International law

Or – it isn’t every day you address several hundred million people The TFF report “The Xinjiang Genocide Determination As Agenda” has reached more people in more countries than virtually anything else we have produced the last few years. That is, outside the West, in Asia in general and in China in particular. All leading Chinese media have paid substantial attention to it in both their Chinese and English editions. It is as if there was a need for a substantial – not political – scholarly examination of the empirical basis of the accusation, or “determination,” that Western governments have issued spearheaded, of course, by the Trump and Biden Administrations. In the report we reveal that the documentation is very weak, the scholarly work biased and bordering on the anti-academic and that those who have brought the documentation are anything but independent. Instead, many of those who have provided the...

En kritisk analys av en rapport från Newlines Institute och Raoul Wallenberg Center Gordon Dumoulin, Jan Oberg och Thore Vestby Transnationella Stiftelsen för Freds- och Framtidsforskning, TFF, Lund, Sverige TFF@transnational.org • The Transnational • Ph +46 (0) 738 525200 Översättning av engelska utgåvan: Rolf Nilsson Den 5. maj, 2021 Den 8 mars 2021 publicerade Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy i Washington en rapport, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention i samarbete med Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights i Montreal. Den säger att ”Denna rapport är den första oberoende experttillämpningen av folkmordskonventionen från 1948 för den pågående behandlingen av uigurerna i Kina. Det genomfördes av Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, i samarbete med Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, som svar på framväxande redogörelser för allvarliga och systematiska grymheter i Xinjiang-provinsen, särskilt riktade mot uigurerna, en etnisk minoritet, för att fastställa...

This photograph depicts the Armenian leader Papasyan seeing what’s left after the horrendous murders near Deir-ez-Zor in 1915-1916. Photograph Source: Bodil Katharine Biørn – National Archives of Norway – Public Domain Alfred de Zayas & Richard Falk April 26, 2021 The misuse of the word genocide is disdainful toward relatives of the victims of the Armenian massacres, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide – and as well a disservice to both history, law, and the prudent conduct of international relations. We already knew that we were adrift in an ocean of fake news. It is far more dangerous to discover that we are also at risk of being immersed in the turbulent waters of “fake law”. We must push back with a sense of urgency. Such a development is not tolerable. We thought that Biden’s election would spare us from menacing corruptions of language of the sort disseminated by Donald Trump,...

Photo credit: The United Nations The UN Security Council is now the battleground for a new Cold War between the US and China Thalif Deen April 23, 2021 UNITED NATIONS, Apr 14 2021 (IPS) – A new Cold War – this time, between the US and China —is threatening to paralyze the UN’s most powerful body, even as military conflicts and civil wars are sweeping across the world, mostly in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The growing criticism against the Security Council is directed largely at its collective failures to resolve ongoing conflicts and political crises in several hot spots, including Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Ukraine and Libya — and its longstanding failure over Palestine. The sharp divisions between China and Russia, on one side, and the Western powers on the other, are expected to continue, triggering the question: Has the Security Council outlived its...

Yesterday, I was invited by Irans’ PressTV to comment – with professor Marandi at Tehran’s University – on the Biden administration’s policy on the JCPOA – the nuclear deal with Iran and the present discussion in Vienna. You may remember that it was signed in 2015 and that the Trump administration left it unilaterally and in violation of international law while also slamming more suffocating sanctions on Iran and its people. It’s fairly obvious that this is not going to go anywhere – probably not meant to, either. It’s also pretty obvious what Washington should do. Please watch also TFF Associate, professor Farhang Jahanpour, commenting on another program – Scope/Indusdotnews – here. Click on this image and watch The Debate Wonder what DailyMotion is? Read here and ask yourself why Google-owned YouTube closed down PressTV.

TFF Associate and friend over decades, Richard Falk, last year turned 90. Read more about him here – and use the search engine to find lots of his writings. The latest we’ve published is on championing lost causes... Eric Walberg March 10, 2021 Writing this memoir has been as much about discovering my story, that is, myself as it is about telling it. That’s Falk’s version of Socrates’ ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ Or should I say, Forrest Gump’s? Falk’s life reads like a storybook, starting with meeting Supreme Court judges with his father at age 9 in 1939, making friends with Claudette Colbert, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liz Taylor (long story) at age 15, befriending and befoeing many of the dramatis personae of the Cold War throughout his long and productive life, finally landing on the shores of democratic socialism as the US charges towards the (literal) finish line. Falk came...

Jan Oberg October 24, 2020 2020 marks the 75th Anniversary of the world’s most important and visionary organisation, the United Nations. Everything TFF has done during its 35 years of existence has been based on one mission – namely, to promote the UN Charter’s Article 1 which states that peace shall be brought about by peaceful means. That is a typical Gandhian inspiration – “the means are the goals in-the-making” – as he said. You cannot use destructive means to achieve constructive goals. Regrettably, one hears many – thoughtless – voices accusing “the UN” of being too expensive, too bureaucratic, too ineffective, too corrupt, too this and that. Why must this be seen as an indicator of intellectual poverty? First, as stated by its first Secretary-General, Norwegian Trygve Lie – the UN shall never become stronger or better than its member states want to it to be. And, sadly, they...

Idag, den 7. september 2020, i London starter en retssag, som får betydning for den frie presse i vesten i fremtiden. Sagen drejer sig om journalist og stifter af mediet WikiLeaks – Julian Assange – som er tiltalt for overtrædelse af den amerikanske spionagelov i forbindelse med at indhente og offentliggøre fortrolige militære- og diplomatiske dokumenter. Retten i London skal tage stilling til, om Julian Assange skal udleveres til USA til retsforfølgelse og potentielt 175 års fængsel. Men hvorfor har denne retssag betydning for hele den frie presse i vesten og for vores danske demokrati? Sagen og historien om Julian Assange og WikiLeaks er lang og kompliceret, og de fleste danske medier ser ud til at have opgivet at følge den til dørs. Men jeg vil forsøge at opsummere sagen kort, og forklare hvorfor den er relevant for dig som borger i Danmark. Demokrati bygger grundlæggende på at flertallet af...

This post is a slightly modified version of an editorial contribution to TMS – Transcend Media Service – June 22-28, 2020 Sanctioning the International Criminal Court, ICC Even Orwell would be at a loss to make sense of some of the recent antics of leading governments. We would expect Orwell to be out-satirized by the American actions to impose penalties and sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court, not because they are accused of acting improperly or seem guilty of some kind of corruption or malfeasance, but because they were doing their appointed jobs carefully, yet fearlessly. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s personal blog on June 26, 2020 here Their supposed wrongdoing was to accept the request for an investigation into allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan by military personnel and intelligence experts of the U.S. armed forces, the Taliban, and the Afghan military. It seemed beyond reasonable...

Richard Falk May 16, 2020 Prefatory Note Republication of opinion piece published in Al Jazeera English on May 13, 2020. The published AJE text has been slightly modified. Annexation foreplay These are the strangest of times. On this almost everyone will agree. Lives all over the planet are being torn apart either by COVID-19 or as a result of its devastating social and economic dislocations. In such a moment, it is hardly surprising that the best and worst of humanity is being showcased. Yet what seems worse beyond even these forebodings is the persistence of gangster geopolitics in its various manifestations. Intensifying U.S. sanctions in the midst of the health crisis on already deeply afflicted societies and suffering populations such as Iran and Venezuela is one striking example. This display of the primacy of geopolitics is highlighted by its rejections of numerous high profile humanitarian appeals for the suspension of...

With a bit more pushing and – after, unfortunately, a bit more killing – the three remaining serious wars on the planet, in Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen, should come to an end. Then it will be time to take stock on what caused the killing, especially why so many innocents lost their lives and whether wars of this kind can be deterred in the future. The world has already made a lot of progress over the last few decades: there are no inter-state wars and the number of civil wars has steadily fallen, (albeit the graph has begun an upward turn in the last two years mainly because of mini-wars in West Africa). Eighteen years ago the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute war criminals was established by treaty. Nearly all the world signed up. The US, Israel, Russia, China and India did not. However, the latter three have not...

April 3, 2020 Robert Reuel Naiman Given the systematic distortion of the Syrian conflict that we have pointed out here on The Transnational many times before, we find it important to highlight the – always omitted – early role of the United States in fomenting what broke out in violence in early 2011. This is an essentially important documentation. In 2010, WikiLeaks became a household name by releasing 251,287 classified State Department cables. Now, a new book collects in-depth analyses of what these cables tell us about the foreign policy of the United States, from authors including Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail and our regular contributors Gareth Porter, Robert Naiman, Phyllis Bennis and Stephen Zunes. “The essays that make up The WikiLeaks Files (2016) shed critical light on a once-secret history,” says Edward Snowden. The following is Chapter 10 of The WikiLeaks Files: On August 31, 2013, US president Barack...