the new U.S.
president Barack Obama will have to deal with," Wolfgang Kaleck, general
secretary of the European Centre for Human and Constitutional Rights told
IPS.
U.S. justice will have to "deal with the turpitudes committed by the Bush
government," says Kaleck, who has already tried unsuccessfully to sue the
former U.S. authorities in European courts. "And, furthermore, the U.S.
government will have to pay compensation to the innocent people who were
victims of these crimes."
Kaleck and other legal experts consider Bush and his highest-ranking
officials responsible for crimes against humanity, such as torture.
Many agree that the evidence against the U.S. government is overwhelming.
U.S. officials have admitted some crimes such as waterboarding, where a
victim is tied up and water is poured into the air passages. Also, human
rights activists have gathered testimonies by innocent victims of torture,
especially some prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
In an interview with the German public television network ZDF, Austrian
human rights lawyer Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture, said
that numerous cases of torture ordered by U.S. officials and perpetrated by
U.S. authorities are well documented.
"We possess all the evidence which proves that the torture methods used in
interrogation by the U.S. government were explicitly ordered by former U.S.
defence minister Donald Rumsfeld," Nowak told ZDF. "Obviously, these orders
were given with the highest U.S. authorities' knowledge."
"George W. Bush is without doubt responsible for crimes such as torture,"
says Dietmar Herz, professor of political science at the university of Erfurt,
235 km southwest of Berlin.
"According to the U.S. constitution, the U.S. president is responsible for all
actions carried out by the executive," Herz told IPS. "Therefore, George W.
Bush is responsible for the torture methods used by U.S. authorities, such as
waterboarding."
International justice against crimes against humanity began in 1945, with the
Nuremberg trials against Nazi criminals, says Kaleck. Leading prosecutor
Robert Jackson said at the opening of the trials in October 1945 that "we are
able to do away with...tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power
against the rights of (the) people...only when we make all men answerable to
the law."
But since then this promise has been fulfilled only in exceptional cases,
Kaleck said.
"Crimes against humanity have been repeatedly committed ever since, but
very few people have been brought before international courts for these
crimes," he said, adding that this impunity is particularly obvious for leaders
of the Allied countries (such as the U.S., France and Britain), who had
organised the Nuremberg trials.
Nobody was ever judged for crimes against humanity committed in Algeria by
France, in Vietnam and Latin America by the U.S., in Afghanistan by the Soviet
Union and in Chechnya by Russia.
Only in the 1990s, after the Yugoslav wars of secession, the Rwanda
genocide, and civil wars in countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone were
state criminals captured, judged and convicted.
"The creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 in The Hague
in the Netherlands marks a turning point in the prosecution of state officials
accused of crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity or of war,"
Kaleck added.
But prosecution for crimes of war or for crimes against humanity continues to
be highly selective. So far, only perpetrators from weak or failed states from
south-eastern Europe, or from the south, especially Africa, have been
brought to court. In a case such as that of former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, Britain acted as an accomplice to protect him.
Over the last couple of years, human rights activists and some national courts
in Europe have been fighting these arbitrary ways. They are appealing for,
and in some cases even applying, a universal jurisdiction of national courts.
The Spanish judiciary has opened cases against Latin American dictators such
as Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Montt, who ruled the Central American
country between 1982 and 1983, and Argentinean military officers involved
in kidnapping and killing civilians. (END)
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