UN should help end impunity in Iran and throughout the world

In 1996, on behalf of the Spanish President Allende Foundation, I filed a criminal complaint in Spain, under the principles of universal jurisdiction, against Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet and other leaders of his military junta. The charges detailed genocide, systematic torture, politically motivated killings and terrorism. The defendants were then enjoying absolute impunity in Chile.

I led a multinational team of lawyers in prosecuting those officers in absentia for more than 4,500 cases of murder and forced disappearance, and for the torture of more than 30,000 survivors of Pinochet’s years as dictator of Chile (1973-1990). I was in Santiago’s presidential palace, Palacio de la Moneda, when the coup took place in 1973 and saw Pinochet’s crimes first-hand. The executions and torture perpetrated in Chile remain fresh in everyone’s memories.

But the number of killings pales in comparison to the case that could be brought against leaders of another inhumane system whose crimes recently have garnered my attention. In just a few months during 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran executed an estimated 30,000 political prisoners and advocates for democratic governance, mostly members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).

On the request of the foundation and a Spanish court of justice, Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 to be extradited and put on trial. Later, he was arrested and indicted in Chile. The United States (under the Clinton administration) did not object. Since then, impunity has ended and hundreds of officers of the Chilean state have been judged and condemned for their crimes against humanity. Many of the leading perpetrators of similar crimes in Iran remain alive; some even hold prominent positions in politics. This means that they still could be arraigned in an international criminal court, if the United Nations takes the necessary measures under the charter.

In the interest of encouraging that outcome, I participated in a civil society hearing on Feb. 1 in Geneva, at which a mock indictment related to the 1988 Iranian massacre was presented and discussed. The proceedings included eyewitness testimony from former Iranian political prisoners and their families, as well as expert opinion from fellow human rights experts including former United Nations judges.

It is my hope, of course, that the Feb. 1 hearing will prove to be a precursor to more formal proceedings by the United Nations. If these proceedings take place, it will be a step toward long overdue legal accountability for some of the world’s worst and most organized violators of human rights, and an encouragement to reduce impunity for crimes of this nature in other countries. Formal trials will likely help to bring some closure to those families that still have not identified the final resting places of their loved ones 30 years later.

Additionally, it is my hope that newfound attention for the 1988 massacre and the subsequent crimes of Iran’s political/religious system will help to reiterate the message that was previously sent by my colleagues and me through our prosecution of the Pinochet crimes. The essence of that message is that, while some officers may enjoy impunity as they commit human rights violations and misuse the instruments of the state, this impunity need not continue forever, much less be accepted by human rights advocates and foreign observers who have the legal mandate to investigate such crimes.

There is a widespread feeling that many world leaders have failed to recognize the role that they can and must play in bringing an end to the impunity of human rights abusers across the globe. Instead, they have tended to look away from dangerous and criminal situations because local populations had no effective means for redress.

Tragically, this impulse has led to situations in which rampant human rights abuses have recurred or worsened over time. But in some cases, the threat of this outcome is lingering, and it might still be prevented. About one week before the hearing in Geneva, the Iranian Resistance leader Maryam Rajavi visited the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as part of the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s efforts to encourage international action to help those arrested during recent protests in Iran.

Beginning on Dec. 28, 2017, two weeks of nationwide protests in Iran gave rise to calls for a change of government. Those demonstrations predictably were met with a violent backlash from the Iranian powers-that-be, the full picture of which is still emerging. Thousands of Iranians have been arrested, more than 50 killed, and reports continue to trickle out of the country regarding young protesters dying as a result of torture in Iranian prisons.

“Mass arrests, opening fire on unarmed protesters, and torturing prisoners to death are clear examples of crime against humanity,” Mrs. Rajavi said. “Unfortunately, Europe has chosen silence and inaction about all of these crimes, something that contradicts many of Europe’s fundamental and joint commitments including the European Convention on Human Rights.”

As we have sadly learned, human rights abusers sometimes escape justice. Democratic nations have an obligation to intercede and protect whenever possible to either halt these abuses around the world, or raise the profile of their perpetrators and increase the chances that they face domestic or international justice at a later date.

With many experts speculating that the unrest in Iran is far from over, the day may not be far off when the Iranian people can seek justice for the crimes committed against them. By helping those people to retain access to the internet and social media, and by weakening the system’s repressive institutions through diplomatic démarches and other appropriate measures, the international community can help to protect the victims and to provide for the reparation of damages resulting from the acts of the state responsible.

Juan E. Garcés was the chief lawyer in the Spanish legal case against Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

JOHN BOLTON: EVERY TIME YOU HEAR NORTH KOREA THINK OF IRAN

JOHN BOLTON: EVERY TIME YOU HEAR NORTH KOREA THINK OF IRAN

by JOHN HAYWARD

 Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton talked about North Korea’s Fourth of July missile test launch on Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.

Bolton said intercontinental ballistic missiles are a goal North Korea has been working towards since the early 1990s, as part of the outlaw regime’s quest for “deliverable nuclear weapons,”

but it was still surprising to many observers that a missile with true intercontinental capability was successfully launched this week.

“It’s capable of hitting Alaska. It can’t hit the Lower 48 yet, but that’s only a matter of time,” he said. “The only other thing we need to find out, and I don’t want to be on the receiving end of it, is whether North Korea has miniaturized its nuclear devices – of which it’s already detonated five – to the point they can put it under an ICBM nose cone.”

“I’ve been talking about this for 20 years, and so have many other people. And yet, for the last three U.S. administrations – eight years of Clinton, eight years of Bush, eight years of Obama – people have tried to negotiate with North Korea to talk them out of their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. It’s failed consistently for 25 years,” he said.

“That’s why Trump has inherited this mess. The issue is whether he can find a way out of it, or whether he succumbs to what I know the State Department, and much of the Defense Department, and much of the intelligence community are telling him: just keep doing what we’ve been doing before. Because that will result in a nuclear North Korea,” Bolton warned.

“And by the way, you can already see the mainstream media and academia preparing us to live in a world where North Korea has nuclear weapons,” he added, citing a New York Times op-ed to that effect from Wednesday.

Bolton judged that Japan would continue to be a reliable ally against North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, since the Japanese are well aware their cities lie within range of North Korea’s missiles. On the other hand, he said “all of the evidence points to China and Russia as, at best, turning a blind eye to what the North has been up to, and more likely facilitating the North’s nuclear and missile programs.”

He said his support from China and Russia was kept low-profile to avoid sanctions, but there was no way to conceal that China supplies North Korea with much of its oil and food, giving Beijing more than enough leverage to halt Pyongyang’s nuclear missile program if it truly wanted to.

“China is playing a double game. They say they don’t want the North Koreans to have nuclear weapons but they haven’t shut it down,” Bolton charged. “It’s a very dangerous situation. Nobody should underestimate it.”

“One other point I would make: Every time you hear the words ‘North Korea,’ think of the word ‘Iran,’” he added. “Because whatever North Korea can do, Iran can do the next day by sending them a check in the appropriate amount. We have stovepiped these two nuclear proliferation threats for a very long time. We need to stop doing that because every day that goes by brings us closer to the day when one or both of them can hit the United States.”

Bolton cited North Korea’s five known nuclear test detonations, and its successful test of ballistic missile technology, to say it is a “more imminent threat” than Iran, but stressed that North Korea and Iran have been working “extremely closely on ballistic missiles” since the Nineties, “and there’s every reason to think they have worked extremely closely on the nuclear program as well.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if a big chunk of Iran’s uranium enrichment program is not in Iran, where we know where it is, but under a mountain in North Korea,” he said. “We have very poor intelligence on North Korea, so it’s a big advantage for Iran to work with them.”

“When the Israelis destroyed that reactor in Syria in September 2007, it was being built by North Koreans,” he recalled. “Well, who paid for that? North Korea doesn’t do anything for free. I doubt that Syria had the resources to do it. Quite likely it was Iran. When that reactor was found by the Israelis and destroyed, the lesson I think to Iran was, ‘Build it someplace where the Israelis can’t find it.’ That’s why they may well have turned to North Korea.”

Bolton noted that U.S. and South Korean military officials have been warning for the past year that North Korea was on the verge of developing missiles that could hit the West Coast of the United States, perhaps as early as 2018.

“In public testimony three or four months ago now, the head of the U.S. Strategic Command told Congress that the only thing he had any doubt about was whether North Korea had fully conquered the miniaturization tasks to take a nuclear device and make it small enough to put under an ICBM nose cone. So even just three or four months ago, he didn’t have any doubt about the range,” he noted.

“There are a lot of other technical steps to overcome here. You can put the nose cone and the warhead up, you can bring it back down, but it’s a pretty rocky ride. You have to make sure that the warhead will detonate at the appropriate time,” he explained.

“We don’t know whether the North has mastered that technology, but I would be very cautious about intelligence that says they can’t do this, and they can’t do that, and they can’t do the other thing, because the first American reaction to this launch was ‘it was an intermediate range ballistic missile, not an ICBM,” and we were wrong. And we didn’t detect this one before the launch. I think we’ve had enough lessons in intelligence being imperfect,” he said.

“Don’t count on our lack of knowledge meaning that the North doesn’t have the capability,” he advised. “They may well have the capability. We may simply not have detected it.