International law

European allies of the U-S have turned down a request by the American President to leave the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (JCPOA). France says it remains committed to the Iran deal, and will continue to work with other parties. Britain has pledged to remain committed too. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reaffirmed London’s support, in a phone call with Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani. US president Donald Trump called on France, Germany, Britain and other signatories to leave the Iran deal and negotiate a new accord. Trump withdrew the US from the agreement in May 2018 and reinstated even harder sanctions on the innocent people of Iran. Editor’s noteUnfortunately, a couple of days after this video was posted and accessible, Google which owns YouTube decided to close down PressTV’s account. Today, January 21, we tried again at no avail. It’s blatant censorship, allegedly explained by Google as a way to adhere...

s at the end of the Cold War – there are more civil wars today than there were in that immediate period, which was the all-time low, and the Cold War itself threatens to re-combust. Nevertheless, the number of soldiers killed on the battlefield continues its decline and in the principal countries of Europe, the locus of most of the wars of history, there has been no war for 74 years. War in the early seventeenth century at the time of the great Dutch thinker, Hugo Grotius, was thought about in a totally different way as it is today. Grotius taught that war was the legitimate way in which states could enforce their rights or their side of a dispute. There was no League of Nations or United Nations to which antagonists could appeal. States had no recourse but to take the law into their own hands. Grotius upheld the...

. On December 12, 2012, on the day, 4 years earlier, Western countries and allies – perversely calling themselves ‘Friends of Syria’ – carried through a regime change by statement and set up a Syrian National Council of people never elected by anyone in Syria and told the world that it was, from now on, the only ‘legitimate representative of the Syrian people!’ During the 4 years, Western, Saudi, Turkish and the Gulf States supported innumerable illegal, destructive and mainly foreign terrorist groups with the goal to undermine the legitimate Syrian government and destabilise the country – as had been recommended by US ambassador William Roebuck (1) in Damascus as far back as in 2006 (WikiLeaks documentation here). December 12, 2016, marked a fundamental turning point. Aleppo did not “fall to the dictator/butcher/mass murderer” aka President Bashar al-Assad – no, it was liberated and the occupation by terrorist groups such...

Political NATO’s London Summit on December 3 and 4, 2019 displays the deep political crisis of the 70-year-old alliance: Only a dinner and a short meeting, no statement to be issued, quarrels among the leading military members, accusations, substantial differences on Syria and many other issues, the deepest-ever Transatlantic conflict and the usual issues of burden-sharing. Legal But the political dimension of NATO’s crisis is only one. There is also a legal crisis. You’ll recognize it if you care to read the NATO Treaty text – something academic and media people don’t generally seem to have done. They would then have noticed that the Alliance of 2019 consistently operates outside – indeed in violation of – its own goals, purposes and values. For instance, the UN Charter which should be NATO’s guideline has been violated on a permanent basis for decades – such as in its out-of-area bombings of Yugoslavia...

“Uanset om man tror, at Assad står bag angrebet eller ej, er det journalisternes opgave at være kritiske over for egne magthaveres beslutningsgrundlag.” Det skrev jeg i Ræson den 20. april 2018 i forbindelse med at Assad og den syriske regering blev beskyldt for at udføre et giftangreb mod sin egen befolkning i byen Douma. Danmark, med tidligere udenrigsminister Anders Samuelsen i spidsen, støttede op om et amerikansk missilangreb mod Syrien på den baggrund, inden vi nåede at tag en offentlig debat om det i det danske demokrati. Hvordan vidste den danske regering, at Syriens regering stod bag? Hvorfor venter Danmark ikke med at støtte op om et missilangreb og fordømme den syriske regering, før der har været en undersøgelse? Er missilangreb en konstruktiv måde at “svare igen” på? Hvordan er Danmarks erfaring med at løse problemer i Mellemøsten ved at affyre missiler? Takket være de – dovne – danske...

Preliminary Notes This post devoted to health and human rights in Gaza. It is based on a video presentation some weeks ago to a conference on this theme held in Gaza. It makes no effort to update by reference to the latest cycle of violence sparked by the targeted assassination of Baha Abu-Ata, an Islamic Jihad military commander, on November 12. I feel strongly about the issues raised by this post not only because I have witnessed living conditions in Gaza and have friends in Gaza who have endured hardship and injustice for so long without losing their warmth or even their hope. My contacts with Gaza and Gazans over the course of many years has been at once inspirational and deeply dispiriting, a deep insight into the deficiencies of the human condition coupled with an uplifting glimpse at the spiritual courage of those so severely victimized. Reflecting on the...

Photo: Gerard Malie/AFP/Ritzau Scanpix Posing the Question Such a question seems little more than a provocation until the effects of the interval between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the present are critically examined in relation to their principal effects. On closer inspection, I am not quite prepared, although almost so, to say that the peoples of the world lost ground as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the United States as the so-called ‘sole surviving superpower.’ Generally, it was rather automatically assumed almost never challenged, that the outcome of the Cold War was a victory for liberal values, including human rights, political democracy, economic growth, and certainly world peace. There was the added popular view that since democracies supposedly do not go to war against each other, and if Communism was discredited on both ideological and materialist grounds, then democracy would spread...

October 25, 2019 By Craig MurrayHistorian, human rights activist and former ambassador UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already been reproduced on myriad other sites, some with much bigger readerships than my own. I have seen translations into German, Spanish and French and at least extracts in Catalan and Turkish. I only ask that you reproduce it complete or, if edits are made, plainly indicate them. Many thanks. I was deeply shaken while witnessing yesterday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended...

Prefatory Note: The following essay will appear as a chapter in Peter Burden & Klaus Bosselmann, eds., The Future of Global Ethics (Edward Elgar, 2018),  with the title: Revisiting the Earth Charter 20 Years Later: A Response to Ron Engel Ron Engel has articulated an insider review of the Earth Charter so thoughtfully, urbanely, and persuasively that my initial temptation was to restrict my response to a single word: ‘Amen!’ Yet I am familiar enough with the academic ways of gathering diverse voices to explore a topic or to evaluate the scholarship of a distinguished author, as to discard my one-word option. At the same time, it would be misleading if I didn’t praise Ron Engel for putting so many elusive issues before us in such a lucid and compelling manner as to make my efforts at dialogue feel a bit forced, given the high level of agreement. Originally posted on...

You’ve hear a lot about the US withdrawal – never mentioned that it was an international law violation – from the nuclear deal with Iran (JCPOA). But you have probably not seen a couple of those Americans who are most responsible, on a day-to-day basis, for carrying out what is de facto an attempt to strangle Iran, its people and some of its leaders. In short, to undermine and in the long run destroy Iran. The two people are Sigal Mandelker of the US Treasury & Brian Hook, US State Department’s “Iran Action Group”. And the video below offer you insights in how they think – and how they justify what they do. It is a dialogue that took place recently at AIPAC. AIPAC is the acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which is one of the most influential and well-financed lobby groups in the world whose task...

Video comment The Leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution says Iran has totally lost hope in the European powers as they have failed to fulfill any of their promises under the 2015 nuclear deal. Iran’s PressTV asked me to comment on that which I do below. It is crystal clear that the European Union has not lived up to the spirit and letter of the nuclear deal JCPOA) with Iran of 2015. By not lifting the sanctions and cooperating with Iran – as long as Iran sticks to its commitments – it violates international law. Why? Because the JCPOA is embedded in a UN Security Council resolution and, thus, is a piece of international law. But the EU could have acted otherwise these four years – had it been a bit more ethical, intellectual and independent-minded. But it chose to accept US diktat about the secondary sanctions and, in consequence, has...

The World Order Backdrop Arguably, even before the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there was a widespread sense that a state-centric form of world order was morally and functionally deficient in certain fundamental respects. Political actors were indifferent to the outbreaks of war, disease, and famine outside of their sovereign territory absent serious extraterritorial reverberations. At the same time lesser states were vulnerable to the manipulations and territorial/imperial ambitions of leading states that generated colonialism, interventions, and sustained an exploitative Europeanization of world order. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s blog Citizen Pilgrimage on September 5, 2019, here World War I with massive casualties, closely followed by the Russian Revolution, which posed a normative challenge to the capitalist/market– driven organization of national societies, led to some groping toward a new global order taking the institutional form of the League of Nations. It became soon obvious that the League, a project...