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We have international laws – we must now uphold them
• I WAS taken aback by Professor Phillipe Sands’ Forum (The silent global revolution, June 15).
He correctly states the arrangements before World War II “basically allowed states to do anything that was not expressly prohibited by international law,” but this is surely a tautology.
In all legal systems with which I am familiar, what is not prohibited is allowed, and what is prohibited is not allowed. What is the point of stating the obvious other than to create in a lay reader’s mind the false impression that relevant pre-war legal arrangements were virtually none existent?
In actuality the first Geneva Convention was signed in 1864 to protect the sick and wounded in war time. It was inspired by Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, which subsequently played an integral part in the drafting and enforcement of of the Geneva conventions.
These included the 1899 treaties concerning asphyxiating gases and expanding bullets. In 1907, 13 separate treaties signed, and in 1925 the Geneva Gas Protocol, prohibited the use of poison gas and the practice of bacteriological warfare.
In 1929, two more Geneva Conventions dealt with the treatment of the wounded and prisoners of war. In 1949, four Geneva Conventions extended protections to those shipwrecked at sea and to civilians.
Although the Geneva Conventions were still evolving, they were already adequate to restrain most of the morally aberrant great-power behaviours that we see around the world today.
I have particularly in mind the continuing aftermath of the Afghanistan and Iraq adventures.
Sands goes on say, quite incorrectly, that “since very little was prohibited states had a broad freedom.
“Under international law they could wage war more or less without restriction; detain very large numbers of people indefinitely and subject them to abusive interrogations, including torture; they could even commit mass murder and genocide against their own populations”.
Yet the linked set of Conventions are carefully crafted to deal with all the categories of perpetrators and victims that can arise in territories affected by large-scale armed conflicts.
If Professor Sands cares to refresh his memory of the original Convention, he will, I think, conclude that his list of the atrocities that were supposedly permitted in the first half of the 20th century is delusional – even if he chooses to discount the 1949 Fourth Convention’s clarification and extension of protections already in place.
He is quite right, however, to emphasise the important further strides that have been made since then. It is not new legislation that we need now, but the means of enforcement through the appropriate international instruments.
In practice this means strengthening the United Nations and the International Criminal Court by all means in our power, and whether our transatlantic cousins like it or not.
Prof Donald Michie
Dunollie Road, NW5
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