{UAH} You may have missed it, but Spain has 'issued an arrest warrant' for Benjamin Netanyahu

INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

You may have missed it, but Spain has 'issued an arrest warrant' for Benjamin Netanyahu

'We consider it to be a provocation. We are working with the Spanish authorities to get it cancelled'

SPANISH ARREST WARRANT FOR NETANYAHU, KAYIBANDA MUSEVENI NEXT?

 

Spain has a precedent for Attempting to have foreign heads of state extradited to its jurisdiction to stand trial for gross abuses of human rights. It did this with the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and is now trying it with Benyamin Netanyahu, the Zionist butcher of Israel.

It is also to the Spanish Courts that a group of Ugandan lawyers, supported by a team of London based International lawyers, are now filing a case for the arrest and extradition of Rwandan mass murderer Kayibanda Museveni to stand trial for among other crimes, the massacre of over 200 Bakonjo civilians on 26 and 27 November 2016, including at least 25 children.

The doctrine of state immunity by a sitting head of state no longer represents current law as impunity has finally been ended and laid to rest many years ago, in fact on 25 November 1998. This is true in both Customary International Law and in treaty law as I discuss briefly below.

1. Customary International Law.

The customary International law position, which applies to Uganda, is now contained in a landmark case decided in the UK House of Lords (Supreme Court) in 1998. In the case, EX PARTE PINOCHET, the court decided that the principle of state immunity no longer applied in customary International law, with regard to certain offences that offend the human conscience. These include Genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, had been arrested while on a hospital visit to the UK on a warrant by Spain to have him extradited to stand trial for the murder and torture of thousands of people during his murderous tyranny and brutal misrule which lasted between 1973 and 1990.

Pinochet argued in his defence against extradition that, as a former head of state, he enjoyed immunity from prosecution for any offences he may have committed in his capacity as Head of State.

The court rejected Pinochet's argument, ruling that murdering innocent civilians does not form any part of the duty of a head of state, and that offences of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are so grotesque, egregious and offensive to the human conscience that they cannot form any part of a duty of a head of state for which he can claim immunity.

The court decided that any competent court in the world has jurisdiction to put the offender on trial. In effect, the case threw out the principle of immunity for a head of state, and secondly, it established the principle of universality of jurisdiction, namely, a human rights abuser, mass murderer, and war criminal like Benjamin Netanyahu or kayibanda Museveni can be tried by any competent court in the world, even though their crimes did not take place within the jurisdictions of those courts, or in this case, Spain.

2. INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT.

The establishment of the International Criminal Court - ICC- by the Treaty of Rome, removed state immunity from heads of state who violate human rights. Former Liberian president Charles Taylor is for eg serving a long prison sentence in a UK jail for human rights abuses he perpetrated in Liberia. Former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo was also tried and convicted by the ICC, although he has been released on appeal. The recently deposed Sudanese dictator Omar Bashir has a warrant of arrest pending against him, issued by the ICC for the genocide he committed in Darfur.There is believed to be a secret agreement between the UN, the ICC and the British government for Kayibanda Museveni to serve his life sentence in a UK jail, probably the Belmarsh High Security Prison in Woolwich, after he is tried and convicted of the crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for which he has numerous charges pending before the ICC.

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