Sunday 10th April 2005
Are Bush & Co. War Criminals?
Some lawyers claim the U.S. is guilty of crimes against humanity
Serving tea in her kitchen in her home on Vancouver’s West Side, Gail Davidson seems more like a friendly neighbour than a wild-eyed revolutionary. Davidson, a grandmother, laughs easily, enjoys gardening, and speaks with a remarkable absence of egotism. In this setting, it’s hard to comprehend that she is a key figure in an international campaign to hold U.S. President George W. Bush accountable for committing war crimes. But that has become her central preoccupation.
Davidson, cochair of an international group called Lawyers Against the War (LAW), says she is the only person in the world who has ever laid criminal charges against Bush. On November 30, 2004, Davidson walked into Vancouver Provincial Court and convinced a justice of the peace to accept seven Criminal Code charges against Bush while he was visiting Canada. She brought evidence to support her contention that Bush should be held criminally responsible for counselling, aiding, and abetting torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at a U.S. military jail at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Each offence carries a prison sentence of up to 14 years.
On December 6, Provincial Court Judge William Kitchen ruled in an in-camera hearing that those charges were a “nullity”. In law, this means they never occurred even though they had been approved. Kitchen permitted Davidson to reveal outside the courtroom that his decision was based on Bush’s “diplomatic immunity”.
LAW cochair Michael Mandel, a law professor at Osgoode Hall law school at York University, claimed in a December 6 news release that Kitchen’s decision was “irregular in procedure and wrong in substance”. However, Michael Byers, a UBC expert in global politics and international law, told the Georgia Straight that a sitting head of state always has diplomatic immunity. [more]
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5734
OrlandoMary
www.maryschneider.us
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