Louise Arbour sucks

Alan Dershowitz takes on one of the saints of progressive Canadians.

The absurdity and counterproductive nature of current international law was proven once again by a bizarre statement issued on Wednesday by Louise Arbour, The UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights and a former justice of the Canadian Supreme Court. She threatened "personal criminal responsibility" against Israeli generals and political leaders -- "those in positions of command and control" -- for the military actions they are taking to protect innocent civilians from Hezbollah and Hamas rocket and missile attacks.

Her theory of prosecution is that the shelling of cities could "constitute a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians," presumably even when the actual targets are terrorists and their rocket launchers, and when the Israeli air force takes extraordinary steps to minimize civilian casualties. She also erroneously stated that international law prohibits "the bombardment of sites with alleged military significance, but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians."

Arbour's knowledge of international law is as questionable as her understanding of morality. Virtually every democratic nation has been forced to bomb cities during wartime, especially when the enemy locates crucial military targets near population centres. Under Arbour's erroneous criteria for criminal prosecution, U.S. presidents Bush, Clinton, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman and Roosevelt, as well as British prime ministers Blair and Churchill, and numerous French, Russian, Canadian and other heads of state would be declared war criminals for causing the "foreseeable" deaths of civilians while bombing legitimate military targets. Moreover, terrorists would be encouraged to launch their missiles from cities, so as to induce democracies to violate international law by counter-attacking terrorists...

... her nominally neutral comments mask the fact that there is an enormous difference between terrorists who seek to maximize civilian casualties and democracies that seek to minimize them. Moreover, as Arbour knows full well, terrorist leaders cannot realistically be subjected to criminal prosecutions because they are underground, while democratic leaders live and travel openly.

Louise Arbour is part of the problem, not part of the solution. She should be replaced as High Commissioner for Human Rights before she does even more harm to the ability of democracies to combat terrorism within the rule of law.

- Alan M. Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard...

By comparison, this is what Ms Arbour has to say about congo, where hundreds of thousands have died, not hundreds:

"As you know, I visited Sudan on the eve of the Abuja peace accords. At that point, violence, both in terms of the frequency and intensity of attacks, had reached a level of gravity not seen since late 2003 and 2004," she said.

The Abuja accords, she added, are unlikely to yield their intended benefits to the people of Darfur, in absence of a radical shift of emphasis from State security to human security.

She urged the government of Sudan to seek the assistance of UN peacekeepers [good luck - MC] in its effort [what effort? MC] to establish sustainable peace...

Why no mention of war crimes here?

Mark C.

Update: See this National Post editorial which highlights Ms Arbour's silence on the war crimes potential of the Russians killing some 200,000 Chechens (though the Post goes too far in justifying the Russians and does not point out that the utterly brutal Russian response to Chechen separatism has done much to push the movement into the hands of the Islamists).

Posted by markc at July 21, 2006 10:47 AM