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Last
Sunday, Adm. Sir Michael Boyce — commander of the British
forces in the Iraq war — revealed the details of a British
internal crisis that unfolded on the eve of the invasion. He stated
that at this time last year, days before the planned invasion,
he blatantly refused to allow British troops to fight unless given
unequivocal reassurance by Attorney General Lord Goldsmith that
the war was in fact legal according to national and international
law.
Four
days transpired before the attorney general was compelled to redraft
his legal advice from his original, more ambiguous stance on the
legality of the war, to the unequivocal stance that finally satisfied
Boyce.
The
Observer — which conducted the interview — went on to
report that Boyce did in fact support going to war. He stated
that the primary reason he took that stance was the fact that
invading Iraq without this legal cover was to open himself and
all of the British forces to prosecution under international law.
Such
a fear does not have much precedent. The Nuremberg Trials, held
just under 50 years ago, was the very first time anything resembling
a tribunal that dealt with war was convened. Prior to this, there
could be heated debate about whether a war was, but nobody debated
whether a war was "legal" — such a notion made
no sense when might always had made right.
Today,
not only did international law underlie the extraordinary stance
that Boyce took; Tony Blair himself insisted in his impassioned
defense of the war earlier this month that Britain went to war
precisely to uphold international law; namely to enforce United
Nations Resolution 1441. I'm sure the absurdity of suggesting
that a U.N. resolution could be enforced effectively by flying
directly in the face of U.N. law did not go unnoticed.
Still,
the significance of this new information speaks to how much the
influence of international law on global politics has increased.
Contemplating possible repercussions of his planned genocide,
Hitler famously remarked — "Who remembers the Armenians?"
True enough, the Armenian genocide had gone unpunished (arguably
paving the way for the Holocaust) and even today, too few remember
it.
The
global political arena has, however, begun to develop quite a
memory, flawed as it might be. The time between Nuremberg and
now has seen the development of war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia,
Rwanda, Sierra Leone and, most recently, Cambodia, as well as
the creation of both the International Court of Justice and the
International Criminal Court — the body cited by Boyce to
which Britain (and therefore her troops) was a party to, and therefore
liable under.
Most
of these courts have come under fire for being mainly for show
and ineffective as deterrents against breaches of international
law. Their fiercest critics barely concede that international
law is law at all, given the lack of any one impartial institution
to enforce its dictates.
Yet,
some strides can be pointed to. Among them is the case of Liberia,
where an indictment of strongman Charles Taylor issued by the
Special Court of Sierra Leone significantly affected the way this
former warlord — the first sitting head of state to face
prosecution in any court of law — calculated his decisions,
which in turn greatly affected the exact manner in which the crisis
unfolded.
To
influence Taylor — whose stature was massive regionally,
but dismissible internationally — is one thing; that international
law would influence a British officer of the highest rank to so
drastic a point as to make him consider disobeying orders even
though he himself supported the war, is quite another.
This
is fantastic proof that however late in the game, the clout of
international law is in fact spreading and making real the lesson
learned by those who hung at Nuremberg — that following orders
is no excuse, and that while accountability to humanity as a whole
might not yet be perfectly embodied in any one institution, it
is no mere empty talk either.
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