Archive for the 'International Justice' Category

« Previous Entries
Next Page »

At the Zenith, our Dead Dreams Awake

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Good riddence to bad rubbish. A rotten end to a rotten year. The weather has been cold and rainy in Shanghai, rainy as it has been all year. And damn chilly.


Crates of secrets, pilling up by the day, trials and allegations notwithstanding. Cao. Leaders talking tough but reforming nothing. Torture on the menu across the board, more legitimized then ever.


Then again, torture has always been on the menu. Its just that we used to limit it to Latin and South America.


Funny how these things spread. One could write a book, so to speak.


That’s really about it. Hope 2010 will be better.


But Tyler Cowen says last year was a banner year for rule of law, so let’s analyze the next Tyler Cowen piece for additional clues to this trending issue. So that’s something.


Tags:

Posted in International Justice, Law | Comments Off

Losing Ground – No Words

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Well, I sort of missed out on the whole sum-up post to close out 09. It was an interesting year, that’s for sure.


What 2009 should be most remembered for, however, is quite simple: it was the year where the rule of law regressed and became more decadent and dishonest than ever before. And if you know anything about the history of for-profit incarceration (well, not to mention war) you may realize the serious fault-lines between public justice and private profit. At the most basic level, everyone knows there are people that can ‘lose your file’; the problem is how to build a system with lasting integrity.


2009 was a year where the crimes of the Bush Administration were swept under the rug, where Gonzo got screwed but torture-lover Yoo just went back to Berkeley to teach Admin law. Where we shouldn’t be ‘backward-looking’ much like the crooked cop doesn’t look back while his business partners are doing their work.


Millions of dollars got funneled around, millions in no bid contracts, millions lost and stolen and ‘mis-appropriated’. And somehow the ‘legal community’ is still back wrestling with the issue of criminal immunity for these contractors. Since when was the flexible, organic system I learned about in law school so incapable of calling a halt to honoring these mandatory arbitration clauses? Since when did a private contract trump criminal law?


We have to go back in the story, at least until Enron, to see how things have gone. There, massive fraud was carried out upon the government and individuals, and nothing was done about it. Couple people went to jail, and all those workers lost out on their pensions while shareholders got screwed, too.


Then of course we had our illegal president, whose people walked roughshod over legal principals and rule of law in favor of their plenary power concepts and fancy arguments. Unfortunately, they also had a good part of the judiciary as well, in the form of the Federalist Society, so there was little pushback…


Which concepts, of course, they abandoned the second they lost the executive branch, which is why usually we shouldn’t end up in this position unless we have a corroded system, because both parties are supposed to understand that they risk future abuse at the hands of the other party through the granting of such extraordinary power. Duh. Its not rocket science, some would even (irrationally, I might add) argue that such an outcome is impossible because it is too irrational, but anyway here we are.


The excessive abuses of the Bush Administration, while some may refrain from calling crimes, must be investigated fully, or Rule of Law will have been dealt a mortal blow by its most vocal supporter for decades.


How can US and international law be ignored, sneered at in fact, with no response?


Only a dead thing behaves this way…


Tags: ,

Posted in International Justice, Law | Comments Off

In Death You Sing

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

The forces of tyranny simply do not understand. They will always overstep their bounds, again and again, until they destroy themselves. Such is the nature of their need for control, it must escalate until it consumes itself.


Ahmadinejad has lost his legitimacy, and the current leadership must bear the responsibility for these crimes as well, and so have effectively gutted their moral authority. These leaders will fall within a period of time, perhaps 18 months as a safe outer limit.


However the Iranian system of government need not, and may well not, be destroyed at the same time. The popular complaints that are leading people into the streets (and have been, now, for about half a year) do not seem to be religious in nature, and the tacit support of the mullahs will wane as the abuses of the power structure become myriad and well-known.


There are people, professional, serious people who are in the business of predicting the fall of foreign political systems, and they are wrong 99% of the time, and most of the stuff that comes out of their mouths is complete drivel. Even the popular protests we have seen in Iran do not mean the social structure will change enormously. Indeed, probably the normal way forward for a culture would be incremental change rather than upheaval, and that could still be possible.


The recent progress in Iran should be seen for what it is: a crumbling structure that has glommed onto the legitimate social system and is desperately trying to survive.


I actually conceived of this post and title when I read of one young man who was killed prior to the fighting in which 8 people were killed by security forces. The news report of this earlier incident mentioned that he was the son of a mullah of some seniority. And I thought that would be a good example of a margin analysis. Here, at least, is one family who can’t ignore the abuses of the government any longer.


You can see the character of an organization when they are under siege. What happened from the very beginning of the troubles? As soon as they started arresting people, there were reports of torture and brutality. The Basij seem to be almost uncontrolled in their abuses.


First Neda. Now this nameless boy is forgotten to time, subsumed within the better-connected young man killed a day or so later. How much farther can you soldier on, having committed so many crimes. When will the crimes rise to the level of past regimes?


Back then I wrote:


What I noticed as I dug into the Iranian situation was how many from within the power structure had already been arrested, even prior to the election. Every article mentioned a cleric or former high government official as being arrested or otherwise marginalized. Might I suggest this is not a pleasant environment?

Oh, did you think I was concerned about the lack of legal protections for the people in the streets? No, no, the real problem is that there are no legal restrictions preventing the government from arresting anyone they want, including former Prime Ministers and the like, their children, and pretty much anyone else they want. That is a real problem, and leads to a very unstable system.



No independent legal structure at all leads, inevitably, to the brutality we have at present. The pressure continues to mount. Can they just put everyone into jail and be done with it?


[Update] The Curv is on the case while The Man is slacking. Typical:


A US doctor and a development consultant visited Iran in May to study a primary healthcare system that has cut infant mortality by more than two-thirds since the Islamic revolution in 1979.


Then, in October, five top Iranian doctors, including a senior official at the health ministry in Tehran, were quietly brought to Mississippi to advise on how the system could be implemented there.



Its a system which is, in many ways, working. Even though a strong case could be made for total organizational failure within the mullahocracy, I doubt that Iranians feel that strongly.


The upheavals at present are going to make many predict massive change, and they will be wrong.


[Updated Update]


And the baritone Professorship comes in from the wings:


Nearly 90 professors at Tehran University have told Iran’s supreme leader that ongoing violence against protesters shows the weakness of the country’s leadership, a pro-reform Web site reported Monday, reflecting a growing willingness to risk careers and studies to challenge the ruling clerics.
…
The letter signed by the 88 instructors was issued as university students around Iran staged acts of defiance — including hunger strikes and exam boycotts — to protest reported arrests and intimidation by hard-line forces, according to witnesses and reformist Web sites.
…
The letter by the Tehran University professors — posted on the Greenroad Web site — called the attacks on opposition protesters a sign of weakness in the ruling system. It also urged Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to order arrests over the hard-line crackdown, which intensified after protesters began chanting slogans against the supreme leader.



Tags:

Posted in International Justice, Law | 2 Comments »

Hearts Pumping Ink

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Recently, in another context, a Chinese colleague reminded me that the West long used human rights as a club against China, for naked political gain, while conveniently defining the term so as to make themselves wholly blameless. The poor kids stuck in the barrios of major cities and ground up in our ‘justice’ system were never victims of the horrid human rights violations like in China, you know.


This indeed diminishes all who would take the same banner, but of course once the US started torturing the entire concept became meaningless, and indeed freedom, democracy, terrorism and torture are all today poorly defined, sloganesque cudgels with which one country or culture can beat another. The words almost mean nothing today. And these instruments of behavioral modification are becoming less and less effective.


Of course, as I believe I have mentioned, the US was sanctioning and teaching torture even back during the great days of Reagan, and all through the Clinton Admin.


So the hypocrisy of today is not actually worse than that of before, in one aspect at least.


Today’s hypocrisy is just a bit more…naked.


The problem is that the banner is important. But the argument has to be made all over again.


What is the best relationship between the state and the individual? We have our system in the West, but the crime and violence we put up with seems dangerous for China, with its large population.


Tags:

Posted in International Justice | Comments Off

Slowly build up; and break it down

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

I am glad the pirate issue has returned to the news, as I failed to get in a few points last time.


These ‘externalities’ as they were once called, i.e. pirates, are always less exogenous than they may appear. Crony corporatism, of course, provides the right conditions for this:


The UN special envoy for Somalia on Friday sounded the alarm about rampant illegal fishing and the dumping of toxic waste off the coast of the lawless African nation.

“Because there is no (effective) government, there is so much irregular fishing from European and Asian countries,” Ahmedou Ould Abdallah told reporters.

He said he had asked several international non-governmental organizations, including Global Witness, which works to break the links between natural resource exploitation, conflict, corruption, and human rights abuses worldwide, “to trace this illegal fishing, illegal dumping of waste.”

“It is a disaster off the Somali coast, a disaster (for) the Somali environment, the Somali population,” he added.

Ould Abdallah said the phenomenon helps fuel the endless civil war in Somalia as the illegal fishermen are paying corrupt Somali ministers or warlords for protection or to secure fake licenses.



When will we get off our soapboxes and regulate ourselves as well as we would regulate our competitors? Is all the human rights stuff really just trash talk? Where does it all end?


Tags: , ,

Posted in International Justice, Law | Comments Off

Where Will It All End?

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Recently I have been thinking about outcomes. You know, behavioral outcomes and the reinforcement that naturally follows, and future behavior by other actor(s) that is influenced by the fate of earlier actors.

When we see someone get spanked (literally or figuratively), we oftentimes realize that we had better shape up, or we might get beat next, and of course the effect is (usually, mind you) even stronger when it is you that is getting beat down. Conversely, an environment of permissiveness is created when bad actions (whether implicitly or explicitly bad) are not punished or are encouraged, and this will naturally lead to an environment of permissiveness and wantonness, and to increasingly extreme behavior.

We saw this in Abu Ghraib, but from a legal standpoint we have little knowledge or even vocabulary to describe precisely where the point of culpability stands when ‘creating an environment of’ whatever is accomplished. This process is understood only as a slouch into insanity; there is no model of the pillars of civility and rationality that must be broken down to achieve such a horrible result.

Fortunately, according to the records we already have, I am quite sure a full and fair investigation will lead to criminal charges against top political figures utilizing existing law for creating such an environment with the knowledge if not actual intent that crimes would be committed there.

But this post is not about Cheney and the torturers at all. It about the cheerleaders of war, the Sullivans and Hitchens and McArdles and Friedmans, and all the others, down to the littlest ones over at Renew America or World Net Daily.

These are people who actively pleasured themselves with the prospects of violence and cruelty of war, with all of the attendant rape, pillage and murder fully realized (more than fully realized, probably) within their tiny skulls. These are people who were able to wrap anything in the entire world up within their need for power, even if it was just (in the case of some of the less well-compensated cheerleaders) power at a distance.
(more…)

Tags:

Posted in International Justice, us.politics | Comments Off

There was Business as Usual

Friday, September 18th, 2009

There is no rule of law in Iran today. The forces in power are contemptuous of anything and anyone that stands in opposition, even to the smallest degree.


There is nothing religious about this, no religion could possibly sanction the behavior of the regime. They are without religion and without reason.


This is not over, not by a long shot.


Tags:

Posted in International Justice | Comments Off

« Previous Entries
Next Page »