AAJLJ Explores Legal Options to Ahmadinejad
August 18, 2008, 1:17 pm |
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By Fern Sidman
The offices of the prestigious and internationally renowned law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, LLP in midtown Manhattan was the setting for a special session convened by the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists on Sunday, August 10th. The session, billed as several lectures on “Preventing Genocide; “Legal Responses to Ahmadinejad” drew about 30 Jewish lawyers and jurists from all over the country and explored the “jurisdictional, procedural and substantial legal issues involved in bringing Ahmadinejad to account and to justice” and warned that as “Iran moves closer to acquiring nuclear weapons it is vital that every means, including legal actions, be used to deal with the threat of genocide.”
The featured speaker was constitutional legal expert, the Honorable Irwin Cotler, Esq., member of the Canadian Parliament, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. Mr. Cotler is also a leading international human rights lawyer and advocate and is a professor of law (on leave) at McGill University in Montreal.
Accusing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of engaging in “state sanctioned incitement to genocide”, Mr. Cotler asserted that even in such constitutional democracies as the United States and Canada, the free speech rights of Ahmadinejad would not be protected because “there is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech”. Citing articles from the the United Nations ratified “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” he said that even heads of state are not “immune to prosecution” and suggested that Ahmadinejad be brought before the International Criminal Court.
He called upon those assembled to galvanize the legal community to seek legal remedial redress for Ahmadinejad’s incitement under the Genocide Convention and to attempt to take legal measures to prevent Ahmadinejad from entering the US and Canada. He said that there were a “panoply of remedies” readily available in the text of the Genocide Convention and in the charter of the International Criminal Court. Saying that despite the fact that the United Nations General Assembly has the right to invite Ahmadinejad to address the world body, because the Iranian president uses the international stage to incite genocide, the United States has the right to override the UN obligation to host him. He stated that in his native country he was involved in preparing “a criminal indictment against Ahmadinejad if he steps foot in Canada.”
No stranger to legally challenging governments who perpetrate genocide, Mr. Cotler mentioned the recent horrific massacres in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Darfur and stated that, “the enduring lesson of these tragedies is that they occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of the state-sanctioned incitement to hatred. This teaching of contempt – this demonizing of the other – this is where it all begins.” He also pointed to the findings of the Supreme Court of Canada that said, “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words.”
Mr. Cotler intoned that “for quite some time” the world has been witnessing a state sanctioned incitement to genocide whose epicenter is Ahmadinejad’s Iran and qualified his remarks by saying that the incendiary rhetoric that is being spewed forth on a regular basis from the Iranian regime is a “toxic convergence of the advocacy of the most horrific of crimes, namely genocide, embedded in the most virulent of hatreds, namely anti-Semitism. It is dramatized by the parading in the streets of Tehran of a Shihab-3 missile draped in the words “Wipe Israel off the map”. He also stated that the utilization of such chilling epidemiological metaphors reminiscent of Nazi incitement such as Ahmadinejad’s characterization of Israel as “filthy bacteria,” “a stinking corpse” and “a cancerous tumor that needs to be excised,” while referring to Jews as “evil incarnate,” “blood-thirsty barbarians” and the “defilers of Islam” is the prologue to, and justification for, a Mid-East genocide, while at the same time denying the Nazi one.
Citing the fact that Iranian proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah also engage in state sanctioned terror, he reminded the audience that during the Lebanon war of 2006, Hanan Nasrallah of Hezbollah launched into a tirade against the Jews to provide ideological justification for launching a military attack on Israel. He also stated that non-Israeli Jews were not immune to Iranian terrorism and cited evidence that the heads of state in Iran were also responsible for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina in which 85 Jews were murdered and over 300 were seriously wounded. He told this reporter that the “Argentinian government has asked for arrest warrants for those in Iran who are responsible for the 1994 bombing of the JCC, yet no governments have come forth to show support for such a venture.”
He concluded his address by urging an “indifferent world” to extricate themselves from their self-imposed morass of political myopia and to work assiduously for the tightening of legal sanctions against Iran for their continuation of their uranium enrichment programs. “The time to act is now” Mr. Cotler declared. “We must stop international genocide by bringing Ahmadinejad to account”.
Following Mr. Cotler was Gil Limon, an adviser to the Israeli Mission to the United Nations who said that Article I of the Genocide Convention required that the International Court of Justice bear the responsibility for preventing genocide. Despite the fact that such UN Security Council member nations as “China, Libya and South Africa” don’t feel that the Iranian nuclear program presents any real danger, he cited UN Security Council resolution 713 that called for an arms embargo against Serbia while genocidal tactics were being employed there. He also chided the UN for maintaining a double standard on the application of the Genocide Convention, but stated emphatically that the International Criminal Court could bring a solid legal case against Ahmadinejad to the International Court of Justice for the crime of incitement to genocide. He urged the International Association of Jewish lawyers and Jurists to prepare a model application and model indictment to bring before the ICC and urged the circulation of such drafts of this indictment to international NGOs of the United Nations.
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Related: Israel, Iran, Law, WMD