from Sunday Herald, 01 February 2009
The UK government’s plan to maintain nuclear weapons on the Clyde will this week be condemned as cruel, criminal and barbaric by a world-leading legal expert.
In a powerful tour de force at a major conference on Trident on Tuesday, the former vice-president of the International Court of Justice, Judge Christopher Weeramantry, will back attempts by the Scottish government to remove nuclear warheads from Scottish soil.
He will also argue that non-violent resistance to nuclear weapons can be justified in international law. Trying to protect humanity from the ultimate catastrophe of a nuclear war is every citizen’s right, he will say.
Judge Weeramantry presided at the international court at the Hague when it issued a historic opinion on the legal status of nuclear weapons in 1996. Before that he was a Justice at the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka.
On Tuesday he will be in Edinburgh to deliver one of the main addresses at a conference on international law and Trident organised by the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy and others. An advance copy of his presentation has been seen by the Sunday Herald.
Over 16 pages it amounts to a devastating and eloquent indictment of the possession, development and threatened use of nuclear weapons. States like the UK which found their defence on such weapons are guilty of a callous brutality far worse than ancient tyrants like Genghis Khan, Weeramantry argues (see below).
“The self-appointed nuclear policemen of the world need to realise how their actions totally destroy their credibility,” he says. “It is elementary that there cannot be one law for some and another law for others.”
The right of nations like Scotland to challenge the deployment of weapons which threaten their people, their environment and future generations is undeniable, Weeramantry insists. “These are all areas which must necessarily be concerns of the parliament of Scotland,” he says.
Scotland’s fishing grounds, its food chain and its cultural heritage are all at risk, he maintains. “Scotland will be a target for retaliation if the Trident missile should ever be used. The people of Scotland will be the sufferers.”
Weeramantry recounts a series of horrific deformities claimed to be suffered by people on the Marshall Islands and elsewhere where nuclear bombs have been exploded. “The people of Scotland have every right to protest against the possibility of this experience being repeated in Scotland,” he states.
“Anti nuclear civil resistance is the right of every citizen of this planet. For the nuclear threat, attacking as it does every core concept of human rights, calls for urgent and universal action for its prevention.”
The British government may also be in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by planning to replace the Trident missile system, according to another international legal expert. Any “bolstering” of nuclear weapons would undermine the treaty’s disarmament provisions, says a paper to this week’s conference from Mohammed Bedjaoui, a former president of the International Court of Justice.
Similar views are likely to be voiced by British legal experts, including Phillipe Sands QC from the Matrix chambers in London. He authored a legal opinion for Greenpeace in 2006 which concluded that replacing Trident was likely to be against the law.
“As a country where nuclear warheads are stored and nuclear-armed submarines are deployed, Scotland has many responsibilities,” said Dr Rebecca Johnson, one of the organisers of Tuesday’s event.
“We hope that this conference will explore the legal situation regarding the deployment, use and renewal of Trident and look at what international law requires governments and citizens to do about nuclear weapons.”
Last April the Scottish government set up a Trident Working Group to investigate ways of getting rid of nuclear weapons using devolved powers. The group is due to report to the minister for parliamentary business, Bruce Crawford, in the spring.
The group is due to hold discussions with two of the lawyers at this week’s conference, which will also be attended by a ministerial special adviser. In June last year the Scottish Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion calling on the UK government not to go ahead with the planned replacement of Trident.
What Judge Christopher Weeramantry will tell this week’s Trident conference
“When Genghis Khan was engaged on his blood-drenched career of world conquest, he is said to have proclaimed a policy that any cities which defied him would be razed to the ground with not a hut standing and not a whimper of life remaining. Not even a dog or mouse would survive, leave alone the humans who would be exterminated.
“The powerful nations, even in the early 20th century liked to describe themselves in international documents as ‘civilised nations’. Yet the successors of these nations are prepared, even in the 21st century, to manufacture, stockpile and undertake research on weapons which can in fact outdo such primitive brutality.
“Indeed they claim the right to use a weapon that can exterminate all life in the target city down to the last microbe. Its use would automatically pollute the environment, not only of the victim state, but of all surrounding neutral states and cause damage that lasts for over twenty thousand years.
“Despots like Genghis Khan would dearly have loved to enjoy this power, the brutality of which goes far beyond anything they could envisage. One of the strange contradictions of our contemporary world is that there are nation states pledged to the maintenance of civilised values that at the same time cherish and preserve this power despite the fact that it reeks so heavily of barbarism at its worst.
“Despots of the past were limited in their devastation to the city or state which defied them. The modern nuclear state causes inevitable damage to the entire global environment and not merely to the opposing state. In addition it harms future generations, but these circumstances do not seem to deter the nuclear states from asserting their claim to use the weapon.
“There is another important feature which we tend to ignore in these discussions. When primitive tyrants ruthlessly built up their empires they were not trampling on international law, for it did not exist. They were not violating a charter of the nations, for that concept was unknown. They were not ignoring human rights, for such a notion still lay in the womb of time.
“All these have now been established through the sacrifice of millions of lives. To override them all today involves greater culpability than could have been attributed to the most merciless despots of the past.”
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