Jurists seek to put Iranian leaders in the dock

JERUSALEM (July 28) -- As the European Union announced new, tougher sanctions th
is week against Iran, a blue-chip coalition of lawyers and human rights activist
s reiterated its demand that Iranian leaders be brought before the International
Court of Justice for incitement to genocide and the brutal repression of their
own citizens.
The Responsibility to Protect Coalition, chaired by former Canadian Justice Mini
ster Irwin Cotler and supported by a who's who of international law experts, say
s the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "a clear and presen
t danger to international peace and security ... and to its own people."
The group's 200-page report, "The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Viol
ating Iran," catalogs Iranian violations of international law and human rights a
buses against its own citizens. The authors argue that the international communi
ty should act now to defuse a "toxic mix" of policies that threaten world securi
ty: "the nuclear threat; the genocidal incitement threat; state-sponsored terror
ism; and the systematic and widespread violations of the rights of the Iranian p
eople."
Atta Kenare, AFP / Getty Images
A human rights coalition said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government
has pursued a "toxic mix" of policies that threatens world security.
"Iran has already committed the crime of incitement to genocide prohibited by th
e Genocide Convention," said Cotler, a law professor at McGill University and a
Liberal member of the Canadian parliament.
In an interview with AOL News during a stopover this week in Jerusalem, Cotler s
aid that Ahmadinejad's repeated calls for the annihilation of Israel were a clea
r violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention and required a response from the int
ernational community.
"The enduring lesson of the Nazi Holocaust and more recent genocides in Srebreni
ca, Rwanda and Darfur is that they occurred not just because of the machinery of
death, but because of state-sanctioned incitement like the rhetoric we see comi
ng from Ahmadinejad's Iran," Cotler said.
Under the Genocide Convention, Ahmadinejad could be brought before the Internati
onal Court of Justice in The Hague if the case is referred to the U.N. Security
Council, he said.
"States have a legal obligation to prevent Iran from carrying through with its d
eadly course of action," Cotler said. "Every state party to the Genocide Convent
ion can initiate an inter-state complaint before the International Court of Just
ice against Iran. This is not just a policy option, but an international legal o
bligation of the first order."
Cotler said that Ahmadinejad's position as head of state did not give him immuni
ty in international law. "In the case of Sudan, the U.N. Security Council referr
ed the criminality of President Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Cou
rt, and the court just recently cited him also for genocide, war crimes and crim
es against humanity," he said.
The coalition -- which includes former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar,
former Canadian Prime Ministers Kim Campbell and Paul Martin, Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Elie Wiesel, Lebanese scholar Fouad Ajami and Egyptian democracy advoca
te Saad Eddin Ibrahim among its members -- has published a dossier of Iran's all
eged violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention and other international laws.
The report exposes Iran as second only to China in the number of death sentences
carried out each year, with the highest number of juvenile executions anywhere
in the world -- 26 in three years, with 140 more on death row. According to the
rights group Stop Child Executions, Iran carried out 80 percent of all juvenile
death sentences from 2005 to 2008. The coalition's report says also that Iran ha
s imprisoned more journalists than any other country as part of a systematic pol
icy of domestic political repression.
International pressure proved effective in securing a stay of execution in one r
ecent case where an Iranian mother of two was sentenced to death by stoning afte
r she was found guilty of adultery, but the coalition says hundreds more cases o
f abuse go unnoticed.
"In Iran there is a massive assault on human rights and the rule of law, while d
angerous state-sanctioned incitement to genocide continues unabated, the whole a
midst a culture of impunity," Meir Shamgar, Israel's former chief justice, said
at a news conference in Jerusalem earlier this month.
At the same forum, Bassem Eid, founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitorin
g Group, said it was time to hold Iran to account for its serial abuses of its o
wn citizens' human rights.
"As the international community decided to present charges against the president
of Sudan towards his war crimes inside Sudan, I think that's the same thing the
international community should have to do towards Ahmadinejad, the president of
Iran," Eid said.
Cotler, who has won support for the coalition initiative during recent trips to
Australia, the United States, Jordan, Israel, Britain, Italy, Argentina and Swed
en, said Monday's announcement of tougher EU sanctions against Iran were "a welc
ome step" but urged the international community to act with resolve.
"The main thing now is to ensure that these sanctions are enforced," he said. "I
n the decade 2000-2010, even while the U.S. had sanctions legislation in place,
they awarded $107 billion in contracts to firms trading with Iran. Thus far, the
sanctions are only targeting the Iranian nuclear threat -- a policy that is ess
ential and necessary -- but the threat from Ahmadinejad's Iran has the three oth
er elements: incitement to genocide, assistance to terrorism and violations of h
uman rights. If sanctions focus only on the nuclear issue, we run the risk of ap
pearing to ignore the other threats or even sanitize them."
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