Human rights and justice

You know the TFF Statement on the Gaza Genocide – if not, read it here. This Declaration was initiated by professor Richard Falk – TFF Associate since 1986 – and the former Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu – a Turkish academic, politician and former diplomat who served as the 26th Prime Minister of Turkey and Leader of the Justice and Development Party from 2014 to 2016. Read this Declaration today. We urge you to sign it – the sooner, the better. This must not continue!

Photo The New York Times John Mearsheimer analyses the South African “application” to the International Court of Justice, ICJ, and explains why he now thinks it is genocide. John Mearsheimer January 5, 2024 Professor John Mearsheimer is one of the world’s leading analytical minds, lately and particularly on both the NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Please see his words in this article about South Africa’s application to the ICJ: – “For the record, I believed Israel was guilty of serious war crimes–but not genocide—during the first two months of the war, even though there was growing evidence of what Bartov has called “genocidal intent” on the part of Israeli leaders.⁵ But it became clear to me after the 24-30 November 2023 truce ended and Israel went back on the offensive, that Israeli leaders were in fact seeking to physically destroy a substantial portion of Gaza’s Palestinian population.”...

Jan Oberg December 13, 2023 One of the enigmatic aspects of international politics is that big and militarily superior countries have systematically lost wars in smaller countries – the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Ukraine. ’Losing’ here means military defeat, being forced out, losing the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people, and facing fiasco when it comes to achieving the presumed noble motives like introducing human rights, democracy, freedom or liberating women. And given the tremendous human costs, particularly in the Middle East, the US’s Global War On Terror since September 11, 2001, is also an intellectual and moral disaster. The United States – the world’s by far largest military spender, interventionist, warrior, occupier, global base-builder with the most militarised foreign policy – is in a class of its own. In losing wars too. It is now rapidly losing legitimacy, relevance and credibility in the eyes...

Discuss problems and improvements as part of the celebrations Jan Oberg December 10, 2023 I was asked by American-French Michèle de Gastyne, who runs Musique Universelle Arc-En-Ciel in Paris, to do a short video about human rights for a seminar she also organises on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Declaration. Michèle works with a strong inspiration from the Japan-based lay Buddhist organisation, Soka-Gakkai and in the spirit of President Daisaku Ikeda, who has also been a TFF Associate since 1995. Daisaku Ikeda (1928-2023) was a Buddhist philosopher, peacebuilder, educator, author and poet who dedicated his life to promoting peace through dialogue and spearheaded the development of the Soka Gakkai as a community-based Buddhist organization of over 12 million members worldwide. Mr. Ikeda passed away peacefully on November 15, 2023, at the age of 95. I accepted this invitation with honour but also with a particular joy because...

December 3, 2023 Here is a very eloquent explanation of three underlying, non-material factors that explain how the occupier has built a mental self-defence that makes everything look normal and fine. Note Levy’s three very substantial points. More about Gideon Levy “Is Gideon Levy the most hated man in Israel or just the most heroic?” from The Independent 2010 and here Wikipedia about him.

[Prefatory Note: A slightly updated and modified interview on Gaza with Zeynep Busra Conkar, an Associate Producer of TRT World, published October 30, 2023, an important Turkish media platform. A link to a short audio excerpt: https://twitter.com/trtworld/status/1719078356577075573] TRT: Israel’s bloodlust shows international law is ‘a manipulated series of norms.’ Renowned International Law Professor Richard Falk says Western leadership becomes “self-righteous” to enforce international law “when it’s in their interest” while in other cases, they remain silent. TRT Introduction to Q & A follows. ”Many objective observers have noted that how Israel is using force against Gaza constitutes an ongoing case of genocide, which is itself considered the most serious of international crimes and deserves to be stopped by a consensus of inter-governmental action at the UN to stop this kind of extreme violent abuse of state power,” Falk said. As the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict enters its 24th day, claiming the...

Friends do not let friends commit crimes against humanity. Jeffrey Sachs November 10, 2023 Israel is running out of time to save itself—not from Hamas, which lacks the means to defeat Israel militarily, but from itself. Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, verging on the crime of genocide according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, threaten to destroy Israel’s civil, political, economic, and cultural relations with the rest of the world. There are growing calls in Israel for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign immediately. A new Israeli government should seize the opportunity to turn carnage into lasting peace through diplomacy. Netanyahu is leading Israel into the same trap that the U.S. fell into after 9/11. Hamas’ goal in its heinous terrorist attack on 10/7 was to goad Israel into a long and bloody war, and to induce Israel to commit war crimes to bring on the world’s opprobrium. This is...

Palestinians search the rubble of destroyed buildings following an Israeli strike, as battles between Israel and the Hamas movement continue for the sixth consecutive day in the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on October 12, 2023.© Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images Jan Oberg October 12, 2023 This is the text of TFF PressInfo 723 sent out earlier today. I suggest that you subscribe to our free about-weekly newsletter here. In civilisational terms, war is a backward, primitive thing; it solves no conflicts and creates no security – only hate, which fuels more war. It’s a system or structural evil – much more than a human evil.   Equally primitive and uncultured is, of course, the type of black-and-white, simplified narrative: there is only one evil party – the Palestinians and Hamas. The war has only one cause, and we need neither history nor conflict analysis to understand anything....

Deeply moving and concise statement by Yanis Varoufakis October 8, 2023 The Nobel “Peace” Committee should have rewarded Julian Assange for his long service in fighting wars – by revealing how they are master-minded and fought with no connection to official explanations and narratives. It would then also have done something for the freedom of expression and human rights – including this hero’s right to live in freedom. But the NATO Norway Committee consists – in violation of the wish of Alfred Nobel – of former parliamentarians (and not of experts in peace as he mentioned) and has, therefore, no wish or ability to reward dissidents in the West or people who devote their lives to fight also US/NATO wars – as did Daniel Ellsberg. Shame upon the Committee! And thanks from our hearts to both Julian and Yanis. Jan ObergTFF director and editor of The Transnational

A facsimile of the signature-and-seals page of the 1864 Geneva Convention. Photograph Source: Kevin Quinn, Ohio, US – CC BY 2.0 Alfred De Zayas September 26, 2023 Progress and retrogression characterize the reality of international law, international relations, and the concrete enjoyment of human rights by women and men throughout the planet. We hail the tides of opportunity, the times of liberation and expansion, but we should not be blind to recurrent abuses, crimes, and moments of disgrace. Today our world is experiencing chaos, but not more so than in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. At least we are not burning witches or massacring indigenous Hopi, Pequots, Sioux, Quechua and Taínos, the slave trade is abolished, colonialism is drastically reduced. We welcome the landmark resolution 48/7 adopted by the UN Human Rights Council on 8 October 2021 concerning the legacies of colonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America, particularly...

This whole affair – this sad weaponisation of law in favour of the exceptionalist Western exceptional war criminals – can be debunked in about 4 minutes. See how below! That did not influence thousands of Western mainstream journalists, editors and what they call experts from talking at length about how important it would be to arrest President Putin. Did you ever hear the same people argue for just one in the series of Western lawbreakers/assumed war criminals? As is clearly pointed out by The South China Morning Post’s chief news editor, Yonden Lhatoo, in his intro, this is not a defence of Russia’s invasion. It’s a matter of exposing the West’s double standards. I find this as brilliant as exhaustive on the issue. I celebrate that it has been seen by so many. You can’t fool all the people all of the time… Jan Oberg, editor

Well over a year after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is backsliding away from democratic freedoms and liberal pluralism. And US and European taxpayers are unwittingly being made complicit in Ukraine’s backsliding away from democratic freedoms and liberal pluralism. Below, see also the US State Department’s quite critical report on human rights in Ukraine. Branko Marcetic March 22, 2023 Few Ukrainians have spent as many years of their life fighting authoritarianism as Volodymyr Chemerys. The sixty-year-old Ukrainian human rights campaigner’s record of activism reads like a history of Ukrainian protest: the 1990 “Revolution on Granite” against Soviet domination of the country, today dubbed the “first Maidan”; the 2000–2001 “Ukraine without Kuchma” protests targeting an independent Ukraine’s later, similarly repressive president; founding human rights bodies that monitored and gave legal aid to the Euromaidan protesters in 2014; and fiercely criticizing Ukraine’s post-Maidan establishment and the growing menace of the far right that came...