Ginsburg: War Crimes Charges Against Bush Officials Unlikely
Prosecutions of Bush administration officials for their conduct of the fight against terrorism are unlikely, said speakers at a panel held today during the World Justice Forum in Vienna.
As George W. Bush’s time as U.S. president nears its end and in the wake of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings rejecting the administration’s treatment of suspected terrorists in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a number of commentators and legal experts have suggested that some of those policies violated international conventions prohibiting indefinite detentions and inhumane treatment of detainees.
The issue was raised by an audience member near the end of a program moderated by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But Ginsburg and Michael Posner, president of Human Rights First in New York City, responded that a likelier scenario than legal proceedings against President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and other top members of the administration would be some serious rethinking of U.S. policy since 2001.
The real question, Ginsburg said, is “Where do we go, what lessons can we learn from the past? The important thing is, what you can learn from the past and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Ginsburg said a revenge motive that may be fueling some of the calls for legal action against administration officials may help explain the U.S. government’s continuing opposition to the International Criminal Court. The ICC is authorized by the 1998 Rome Statute to investigate and prosecute individuals for serious violations of international human rights laws and war crimes when national legal mechanisms don’t exist to handle such cases. The U.N. Security Council also may refer cases to the ICC.
The Bush administration officially opposes the court on grounds it would put U.S. officials and military personnel at risk of prosecutions.
But Ginsburg also chided another audience member when he said the United States no longer offers the world a model for commitment to the rule of law because of its anti-terrorist policies.
“I would not judge our country by seven years,” Ginsburg said. “It’s had more than 220 years.”
Posner acknowledged that there may be efforts in the United States and Europe to hold U.S. officials legally accountable. “But it’s important to have another kind of accountability, a mechanism that looks at what happened, and why,” he said.
Prosecutions would be legally and politically more complicated, Posner said. He said it’s unlikely any administration would want to get involved in proceedings against leaders of a predecessor administration.
Another speaker at the program, Parvez Hassan, described the trauma in Pakistan when that country’s leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, tried to sack the country’s chief justice and most of the judiciary in 2007 and suspended the constitution when it appeared the Supreme Court would reject his attempt to run for another term as president. Musharraf’s actions led to widespread street marches and other protests by Pakistani lawyers.
Hassan praised lawyers in the United States and elsewhere for supporting their Pakistani colleagues. “Every time we heard or read about the American Bar Association marching on our behalf, that was a night we slept well,” said Hassan, a human rights and environmental law activist.
“It hasn’t always happened,” Ginsburg said, “that the lawyers have stepped forward when a country is in turmoil as have the lawyers of Pakistan.”
The ABA and other sponsors of the World Justice Project convened the forum this week to bring together an international roster of leaders of the legal profession and other disciplines to form a consensus on how to advance the rule of law as the foundations for societies of equity and opportunity. On Thursday, the WJP unveiled its Rule of Law Index, meant to measure how effectively countries have applied the rule of law.
Nearly 500 invited attendees from 15 disciplines will wrap up their work Saturday to seek to identify rule-of-law programs that can be implemented in various regions of the world.
More World Justice Project Headlines:
World Justice Project Reveals ‘Rule of Law Index’ (ABA Journal)
Experts unveil index to check nations’ rule of law (Associated Press)
World’s top legal experts unveil ‘rule of law’ index aimed at measuring how nations behave (Associated Press)
Leaders in Vienna Seek Consensus; Rate Country Effectiveness on Rule of Law (ABA Journal)
