Human Rights Watch: Foreign courts should try Bush, Cheney
The influential advocacy group Human Rights Watch is preparing a major report on what it considers crimes by senior Bush administration officials. The report will be accompanied by calls for former top officials–including the former president and vice president–to be put on trial, by foreign governments if necessary. The organization has long championed universal jurisdiction–the ...
The influential advocacy group Human Rights Watch is preparing a major report on what it considers crimes by senior Bush administration officials. The report will be accompanied by calls for former top officials--including the former president and vice president--to be put on trial, by foreign governments if necessary.
The influential advocacy group Human Rights Watch is preparing a major report on what it considers crimes by senior Bush administration officials. The report will be accompanied by calls for former top officials–including the former president and vice president–to be put on trial, by foreign governments if necessary.
The organization has long championed universal jurisdiction–the legal theory that any country’s courts may prosecute those who have committed certain heinous crimes elsewhere. "Given Obama’s unwillingness to investigate, let alone prosecute, the admitted ordering of waterboarding, ie torture, by Bush and other senior Bush officials, universal jurisdiction is, sadly, the only option," says HRW executive director Ken Roth.
To this point, the organization has been relatively quiet on the question of whether foreign courts should pursue Bush administration officials. The group did voice support for a case in Germany against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld several years ago (ultimately dismissed), but otherwise had not issued any public calls for universal jursidiction prosecutions of Bush administration officials.
Roth insists that the organization’s reticence does not indicate qualms about the policy; instead, Human Rights Watch wants to time its public call for prosecutions with the release of the major report it is finalizing.
The concept of univeral jurisidiction has been part of the legal landscape for decades, but it has received heightened scrutiny ever since a Spanish court attempted to prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. That case sparked a number of other prosecutions and raised the possibility that universal jurisdiction could be used as a regular mechanism to combat impunity. European courts, in particular, showed strong interest in pursuing these cases. According to Human Rights Watch, countries that have used universal jurisdiction as the basis for prosecutions include Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Spain.
While it excites human rights advocates, universal jurisdiction tends to unsettle diplomats, who worry that the cases can complicate important relationships. In part because of pressure from foreign governments and their own foreign ministries, Spain, Belgium and other European countries have restricted the ability of their courts to initiate prosecutions on the basis of universal jurisdiction.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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