The Exchange

What splendour! Welcome back Arab League to the, eh ....pre-international community?

I must congratulate the League’s members on supporting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir –wanted by the International Criminal Court on the basis of his individual criminal responsibility on:

- five counts of crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, forcible transfer and;
- torture and rape; two counts of war crimes: intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities and pillaging

...let alone the pending possibility of charges of genocide should additional evidence be gathered by the Prosecutor – and giving two middle fingers nice and high to cosmopolitan justice. So who exactly is going to “eat it [the arrest warrant]” as Bashir instructed? The ICC? The international cosmos [/cosmopolitan community]?

Looking back in the mirror, what does the face of international law look like now injected with the presence of the League of Arab States (LoAS)?

Well jolly well bendable that’s for sure! Look at it go! Standards, accountability (domestic or otherwise), diplomacy channels, summit hopping, justice? Well maybe their justice but certainly not our kind. I’m fully behind inter-state solidarity and certainly regional kinship must be considered a race for middle ground. But throwing out hard fought international criminal standards (established through the legacies of shared histories of war, state sanctioned murder and the proliferation of genocides) with Arab (League) bathwater can’t wash well at 90 degrees.on a never ending spin cycle.

Just out of some incurable curiosity I clicked on the LoAS homepage at the end of March in search of a soundbite, a primary source document or anything really so that I could just read it as unmediated news and was kindly met with a “website under construction – go to Arabic Site” notice. Fantastic. Have no fear fellow traveller –you don’t have to be Arabic speaking to be welcome past the welcome page hurdle and into the last news item posted on the website in 2005 on a discussion on the release of the Danish cartoons caricaturising the Prophet Mohammed, or perhaps onto the (ahem) extensive document listings, including a dusty old item (and only one!) entered into the human rights documents vault -a letter dated 27 June 1989 from the Permanent Representative of the Syrian Arab Republic to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General.

So who are the cosmopolitan shapers from the LoAS and who are the movers? Who’s word is as good as their bond and who’s bond is as good as a photo opportunity, putting aside Article III of the Charter of the LoAS which states

It likewise shall be the Council task to decide upon the means by which the League is to co-operate with international bodies to be created in the future in order to guarantee security and peace and regulate economic and social relations.

So who exactly has ratified into law and acceded to the Rome Statute? Roll Call time!

Signed for the photo shot but not ratified – 14 countries
Egypt
Syria
Yemen
Sudan
Morocco
Kuwait
Algeria
Unite Arab Emirates
Bahrain
Oman
Djibouti
Comoros
Brazil (observer status)
Venezuela (observer status)

No signatures, no nuthin, zip, zero – 10 countries
Jordon
Iraq (don’t ask the Americans why!)
Lebanon (don’t ask the Americans why!)
Saudi Arabia
Libya
Tunisia
Qatar
Mauritania
Palestine
India (observer status)

And ratifications…?

Whats less than zero??

With no ratifications and plenty of cosmopolitan card holding posers –count them, there are 12! – that leaves lots of talkers and no walkers. Most the pity. This brotherhood of understanding that shields the ruling political classes from international criminal accountability leaves all of them in good company. How foolish were we to consider a situation other than what transpired as a regional blocking to Western bourgeois dogmas like, say, a shared notion of justice toward all criminals and not just petty pedestrian ones!

How slow is do not pass go? As injustice moves at the speed of digital sight our collective wills only nudge ever so slightly at the fleshy weight of dead televised pounds. Without a face, without any backbone, without a central spine to this international body we inhabit we are but a decaying jelly-bellied mass wobbling and toppling at our own cerebral reflection. What splendour it is basking on the 60 anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights!

Dear international law: you cad!