Batter up!!!
New York, March 17, 2003--War against Iraq is "unequivocally illegal under the UN Charter and international law generally", according to a new report. The report rejects efforts by the U.S., U.K, and Australia to circumvent the U.N. Security Council and claim legal justification from past resolutions.
Attempting to legitimize a war opposed by world public opinion, the U.S. Secretary of State, the U.K. Attorney-General, and the Australian Prime Minister have in the past 24 hours each issued major statements insisting that international law justifies their decision to attack Iraq.
The report, issued by the New York-based Center for Economic and Social Right, cites a range of authoritative legal sources to dismiss their arguments. According to Professor Thomas Franck, a leading authority on the use of force, the use of old resolutions to support military action today "makes a complete mockery of the entire system" of international law.
"It is the height of hypocrisy for the U.S. and U.K. to base war on Resolution 1441 when they are fully aware that France, Russia and China approved that resolution on explicit written condition that it could not be used by individual states to justify military action," said CESR Executive Director Roger Normand, who recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Iraq. "This war violates every legal principle governing the resort to force. It clearly has little to do with disarmament, democracy, human rights, or even Saddam Hussein, and everything to do with oil and power."
The report warns that an illegal war in Iraq would threaten the pillars of collective security established after World War II to protect civilians from a recurrence of that unprecedented carnage. "This is an attack on the very institutions of international law and the United Nations," said Philip Alston, Professor of Law and Director of Human Rights and Global Justice and New York University. "It opens the door for every country to take the law into its own hands and launch preemptive military strikes without any universally binding restraints."
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected German arguments of the necessity for preemptive attacks against its neighbors and instead outlawed preventive war as a crime against the peace. In the Tribunal's judgment, "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
The Center for Economic and Social Rights is taking part in an unprecedented worldwide effort by legal organizations, practitioners, and scholars to uphold the rule of law by putting governments on notice that they will face public condemnation and legal prosecution for any war crimes they commit in Iraq. "The law is meant to protect all people and apply to all countries," said Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a human rights litigation center. "We are working with CESR and likeminded groups in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere to ensure that our leaders know in advance that they will be held individually accountable for any and all war crimes they commit."
The report points out that the impact of an unlawful war against Iraq will be suffered primarily by innocent civilians. "A pre-emptive military strike against Iraq is a cruel culmination of 13 years of punishment of people for something they have not done," said Hans von Sponeck, CESR's Europe representative and former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq.
CESR is an international human rights organization accredited to the United Nations and supported by the Ford Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation. For further information please visit
www.cesr.org/iraq.