Geoffrey Robertson's Blog, page 3
July 5, 2016
Putting Tony Blair in the dock is a fantasy – he broke no law | Geoffrey Robertson
If we are to prevent world leaders from waging wars of aggression without just cause, we must first make sure there’s a law against it
Both Jeremy Corbyn and Alex Salmond have already hinted that their response to Chilcot will be a wish to put Tony Blair in the dock – a spectacle long advocated by Desmond Tutu, George Monbiot and others. This hypothetical, however engaging, is a legal impossibility. Instead, we need to concentrate on how the law should be changed to ensure that future leaders who wage wars of aggression can be brought to account.
There is little doubt that the US/UK invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq in 2003 was an unlawful breach of the UN charter, which permits such force only in self-defence, ie when there is an imminent threat of an armed attack, or (less certainly in 2003) a case for humanitarian intervention. But a breach of the charter does not mean that those who lead it are guilty of a war crime – which must, like any other crime, be both clearly defined and justiciable by an available court.
Related: The phone call from George Bush that told Tony Blair he’d failed on Iraq | Sarah Helm
Blairites still argue that the invasion was an exercise in humanitarian intervention – it was nothing of the sort
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June 27, 2016
How to stop Brexit: get your MP to vote it down | Geoffrey Robertson
We don’t need another referendum. Members of parliament have every right to vote against repeal of the act that led us into Europe
It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force. “Sovereignty” – a much misunderstood word in the campaign – resides in Britain with the “Queen in parliament”, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union – and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.
Related: Petition for second EU referendum may have been manipulated
Continue reading...May 1, 2016
John RWD Jones obituary
The human rights barrister John RWD Jones devoted himself to helping those in peril in the courts. He was a leading architect of the nascent system of international criminal trials, and in those trials he was the best of defence counsel for the worst of defendants: those accused of atrocities. He has died at the age of 48, after being struck by a train at West Hampstead station, north London, and an inquest has yet to be held.
It was at the United Nation’s special court for Sierra Leone in 2003 that John made his first permanent mark. I had been concerned, as its first president, that international justice had, ever since, and including, the Nuremberg trials after the second world war, been delivered by courts which had an in-built bias towards the prosecutor: equality of arms required a defender.
Continue reading...April 22, 2016
The recolonisation of Norfolk Island is a heavy-handed act of regression | Geoffrey Robertson
Where in the world is “God Save the Queen” a revolutionary call to arms? In Norfolk Island, whose 2,200 citizens – half of them descended from Fletcher Christian’s HMS Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian partners – are resisting the forcible recolonisation of their homeland by Australia.
Their self-governance has been abolished, their parliament locked up, their freedom of speech curtailed and their membership of international sporting and political bodies cancelled. Their autonomy and their identity are being destroyed – they have even been told to stop singing God Save the Queen and learn the words of Australia’s doggerel national anthem.
Already the heavy hand of the Australian public service has censored the local radio station and removed a satire show
Related: 'We're not Australian': Norfolk Islanders adjust to shock of takeover by mainland
Continue reading...January 23, 2015
‘Armenians want acknowledgment that 1915 massacre was crime’ | Geoffrey Robertson
In 1915 Britain was determined to expose the Armenian genocide, so why have we since downgraded it to a ‘tragedy’?
Just before the invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler urged his generals to show no mercy towards its people – there would be no retribution, because “after all, who now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?” As the centenary of the Armenian genocide approaches – it began on 24 April 1915, with the rounding up and subsequent “disappearance” of intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople – remembrance of the destruction of more than half of the Armenian people is more important than ever. Although, as Hitler recognised in 1939 (and it is still the case today), the crime against humanity committed by the Ottoman Turks by killing the major part of this ancient Christian race has never been requited, or, in the case of Turkey, been the subject of apology or reparation.
The “Young Turks” who ran the Ottoman government did not use gas ovens, but they did massacre the men, and sent the women, children and elders on death marches through the desert to places we only hear of now because they are overrun by Isis. They died en route in their hundreds of thousands from starvation or attack, and many survivors died of typhus in concentration camps at the end of the line. The government ordered these forced deportations in 1915, and then passed laws to seize their lands and homes and churches on the pretext that they had been “abandoned”.
Continue reading...December 19, 2014
Mandy Rice-Davies: fabled player in a very British scandal
It has taken 50 years, but Britain has gradually caught up with Mandy Rice-Davies. A confidence, a swagger, a certain arrogance surrounds the young who carve their very public niche in contemporary Britain. Rice-Davies had it half a century ago.
Inevitably she changed. In the years before her death yesterday from lung cancer, she lived the suburban life in Surrey. But it proved an ideal vantage point for her to watch as stuffy old Britain changed too.
Continue reading...August 1, 2014
Gaza: how international law could work to punish war crimes | Geoffrey Robertson
For three weeks, the world has watched war crimes apparently committed by both sides in Gaza: lethal attacks on schools and hospitals, rockets aimed at civilians, tunnels chillingly lined with syringes and ropes; and the dead and dying children. Now the call goes out from politicians and the UN secretary general for accountability and justice. That should mean a proper forensic investigation with criminal charges against commanders if the evidence warrants, heard in an international criminal court. It is important to understand why this could happen and why it probably will not and why British diplomats have connived in making Gaza a legal black hole.
There is, after all, an international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, with a prosecutor equipped to investigate and charge the crimes that seem to be occurring in the conflict. But her power to act arises only in two relevant circumstances: first by a reference from the UN security council, which is sure to be blocked by at least one of the five permanent members by the US (always protective of Israel), by Russia (afraid of where a criminal investigation of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 might lead), by China (obsessed with state sovereignty), and even by Britain and France.
Continue reading...June 15, 2014
Ben Whitaker
The former Labour MP for Hampstead, north London, Ben Whitaker, who has died aged 79, was the embodiment of the liberal values associated with the area. At the 1966 election he won the Hampstead seat, for 81 years a Tory fiefdom, from the reactionary former home secretary Henry Brooke, and championed the progressive social reforms of the Harold Wilson government, in which he held a number of posts. Subsequently, as a human rights lawyer long before this was a fashionable career, he made distinguished contributions to civil liberties in Britain, and especially abroad, through his leadership of the Minority Rights Group and then of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and as a UN rapporteur.
Ben was born in Nottinghamshire, the son of Major General Sir John Whitaker and his wife, Pamela (nee Snowden), who were not modern enough to avoid sending him to Eton. He subsequently did national service in the Coldstream Guards, before graduating from New College, Oxford, to the bar. After what he described as this "Victorian education", he lectured in law at London University and became outraged at the conduct of the police, who at the time were framing Stephen Ward, planting bricks on political protesters and, in Sheffield, had been caught beating suspects with rhino whips. His first book, The Police (1964), was written with the object of restricting their powers.
Continue reading...June 5, 2014
The Charity Commission doesn't know what charity is
Does the Charity Commission have any idea of the meaning of charity? Not if you read its decision on the Human Dignity Trust, which fights in the courts to end discrimination against homosexuals in other countries.
This could not possibly be for the public benefit, the commission has ruled, because changing these laws is contrary to public policy and could prejudice our relations with states that put gay men in jail. For these reasons, the commission has denied the Human Dignity Trust registration as a charity, a decision that will be challenged in court today.
Continue reading...April 20, 2014
Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter's life story is a warning to us about racism and revenge | Geoffrey Robertson
In 1976, I was a junior lawyer on Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter's retrial defence team. His story has a significance that should outlive his death
In the summer of 1976, I walked the mean streets of Paterson, New Jersey, with Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and encountered the raw, bloodshot hate-gaze from the white folks who passed us by. Carter was instantly recognisable: he was as bald and black and muscley as the Michelin man.
"What chance do you give me?" he asked this then-young British lawyer, shrugging his boxer's shoulders. "You can see my verdict in their eyes. In America, nothing has really changed."
Continue reading...Geoffrey Robertson's Blog
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