The guilty verdict by the judges of the Special Court for Sierra Leone against Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor is important for both Africa and the international community.  The unanimous finding by the Special Court for Sierra Leone that Liberia’s former President Charles Taylor is guilty of aiding and abetting and planning war crimes and crimes against humanity during the civil war in Sierra Leone, constitutes the first conviction of a former head of state before an international tribunal since the conviction of Karl Doenitz (the 23-day day President following Hitler’s suicide) at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946. This is a significant achievement for international criminal justice.

This ruling is of obvious interest for the ‘Human Rights’ topic of the Global Issues paper in terms of illustrating both the importance on of rights on the international stage but also the fact that the human rights regime is enforceable.  Nonetheless, the case has not been without controversy since its inception.So has international justice been vindicated?

To follow up on the story here are a few articles:
Telegraph: Charles Taylor found guilty of ‘aiding and abetting’ war crimes
Guardian: Charles Taylor is guilty – but what’s the verdict on international justice?

Walter Bagehot once wrote “The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it,” This week the debate over whether the House of Lords should be reformed is boiling up once again.  Until recently most articles appearing in the press have tended to side with keeping the House of Lords as is, and highlighting the merits of its cantankerous but independent minded ‘appointed’ Life Peers.  However, a wider range of views are now being canvassed in the press.  Here is a quick survey of articles reflected roughly the different positions:

In favour of an elected upper house:
1. In the Guardian Andrew Adonis puts forward a strong case for reform in an article:Reform the House of Lords now and it can survive. He argues:

The second chamber is costly and unrepresentative. Only radical change will head off the abolitionists

2. And, a bit earlier in the Observer there was an article Lords reform: Will nobody finally rid us of these bumptious buffoons? It asserts:

As bishops remain in the upper house, hopes of any substantial change in this antiquated chamber are dying fast

3. Steve Richards in the Independent has The Lords is undemocratic and increasingly silly, and argues:

Clegg is right to push on. Nearly all opposition is on Machiavellian grounds rather than principle

In favour of the status quo [i.e. an appointed upper house]:
3. Philip Blonde [a.k.a The Red Tory] has an article in the Independent: Electing the Lords would undermine its value.  Its thrust is:

It would be the greatest extension of executive power since Charles I dissolved Parliament

And finally the are those who advocate the complete abolition of the House of Lords:
Here cue Polly Toynbee in her Guardian article: Lords buffoonery has to end. So why not abolish them? in which she asserts:

Reform opens deeper questions about where power should lie than this cabinet looks willing or capable of confronting

An interesting blog post from James Cleverly AM: Elected House of Lords, what would we lose? has a list of some of the cross benchers and their expertise which would be lost if they were replaced by elected peers.  Some include:

Psychiatric social worker and chairman of the Harold Shipman inquiry and the Baby P inquiry
Former Chief Constable of West Midlands Police
Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford, former chair of the Food Standards Agency
Former Permanent Secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service
Former Permanent Secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service
Former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
Former Chief of the Defence Staff
Human rights lawyer and former Chair of Oxfam
Professor of Surgical Sciences at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University
Professor of the psychiatry of learning disability at St George’s, University of London, former president of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists
Professor of Law at Queen Mary College, University of London

Not your ordinary buffoons!

Are Cameron’s political fortunes beginning to wane?  The difficulty and unpoluarity in passing the Health and Social Care Act 2012 , Osborne’s budget, the Craddus affair involving for ‘Cash for Access’ at No. 10, the leak of the controversial ‘NHS Risk Register’ document the and the shambles over petrol in the face of a possible strike by tanker drivers have all added up to tarnish Cameron’s authority.

Cameron’s tendency to rely on a small clique of trusted confidants, instead of the Tory Party as whole has seen David Cameron’s Coalition, his leadership ability and his choice of associates have taken something of a political kicking.

Two interesting articles to follow up on this:
1. Daily Mail’s The knives are out for David Cameron. He should watch his back  Which includes the line:

‘In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way’.

2. Peter Oborne in The Telegraph: The Conservative Party can save Cameron, but only if he lets it.  Which asserts:

The Prime Minister’s proxies and cronies must go if he is to re-establish confidence.

The article starts:

For many governments there comes a desperately sad moment after which nothing is ever quite the same again, when trust and confidence evaporates and all that remains is a long battle of attrition.
For Harold Wilson, that moment struck with the devaluation crisis of 1967; for John Major, it was Black Wednesday in 1992. Tony Blair’s came with the realisation that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction and that his casus belli for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a lie.
There is now a strong possibility that historians will identify the events of the past two weeks – the lethal combination of George Osborne’s shambolic Budget with the shocking revelation that access to the Prime Minister and government policy is up for sale – as the climacteric of the Cameron/Clegg Coalition.

Oborne puts this reverse in the PM’s fortunes down to:

There are only two reasons for the collapse of this Government’s fortunes: the first is Cameron and Osborne; the second is the decision made in 2005, when Cameron was elected leader, to govern as much as possible without the Conservative Party.

‘Why are asymmetrical wars difficult to end?’, was a recent exam question for Unit 4. Tying in with that theme is an excellent recent article in the Scotsman entitled Afghanistan: A war that can never be won? where Dani Garavelli [amother Italian Scot?]  writes “One fatal disaster after another has left the coalition’s hopes of succeeding in Afghanistan at an all-time low”.  The article hits the nail on the head, especially in terms of grasping the nature of dealing with a full blown insurgency and the issue of creating a viable and resilient state in Afghanistan.

A must read, but few significant exerpts are:

Do we now have to confront the possibility that withdrawal may ultimately be synonymous with defeat? Have allied forces done enough to ensure the gains made in Afghanistan will be sustained, or will the troops’ departure signal the country’s implosion into civil war? And, as Nato is met with a cascade of unexpected challenges, is the much-vaunted exit strategy – in the words of Henry Kissinger – “all exit and no strategy”.

One of the difficulties with assessing “victory” or otherwise in Afghanistan is that the endgame has never been precisely defined. Initially, a war of reprisal, aimed at ridding the country of al-Qaeda, punishing the Taleban for giving them quarter and ensuring they could never flourish there again, the emphasis has shifted over the years to counter-insurgency and securing a better future for the people of Afghanistan – a concept that has been increasingly difficult to sell to the US and British publics, especially as the death toll has mounted.

AND

The academic recounts the Taleban slogan that dates back to the Soviet invasion: “‘While you have the watches, we have the time.’ In other words, while you have great firepower and technology, we have all the time in the world,” she explains. “While for you this is just a misadventure, for us it’s a serious war for political gain, for political survival.”

The truth of this may become all too apparent in the next few months. “The snow is melting across the Hindu Kush now – this is the fighting season opening,” Crow points out. “The Taleban commanders will come in from neighbouring Pakistan ready to fight – and I don’t know to what extent our domestic public’s going to be willing to put up with many more losses.”

The conviction of Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo by the International Criminal Court is a milestone in the search for international justice.  Chatham House’s Elizabeth Wilmshurst provides some expert comment and analysis - [click here]. The trial ends a 10 yesr legal process and is the ICC’s first conviction.  Wilsmhurst writes:

Lubanga was convicted of the war crime of conscripting and enlisting children under the age of 15 years and using them to participate actively in hostilities. Lubanga was the commander of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC) and its armed wing, the Forces patriotiques pour la libération du Congo (FPLC), at a time when many armed conflicts were taking place in the mineral-rich eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The trial chamber, presided over by British judge, Sir Adrian Fulford, found that Lubanga had encouraged children to join the army and had personally used them among his bodyguards. He and others had participated in a common plan to build an army so that the UPC/FPLC could maintain political and military control over Ituri, a plan which resulted in the recruitment of children, whether voluntarily or by coercion, and their use in various ways in the hostilities.

However, does this herald a new dawn in upholding and enforcing international justice.  Well enthusiasm needs to be curbed…some critical comment is proved in the Econmist, which argues that:

Since it was set up in 2002 to try genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, the court has been lambasted for its glacial slowness. Some critics cry bias, too: all 15 cases now before it concern African countries: Uganda, Congo, the Central African Republic, Sudan (Darfur), Kenya, Libya and Côte d’Ivoire. Yet—except in Kenya—the court intervened either because the countries themselves asked it to, or because there had been a UN Security Council resolution.

The court’s statutes say it may take on only those cases where the country concerned is either unwilling or unable to do so. That, sadly, applies to many African states, where courts are still woefully partial, corrupt or otherwise inadequate. And Africa is also the scene of the sort of wars that bring the atrocities over which the ICC has jurisdiction. Of the 120 countries that have now signed up to the court 33—the biggest single group—are from Africa.

One of the difficulties faced by the court is its lack of any kind of enforcement mechanism. It has to rely on its individual members to arrest and hand over suspects, as required under its statutes. Some African states have proved unwilling to do so, however. Indeed, the African Union has specifically ordered its 54 members not to co-operate with the allegedly pro-Western ICC’s arrest warrant for Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, one of only two sitting presidents ever charged by the court. The other was Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.

Further comment can be found here:
Economist: Bench mark: ICC’s first verdict