United Nations

As representatives of almost every state in the world gather in The Hague, all eyes should be on them. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – whose conference they are attending – was mandated by the people of the world to play a vital part in reducing the evils of war. Instead, it seems, the OPCW has been manipulated to serve the ends of warmongers. Critics and non-Western nations arrived at this understanding some time ago. Key investigators at the OPCW have known it for a fact. Their knowledge was brought to light first by the leak of a suppressed report, then by firsthand testimony heard by an international panel, and now by Wikileaks’ release of an email in which an OPCW inspector expresses the gravest concern about intentional bias introduced to a redacted version of the report he co-authored. Crucial facts about the 2018 Douma chemical...

“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...

The Future of Human Rights: Regressive Trends and Restorative Prospects Points of Departure Reviewing the global situation, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zaed Raad Al Hussein of Jordan, opened a 2018 conference devoted to the 25th anniversary of the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights and Development held in Vienna, on a decidedly pessimistic note. Instead of doing the usual on such occasions, that is, celebrating the progress made since the earlier event, Prince Zaed emphasized the disturbing evidence of regression with respect to a broad range of issues bearing on the protection of human rights embedded in international treaty instruments as evidenced by the practice of states. He insisted that without fundamental changes in patterns of governance by sovereign states and in the operation of the world economy it would be naïve to expect an improved international atmosphere for human rights. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s blog...

Interviewed by RT International Among other things, I argue that the international so-called ‘community’ – there definitely is no such thing – is still regrettably simple, or primitive, when it comes to making peace. Here two leaders meet and discuss affairs pertaining fundamentally to what shall happen on the territory of a third sovereign state which is not present. Their focus is on the means of violence – which have already been used and created the situation whereas there is no awareness, it seems, of how important it would have been to address the underlying conflicts. Conflicts are the basic unit if you want to create peace – the violence mostly a symptom of conflicts – problems – un-resolved. International law is violated in several ways – and has been the last 10-15 years when it comes to Syria. It started with the US deciding to go for regime change...

Prefatory Note: The post below of my remarks at the opening session of the Maker Majlis Conference, College of Islamic Studies, Hamed Bin Khalif University (HBKU) in Doha, Qatar on 22 Sept 2019. The theme of the three-day conference was on the role of youth in furthering the UN process associated with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs (as further clarified by 169 targets), ambitiously set to be achieved by 2030. The massive Global Climate Strike on 20 September seemed to have similar intentions to conference, that is, how to explain and  overcome the absence of political will on the part of the governments of the world, none more lacking in this respect than the U.S. Government, with respect to the ecological agenda of the world, with particular consideration of climate change threats and harms. This civil society challenge from below, transnationally and inspired and organized by youth, offers us...

This is what TFF sent out as TFF PressInfo 532 today. It gives you an impression of what you will get if you have not already subscribed to this, one of the oldest peace mail services. Just fill in the form to your right. Above Gandhi’s prophetic diagnosis of today’s Western, or O/Accidental, malaise. Gandhi’s message is not backed up by statistics, figures and charts. It’s the type of statement of wisdom which seems to have disappeared in our modern times. He was born today 150 years ago. Some believe his theory and practice is just historical or irrelevant. However… Millions of people believe in and use non-violence every day. About a week ago, 6 million marched for humans and societies to re-learn to relate non-violently to Nature. Many other millions practice dialogue, negotiations, friendly quarrels, mediation, meetings, writings, speeches, humour etc to deal with their conflicts. It’s non-violence even...

Intro Below please find a letter I wrote more than 3 months ago to the Nordic bank, Nordea – present in roughtly 20 countries around the world. Since then, I have been waiting for an answer, but none has arrived. I believe it should have been possible for Chairman of the Nordea board, Mr Thorbjörn Magnusson, to have responded by now. As this is not the case and I have no reason to expect an answer will arrive from him, I hereby make the matter be known to a wider circle of people. Should anybody in the Swedish/Nordic press be willing to take it up, it would be good. But I also do not expect that given the political correctness practised, not the least around the issue of Iran and the primary and secondary sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran and on everybody else, Europe in particular. PS...

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has long been controversial. Back in the days of the Soviet Union, Moscow protected communist and ultra-socialist dictators around the world from any attack on their human rights abuses. At the same time routine attacks on Israel, even the extravagant ones, were given free reign in the Council. Indeed, this still continues with the protagonists often unable in their minds to separate criticizing Israel, which deserves it, with criticizing the religion of Judaism, so-called anti-Semitism. (One should add that many Jews conflate the two as well.) This month a new controversy has flared. According to the Swiss organisation, UN Watch, the Human Rights Council is censoring a human rights complaint about the mass incarceration of Moslem Uighurs who live in northwest China. More than a hundred NGOs from around the world have co-sponsored the complaint. A letter has also been written by the same...

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...

The following statement on US warmongering in relation to Iran was prepared by Mark LeVine, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine and myself. Some of the early signatories are among the leading scholars in the field of Middle East Studies. Their names are listed below. It seeks to make two major arguments: First, that the unlawful threats and coercive moves made by the United States point toward a political disaster that would include the commission of the most serious of international crimes, that of aggression via threats and uses of force that do not constitute self-defense under international law; and Secondly, that it is essential to shift the relationship with Iran from one based on coercive to an approach resting on restorative diplomacy involving a deliberate reversal of American Foreign Policy with the overriding objective of normalization of relations between our two countries. Statement by leading Middle East/Islamic studies...

, marks for Europe. Comment Today is a tragic day for Europe, indeed for the world – but do the media highlight that fact on their front pages? Of course, they don’t. The INF Treaty has made Europe less insecure since 1987. But Russia and the US have accused each other of violating it. The bigger reasons for this tragedy are that a) there is a new Cold War in Europe and b) since other countries are now able to develop similar INF weapons – Inter-mediate range Nuclear Forces (INF) with the particular range mentioned in this movie – they want to have their hands free. And, one might almost say, as usual – the policies of the US have spearheaded today’s tragedy, particularly with the totally counterproductive and de factor offensive Ballistic Missile Defence, BMD, that Russia – legitimately – sees as a threat. Just listen to a man...

June 10, 2019 Mr. Amano, IAEA, indeed has good reasons to be worried – also today when the Germain foreign minister, Heiko Maas, visits Tehran and seems to have nothing new to convey to Iran’s foregin minister and president. Iran’s PressTV asked TFF’s director and co-founder, Jan Oberg, to comment on Amano’s statement, together with E. Michael Jones.