Pearls and Irritations

As we speak, international law is being openly flouted by powerful actors, [the US, the UK, and Israel] with devastating results for Julian Assange, and other political prisoners, for thousands of innocent civilians slaughtered in Gaza, and for the continued viability of international human rights and international law themselves.

Introduction by John Jiggens:

Craig Mokhiber is a former Director of the New York Office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, who resigned his UN position on 31 October 2023 over the failure of the UN to prevent genocide in Gaza, naming the UK, the US and much of Europe as “wholly complicit in this horrific assault”.

In his opening address to the conference, Night Falls in the Evening Lands: the Assange epic, held in Melbourne on March 9, Mokhiber explored the implications for human rights, journalism, and justice, of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the US persecution of Julian Assange.

Night Falls in the Evening Lands is a literal translation into English of the German title of Oswald Spengler’s classic, The Decline of the West, which explores the rise and fall of civilisations. Mokhiber’s speech was a powerful examination of the decline of human rights in the US empire.

As Mokhiber argued, Julian Assange warned us of this decline, and then he became the warning.

Craig Mokhiber:

As we speak, international law is being openly flouted by these powerful actors, [the US, the UK, and Israel] with devastating results for Julian Assange, and other political prisoners, for thousands of innocent civilians slaughtered in Gaza, and for the continued viability of international human rights and international law themselves.

Because the world is watching. And when a journalist and a publisher can be attacked and unlawfully imprisoned with impunity; and when the most serious crimes conducted since the Second World War, including apartheid, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, are openly perpetrated by Israel, not simply with the tolerance of the West, but with the active complicity of the US, the UK and much of Europe  ─ the same powers that have publicly collaborated in Julian’s persecution and committed themselves to the calls of impunity for these crime ─ there is little hope that the force of international law can long survive.

Who will dare to invoke these rules in other situations after the collective West has imperiously declared that they do not apply to the powerful states of the West or to their allies?

Today, in the wake of the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a journalist is fighting for his life in Belmarsh, simply for acts of journalism. Palestinians are losing their lives in their thousands, simply from being born Palestinians.

And the rest of us are losing the promise of the protections of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and the UN Charter itself.

Just imagine the crime of genocide, for many, the most serious breach of international human rights law, carried out as we speak on a caged civilian population of 2.3 million people, with the active support of Western states like the US and the UK.

Genocide scholars and human rights experts have been stunned by the textbook nature of the genocide in Gaza. Israel’s assault has checked every box in the UN Genocide Convention 1948: targeting a specific ethnic group; mass killings on a horrifying scale; more than 30,000 civilians, most of the children and women, murdered in cold blood; widespread harms to children, to women, to men; food, water, medicine intentionally denied; cut down by snipers and bombs, dying of externally imposed starvation; more than 70,000 more injured, many thousands more still under the rubble, and more still dying of disease.

Even before October of last year, year after year, Israel has imposed conditions of life intended to bring about the destruction of the population of Gaza by a cruel and unlawful siege: schools, hospitals and ambulances, churches, mosques, homes, refugee camps, UN humanitarian facilities, food production, even cemeteries all targeted. Forced to transfer, collective punishment. Horrors!

All this in the context of 75 years of ethnic purges carried out by Israel inside the Green Line in Jerusalem and the West Bank and now in Gaza.

And most remarkable of all is that the impunity afforded to Israel by the United States, the UK, and Europe has created an unprecedented situation in which the requisite genocidal intent cited by the Convention has been openly and publicly expressed by Israeli political and military leaders over and over again.

No need here for investigators to dig through dusty government archives looking for evidence and genocidal intent. Typically the most difficult element to prove in cases of genocide is intent. But in this case, so confident are they that they will not be held accountable, the Israeli political and military leaders have spoken openly about their genocide intentions, including the President, the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers, senior military officials and others.

They have openly dehumanised all Palestinians as animals, inhuman, terrorists, a cancer, vermin. They have declared an intent to wipe out all of Gaza’s inhabitants, with the stated intention not to distinguish between civilians and combatants, expressed the need to raise Gaza to the ground, to reduce it to rubble, and to carry out another Nakba.

And the Prime Minister himself even invoked the biblical verse on the Amalek, demanding that the entire population be wiped out, that none be spared men, women, children, suckling babies and livestock and food.
In a case such as this with such a clear and compelling prima facia manifestation of both acts of genocide and genocidal intent, if legal accountability is not pursued and secured, in addition to representing an intolerable abandonment of victims, I fear that eight decades of legal developments around the concept of genocide and the Convention itself will also be eroded beyond repair.

And let me add a final point, the Convention criminalises not only acts of genocide, but also complicity in genocide. In this case, we have seen the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany and others not only failing in their prevention obligations, but also actively providing economic, military, intelligence, and diplomatic support to Israel while it is engaged in these unlawful acts in Gaza.

Indeed, the US has even deployed its veto multiple times to prevent the Security Council ceasefire, after which thousands more have been killed each time. Tier 2 legal accounting must be pursued, but the war crimes, the crimes against humanity, the ethnic cleansing and genocide unfolding in Palestine are not the first warning that we have received of the dismantling of human rights and the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are not the first notice provided of the leading role of powerful Western states in the role of this dismantling of human rights.

We have seen this ruthless methodology of abuse of power deployed by these forces before. Smear, dehumanising, invoking security exceptions, brutalising and then denying. Indeed, anyone who’s been paying attention to Julian’s case for the past thirteen years will already know the willingness of these states to crack down on the most fundamental human rights and the rule of law itself, with impunity.

We know this because Julian Assange, the most important journalist of the 21st century, an award-winning publisher in the service of the public interest, dared to tell the truth about horrific US war crimes, and for this he is facing a terrifying and unrelenting assault on his human rights.

Not by some dictator or street gang, but rather by the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and other complicit European states.

Think of it.

For committing the crime of journalism, Julian has been smeared, demonised, threatened with kidnapping and assassination. He’s been subjected to arbitrary arrest and long unlawful detention and cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions.

He’s been denied his right to help in the UK and threatened with highly abusive custodial measures in the United States. And much of the world, including shamefully some Western media corporations, have either collaborated in this assault, or stood by in complicit silence.

Of course, as the guardians of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the binding human rights treaties based upon it, the United Nations has done far too little to address this case with the seriousness that it deserves.

But thankfully, even in the face of political pressure, it has not been entirely silent in this matter for many years now. The UN has spoken out on the unlawful persecution of Julian Assange. The UN working group on Arbitrary Detention, concluded that Julian has been arbitrarily and unlawfully detained since December of 2010. And as a matter of international law, he must be immediately free and compensated for the harms done to him.

And the UN Special Rapporteur on torture said that Julian’s treatment has amounted to torture in another serious violation of international human rights law.

The response of the US and the UK?

They simply ignored the UN’s findings, and with them, the very essence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, confident of their own impunity, just as they do in Palestine, they commit their crimes against Julian out in the open, in effect their message was. ‘We are powerful Western states. You can’t tell us what to do.

And thus destruction: one cruel blow against the humanity of Julian Assange, and another against the freedom of the press and still another against international law itself.

This should be enough to mobilise all who care about justice, all who despise impunity, all who love human freedom, and rights, who still believe in human rights.

We live in dark and dangerous times, times of great insecurity and uncertainty. Times of hard questions.

Will the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the framework of international law that it generated survive these attacks by powerful Western states? The answer, I believe, is up to us. If we speak up, if we demand justice and rule of law, accountability for perpetrators and redress for victims.

If we insist on the vision promised to all of us by the Universal Declaration 75 years ago, we can turn the tide. We can turn what would have been an elegy into a celebration if we care enough to try.

But even if you still don’t care about the persecution of Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes, even if you still don’t care about the millions of Palestinians subjected to genocide, you should take action anyway.

Because if they can get away with it in Julian’s case.

If they can get away with it in Palestine.

Then they can get away with anything anywhere.

And in a post-human-rights world, and without the promise of the protection of the law against abuses of state power, do not doubt for a moment that you may well be next.

Still, there is hope. British courts are considering one last appeal to protect the rights of Julian Assange and the World Court is hearing the case against Israel on genocide in Palestine. These courts may well save the framework of international law for another day.

But even if they fail, listen carefully. There is a righteous rumble building in the heart of civil society, spreading out across continents, and it is growing louder each and every day. Social elites, unions, legal groups, human rights defenders, peace activists, climate defenders, all of the people in the room listening to this conference and ordinary human beings of every stripe are mobilising across the world in their millions to join the call for justice. Justice for Julian! Justice for Palestine! Justice for all of us! If we join them, they cannot and will not be denied.

I thank you for listening and I call for Julian to be released.