Category Law

Entries 68 Total Description

Rules of conduct or procedure established by custom, agreement, or authority.

Blair admits intention to commit war crimes

Dec 12, ’09 4:22 PM

Tony Blair has admit­ted on TV his inten­tion was to com­mit the inter­na­tional crime of uni­lat­eral war for regime change. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Asked if he would have gone on had he known there was no WMDs, he replied:

I would still have thought it right to remove [Sad­dam Hus­sein]. I mean obvi­ously you would have had to use and deploy dif­fer­ent argu­ments about the nature of the threat.

Two world wars, tens of mil­lions dead, the sub­sequent entrench­ment of inter­na­tional law under the Charter of the United Nations and Tony Blair thinks that the decision to go to war should come down to his own per­sonal beliefs about right and wrong.

Click through to read more and view a video excerpt of the interview.

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Chilcot Inquiry into Iraq War is a whitewash before it starts

Nov 23, ’09 9:06 AM

The Chil­cot Inquiry into the Iraq war is already run­ning a pro­pa­ganda cam­paign that it “won’t be a whitewash.”

But you only need to real­ise that its mem­bers were appoin­ted by Gor­don Brown — one of the per­pet­rat­ors — and read the terms of ref­er­ence to real­ise this is a white­wash before it even starts.

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Guardian gagged from reporting parliament

Oct 13, ’09 6:49 AM

Guard­ian gagged from report­ing UK par­lia­ment:

The Guard­ian has been pre­ven­ted from report­ing par­lia­ment­ary pro­ceed­ings on legal grounds which appear to call into ques­tion priv­ileges guar­an­tee­ing free speech estab­lished under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Update: Trafigura drops bid to gag Guard­ian over MP’s ques­tion.

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NZ National/ACT government wants option to commit war crimes

Sep 9, ’09 7:13 AM

No Right Turn on the NZ National/ACT government’s oppos­i­tion to a new bill that would make it a national crim­inal offence for any New Zea­l­and polit­ical leader to “plan, pre­pare, ini­ti­ate or execute an act of aggres­sion” in viol­a­tion of the UN Charter.

… when Wayne Mapp says he doesn’t want our for­eign policy to be sub­ject to a UN veto, what he is really say­ing is that he wants to wage war in con­tra­ven­tion of inter­na­tional law and the UN charter — in other words, he wants us to be a rogue nation, just like the US…

Which seems to me to be a per­fect example of why we must pass the bill.

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Climate Camp’s open letter to the Met

Aug 26, ’09 12:50 PM

Open let­ter from the Camp for Cli­mate Action to Ian Thomas, the Chief Super­in­tend­ent of the Met­ro­pol­itan Police Ser­vice. Worth read­ing in it’s entirety.

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A gender experiment in policing

Aug 22, ’09 8:49 AM

Could be inter­est­ing. Jon Hen­ley for The Guard­ian:

The Met­ro­pol­itan police have announced a new strategy for next week’s Cli­mate Camp – put­ting women officers in charge of the oper­a­tion. Will this avoid the viol­ence seen at the G20 protests?

Per­haps the most noted Amer­ican researcher into gender dif­fer­ences in poli­cing, Joseph Balkin, observed that “police­men tend to see police work as involving con­trol through author­ity, while police­wo­men see it as pub­lic ser­vice”. In some respects at least, he con­cluded, “women are bet­ter suited for police work than men.”

Maybe this strategy should be trans­posed to inter­na­tional politics?

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Cheney: an evil person for evil times

Aug 14, ’09 7:19 AM

The Guard­ian: ‘Mem­oirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on terror.’

Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.

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What happens when the hang ‘em high brigade call the shots

Aug 8, ’09 12:05 AM

The Eco­nom­ist has an inter­est­ing story this week illus­trat­ing how sex offender laws in the U.S. have run amok and are not only mak­ing mat­ters worse but are des­troy­ing the lives of many inno­cent people in the process.

Plonkers with bal­lots + self-serving polticians = per­ver­sion of justice.

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‘They’ve made us scared to talk’

Aug 6, ’09 9:11 PM

Fam­ily of Ian Tom­lin­son — who died after being hit by police­man at G20 protests—speak out.

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Colonel Julian didn’t get the memo

Jul 20, ’09 8:09 AM

Ahh, yes, there’s noth­ing like a little Amer­ican excep­tion­al­ism to get one going in the morning.

Accord­ing to Reu­ters, Col­onel Greg Julian, a U.S. mil­it­ary spokes­man in Kabul, has been com­plain­ing that the Taliban is viol­at­ing inter­na­tional law by parad­ing a cap­tured U.S. sol­dier on camera.

It seems Col­onel Julian didn’t get the memo: the U.S. tore up inter­na­tional law a long time ago.

Not only did the U.S. com­mit the supreme war crime when it invaded Afgh­anistan and Iraq — supreme because of all that ensues from start­ing a war, includ­ing the crimes of your oppon­ents — but this is the same coun­try, of course, to have declared by pres­id­en­tial order that the Geneva Con­ven­tions did not apply to cap­tured Taliban sol­diers and has since been detain­ing Afghan pris­on­ers without trial, sneak­ing them off to Guantanamo and its secret pris­ons and tor­tur­ing them.

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