Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

Ben Ferencz is the kind of guy you like right off—friendly, smiling, open, and incredibly humble considering his stunning achievements. I was lucky enough to make Ben’s acquaintance through a mutual friend, former Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo. Since I was in the midst of in-depth research for a book that was to be, in part, about the link between international justice and world peace, Luis thought Ben was somebody I needed to meet. Ben and I at his winter home in Florida. Still highly active despite then being on the threshold of his tenth decade, Ben met with me while he was visiting The Hague, where Moreno Ocampo had asked him to provide some concluding comments at the closing of the ICC case against Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for crimes against humanity. I was there, as an observer, on Moreno Ocampo’s invitation as well.   Ben and I seemed to hit it off right away, and we cemented our friendship still furt...

ISIL: a clear and present danger to world peace. Since the beginning of 2014—the year in which the world was to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I by leaping headlong into new situations fraught with grave threats for world peace—several regional conflicts have morphed into worldwide concerns. All of these are critical, difficult to solve and risky in that they pose a catalyst for world conflict: the war in Syria, the war in Ukraine, the exchanges of missile fire between the Israeli government and Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip, all of these have this year shaken the foundations of world peace. But perhaps the most immediate and high-profile of these threats has been the swift rise of the fundamentalist terror organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL. Without a doubt, ISIL is a clear and present danger to world peace and democracy. But it is worthwhile reflecting that it is as much an indirect threat, because of how...

Last Monday marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I, one of the two bloodiest and most horrendous conflicts in recorded history. It was known also as The Great War and more popularly as “the war to end all wars”. But it didn’t, of course. Barely more than two decades after it ended, the world would witness the start of World War II on September 1, 1939. That war would prove to be even more horrific and far more costly in human life than its predecessor, and with its end, the world would once more say, “Never again,” and give birth to multilateral institutions and worldwide treaties aimed at ensuring peace. And yet, peace has not come. Although the “advancement” of war technology (to the detriment, one might argue, of environmental and life sciences which must vie for funds, materials and human resources with the gnashing golden teeth of the First World’s war machine) has—until now, at least—kept the major powers from again engaging in battle directly, i...

Photo from the Rise up Times Some people divide the world into optimists and pessimists, into positive and negative thinkers, into “glass half-full and glass half-empty” types. Those people will probably try to tell you that it’s negative to focus on “the bad stuff” and conclude from this that the world is becoming an ever more violent, dangerous and heartless place and that this kind of thinking is, in the end, merely a perception brought on by ever-increasing connectivity with the rest of the world. They’ll tell you that there was always violence and chaos in certain parts of the world, but that those of us who didn’t live in those places simply didn’t know about it, whereas, today, everybody’s connected to everybody else all the time, so unlike before, we now know what’s going on in the rest of the world—instead of being blithely ignorant, one might conclude. Therefore, they will tell you, the idea that the world is growing more violent and war-like by the day is a mere erro...

The lightning surge of the Sunni militant ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a.k.a. ISIS) that took shape earlier this month appears to demonstrate that both Western-leaning Iraqi authorities and US intelligence have sorely underestimated this fundamentalist threat and extremist leaders’ capability to make good on it. In Mosul, the Arab country’s second largest city, over the past few days many defending officers and troops have thrown down their weapons and fled before the advance of a few thousand determined and well-seasoned militants, many of whom are believed to have previously been fighting in Syria’s civil war—neither on the side of the  repressive Bashar al-Assad regime nor for the pro-western rebels of the Syrian National Militia, but against all comers for their own cause: the establishment of a pan-Arabian fundamentalist Islamic state. Embattled Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki By the end of this week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was under pressure to ...

An incident in high-profile civil disobedience in Egypt, where court actions and death sentences against citizen protests have been the focus of international controversy, this week struck a new parallel with the case of Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan in a New York court, which I commented on in my previous blog post. http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2014/05/the-american-pussy-riot.html   The incident that I refer to is the sentencing of Mahienour El-Massry—sometimes dubbed “the voice of the Egyptian revolution” and a renowned defender of the rights of Egypt’s women—to two years in prison for protesting against recent violations of human and civil rights. A 28-year-old lawyer, Mahienour was tried and convicted of taking part in an unauthorized demonstration and of violating the country’s so-called Protest Law. The conviction refers to a December 3, 2013 protest demonstration in Alexandria that was broken up by police using tear gas and baton charges. ...