War Crimes Investigation
A recent headline, “War Crimes Investigation Requested,” in the “Santa Barbara News Press,” caught my attention. What’s this about, I wondered, thinking it was probably another attempt by the World Court to assert its authority as the official arbiter of law throughout the world. To my surprise, the story was not about the World Court but about the German courts, where a complaint has been filed by lawyers who noted that “the point was simply to increase the pressure on top (American) brass they say are culpable. German federal prosecutors said they would examine the case.”
But culpable of what? Abusing prisoners at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that’s what.
How did this complaint come to be filed in a German court? The Germans don’t have jurisdiction over the U.S. military and American officials do they? Apparently, according to them, they do. As a matter a fact, German law provides for prosecution of war crimes that may actually occur in other nations. A 220-page lawsuit has been filed under the provisions of a German law, naming 13 U.S. officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense.
How’s that for chutzpah? Germany, the nation that gave us the Holocaust, has now set itself up as a world court, with authority to try anyone for war crimes that are committed anywhere in the world.
The claim is that Secretary Rumsfeld “personally ordered and condoned torture.” One of the leading witnesses is U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the former commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq, who was relieved of her command and demoted over the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Bagdad.
In a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black, Gen. Karpinski claimed she wanted to “be a voice for my soldiers.” Really. Of course, there’s no payback involved, is there?
If there is a legal case in this situation at all, shouldn’t it be heard in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International Criminal Court (ICC), not in a German court?
The ICJ website states that the Court’s role is “to settle in accordance with international law the legal disputes submitted to it by States, and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by duly authorized international organs and agencies.” So, it appears they don’t qualify as the venue to hear cases involving “crimes against humanity.”
However, the International Criminal Court was established as “a permanent tribunal to prosecute, ‘crimes against humanity’.” (WorldNetDaily, April 11, 2002), so why isn’t this particular case being tried there?
The United States “lodged strenuous objections to the ICC,” and the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee refused to release the treaty for a vote for a number of reasons, including:
- Concerns that crimes of aggression were not defined, which would make various U.S. military operations open to prosecution, which would include such acts as injury to a population’s ‘mental health’ in the definition of “crimes against humanity”
- U.S. citizens would be denied the guarantees of our Constitution.
- A U.S. president could conceivably be prosecuted by the court for engaging in military activity without first seeking approval from the U.N.
- World events in the near future could find the U.S. and its citizens at the mercy of a panel of judges from non-Western nations, or of nations that seek to extort favorable trade agreements from the U.S.
- The treaty is not entered into “among parties in agreement, but is instead a new, and many believe dangerous, species of an international instrument that subordinates all nation states in the world to the rule of the United Nations’ court.”
- The ICC can prosecute whenever it deems a nation’s courts have failed to prosecute its own violators of ‘human rights’.
So, now German law makes it possible to prosecute someone in Germany for “crimes against humanity” that may have been committed elsewhere. For example, Human Rights Watch (hrw.org) recently reported, “Survivors of torture and the May 13 massacre of unarmed protesters in Andijan, Uzbekistan, filed a case on Monday in Germany calling for the prosecution of Zokirjon Almatov, Uzbekistan’s Minister of Internal Affairs, for crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said today. Almatov is in Germany receiving medical treatment.”
This, at least, makes some, albeit limited, sense. That is, trying someone who is in Germany for crimes that may have been committed elsewhere. Although the fact that the individual involved is not a German citizen still makes the application of their law questionable in my mind.
Furthermore, the case in question (against U.S. leaders) makes it appear that it is an effort by the Germans to unilaterally apply their laws so as to extend their authority over citizens of other nations who may have committed crimes elsewhere around the world. It almost looks as though they are trying to use their legal system to gain the ascendancy over other nations that they failed to achieve in WWII.
Nice try. Having failed to conquer Europe at gunpoint, are they now, some 60 years later, attempting to become “king” of the world by the simple act of passing a law? Not just a law that applies to German citizens, but to anyone who commits “crimes against humanity” anywhere in the world. Where did they get the authority to do this? If they try our citizens in absentia, will they then attempt to have them extradited to Germany?
Isn’t it about time for Americans to stand up and start telling those nations that attempt to unilaterally exercise authority over us to take a hike? If they can pass laws to extend the jurisdiction of their courts over U.S. citizens for acts that were not committed on German soil, how about our doing the same thing?
I can think of a lot of people who should be tried for “crimes against humanity” who are not U.S. citizens and have committed the most heinous crimes imaginable in other countries. How about going after them?.
© 2007 Harris R. Sherline, All Rights Reserved
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