The Guardian reports:
The United Nations is to set up a dedicated investigations unit in Geneva early next year to examine the legality of drone attacks in cases where civilians are killed in so-called “targeted” counter-terrorism operations.
The announcement was made by Ben Emmerson QC, a UN special rapporteur, in a speech to Harvard law school in which he condemned secret rendition and waterboarding as crimes under international law. His forthright comments, directed at both US presidential candidates, will be seen as an explicit challenge to the prevailing US ideology of the global war on terror.
Earlier this summer, Emmerson, who monitors counter-terrorism for the UN, called for effective investigations into drone attacks. Some US drone strikes in Pakistan may amount to war crimes, Emmerson warned.
In his Harvard speech, he said: “If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms … then it may in the last resort be necessary for the UN to act.
“Together with my colleague Christof Heyns, [the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings], I will be launching an investigation unit within the special procedures of the [UN] Human Rights Council to inquire into individual drone attacks.”
The investigation unit will also look at “other forms of targeted killing conducted in counter-terrorism operations, in which it is alleged that civilian casualties have been inflicted”. Emmerson maintained that the US stance that it can conduct counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaida or other groups anywhere in the world because it is deemed to be an international conflict was indefensible.
“The global war paradigm has done immense damage to a previously shared international consensus on the legal framework underlying both international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” he said. “It has also given a spurious justification to a range of serious human rights and humanitarian law violations.
“The [global] war paradigm was always based on the flimsiest of reasoning, and was not supported even by close allies of the US. The first-term Obama administration initially retreated from this approach, but over the past 18 months it has begun to rear its head once again, in briefings by administration officials seeking to provide a legal justification for the drone programme of targeted killing in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia …
“[It is] alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns … has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view.”
Phyllis Bennis just got a question about the I/P conflict through the international hour on the Diane Rehm show. Good one. Bingo. Have been doing this for over 12 years on the Rehm show and other MSM outlets. Glad to have a heavy hitter like Phyllis doing the same. Use the MSM to get relevant and factual information out into the larger public audience
The UN is apparently not willing to consider that so-called “targeted” assassination (or bombing) (though so very, very much to be preferred to the previous [one supposes] random and untargeted variety) is OK if no USA citizen is the target. No, to the UN, it is [perhaps] no good even if all victims are furrinerz [from a USA perspective].
Careful, UN. Too much of this impartiality stuff could mean budget cuts!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/27/imran-khan-detained-flight
Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain turned politician, was taken off an international flight from Canada to New York and questioned by US immigration officials over his views on drone strikes and jihad.
Khan, who has been at the forefront of a high-profile campaign as leader of the Pakistan Movement for Justice party (PTI) to end US drone strikes in northern Pakistan, had been in Canada to give a speech and was on his way to a fundraising dinner in the US on Friday.
Khan recently attempted to lead a high-profile march into south Waziristan which included US peace activists from the Code Pink group with some 15,000 of his supporters.
He claims that the drone strikes kill large numbers of innocent civilians – a claim denied by the US.