> --I'd think a better ability is to discern how the US manipulates
> concerns about human rights to rationalise a war of choice and
> aggression. I don't see how one can view today's headlines about
> alleged "mass graves" discovered by the US military in Iraq...
>
> steve
==============
It's one, amongst many, of the tragic contradictions of international human rights law that it can be cynically used as a cover for interventions which occur for other reasons. Then again the onus is on those who think human beings will behave with greater decency and respect for one another in a world of complex technologies where/when a discourse of rights and duties is wholly absent.
[snip]
Approved by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the Genocide Convention came into force in 1951, and was guardedly ratified by the United States in 1988. Ratifying states are required to adopt legislation making genocide a criminal offence, even for heads of state. Trials for genocide must be held either in the country where the genocide occurred or at an international penal tribunal, if such a court is ever established. These and accompanying provisions at first sound anodyne and easily doable. But in fact the Genocide Convention represents an improbable attempt to modify several basic principles that have dominated international law since the Treaty of Westphalia. It aims, above all, to curb the sovereign right of national governments to decide, without being second-guessed by foreigners, what domestic threats they face and what responses, on their own territory, are available to meet such real or imaginary threats.
Before the Convention was ratified, the Western powers had intervened episodically to protect co-religionists in the Ottoman Empire, China and elsewhere. But international law did not expressly recognise any remedy against atrocities committed by a government against its own citizens within its borders. Because there is no unambiguous right without a reliable remedy, it follows that, under traditional international law, citizens had no right not to be brutally murdered by their governments within their state's sovereign frontiers. Every government was master in its own house, and mass murder was an internal affair. As Power points out, this was a morally repulsive and even 'maddening' conception, although it accurately reflected political realities.
[snip]
full at:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n22/holm01_.html