America: above the law

The International Criminal Court (ICC), the court that investigates genocides and contraventions of international treaties relating to war, and organisation much respected by the majority of the Western World has been shunned by the USA once again, continuing the trend of the US administration keeping it at arm’s length since its inception in 2002.

The reason the US doesn’t want such a court to exist is obvious, it doesn’t want its own actions to be scrutinized under the spotlight. Indeed, the US has stated that it will bring sanctions against the ICC if the court pursues any US citizen for suspected illegal criminal acts. As Warren Bolton said, in quite dramatic language, the ICC is “dead to America”.

The rampant abuse by US troops and contract soldiers something that the US government wants covered up, there are many news sources that detail the effects of war, not just the immediate deaths and effects of weaponry, but also the long-lasting damage caused by weapons with heavy metals, causing cancers and damage to natural resources. This shows that the US government’s attitude to human rights stands in deficit to its hunger for the profits which war and the subsequent massive rebuilding projects bring its way. Surely this make even more sense when we consider the US is on the brink of withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council on the back of a poorly formed treaty encompassing disparate matters from human rights, climate change and rights pertaining to the sexual freedom of the LGBT community. I can’t help think that this treaty was deliberately hamstrung, loading into it a mismatch of ideals which in all probability will cause some countries not to want to ratify it.

Then when I consider that the US is loosening its humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, I am forced to look back at the history of the USA, and it strikes me that a country founded on destroying other people’s human rights with its genocide against the native American Indians, Trans Atlantic Slavery and the various discriminatory institutions that have sprung from that; that such a nation can never understand what it is to respect human rights, no matter how it paints itself on the world stage, that murky undercurrent and stench of iniquity will always find a way to break through.

America has not learned from its past, and is bound to keep on making the same mistakes again in the present and in the future. This abandoning of human rights principles and international justice should ring alarm bells all over the world. Who polices the police? With America appointing themselves as the guardians of the free world, what will we do as it seems all too apparent that their moral compass is off, and they refuse to have anyone to be answerable to? How does one conquer this power of self-righteousness, arrogance and conceit? Man might choose to form an alliance of nations that imposes sanctions on the USA and seeks to create new trade links with other countries in order to avoid buying from the USA. However, our God has his own way, to make the proud humbled, and as The Proverb’s state “Pride goes before destruction, and a proud spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:4).

The Guardian Article on ICC and the USA
BBC News Story on the UN Human Rights Council and the USA

Posted in Faith, I Hate, News, Politics.

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