Lawyers Against the War are After Bush

[seemslikeadream]

last update 09/04/2005 05:29
Norman (Otis) Richmond, The Black Commentator

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LAW had Bush charged in Germany. Says Davidson,”One thing we will do for sure is pursue similar charges in Germany as Part of the prosecution launched there by the American Center for Constitutional Rights. There is reason to think that the German authorities will show more backbone in the face of the Bush administration’s trashing of international human right human rights law.”

The movement of international lawyers is a good thing and should be supported. This is a people-to-people action which is positive. However, we should not be so naive as to believe that the governments of the U.S. or Germany have good intentions for the world’s people. Both are concerned about their bottom lines. German imperialists are no different than American or Canadian imperialists. We must always remember there is such an animal as inter-imperialist rivalry that will cause the imperialists to fight among themselves for a slice of the capitalist pie. While Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin refused to join the U.S. on the question of Missile Defense he did so to save his politic life.

Gerald Horne, author of a new book Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican revolution, 1910-1920 supports Law’s international efforts. Horne feels that internationalist has always aided African Americans. International support has always helped African Americans and American working people. There is a historic precedent for this. On Dec.17, 1951, Paul Robeson and William L.Patterson, two giants of the international African Liberation Struggle, delivered to the United Nations a petition titled, “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” < http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/2981/1/139 > Many feel that this act helped spark the modern civil rights and black power movements. The great El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) was talking about an updated version of what Robeson, Patterson, George Crockett, Dr. W.E.B. Dubois, Claudia Jones and others had started in 1951.

There are more international bodies in 2005 then there were in the time of Robeson. Could this case be taken up by the African Union (Kenya has a chapter of LAW) or the European Union which has several members? Says Davidson, “Many countries over the last decade or so have expanded their criminal jurisdiction as they joined international conventions. All countries that joined the conventions against torture have to deal with the issue. The US joined in 1994 and Canada joined in 1987. So all countries that joined that convention had to change their criminal law so that they had to expand their capacity to prosecute crimes of torture.

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