Opening the Other Eye: Charles Taylor and Selective Criminal Accountability

Reblogged from :

This post is a corrected and modified version of my earlier text with the same title; this version is published in AJE today, 1 May 2012

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            From all that we know Charles Taylor deserves to be held criminally accountable for his role in the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during the period 1998-2002. Taylor was then President of Liberia…

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Brilliant article about U.S. hubris. Chalmers Johnson would be happy to know that someone is keeping up the good fight. Thank you Prof. Falk. [excerpt] "What is dramatically ironic about the whole picture is that the United States is the number one advocate of international criminal justice for others, while holding itself self-righteously aloof from accountability on the main ground that the process might be tainted by politicized motivations! The U.S. Congress has even threatened that it would use military force to rescue any Americans that were somehow called to account by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and has signed agreements with over 100 governments not to hand over American citizens to the ICC. And yet it is American criminal lawyers and human rights NGOs that have been most loudly applauding the outcome in the Taylor case, and without even a whimper of acknowledgement that there may be some issues relating to double standards."