No country should be allowed to enter the UN unless the government is democratically elected.

Before Mark closes this thread off I just thought I’d mention that you are in very good company. From memory George Monbiot’s book The Age of Consent suggests that voting in the UN ought to be weighted according to the number of people democratically represented. Under his system China would be weighted for one whereas Australia would be weighted for 20 million.

He would have had a suggestion as to how the weighting should be decided, but I don’t have time to look it up.

I could probably have got you a good price for it in ‘03 -cant promise much now.

And I’ve already shown you what has been found

There you go again. There was no WMD bollocks. You are lying.

True; thats because There is an Article of the UN charter which makes *all* recourse to force between nations illegal; subject only to
a. self-defence (hence the WMD bollocks) or
b. UN Security Council authorisation (which didnt happen).

A dramatic example of the failure to hold several hypotheses in parallel.

“As for Kosovo - that was a NATO action, with a dubious status under international law, owing to the lack of a security council resolution on it…”

Lefty its the above statement that is dubious. How can Nato be less legitimate then the UN? The governments involved are virtually all consensual.

It wasn’t long ago that the security council comprised two of the greatest mass-murdering, mass-enslaving states that the world had yet seen.

As for “superceding” - treaties become domestic law when ratified by parliament - so its not an issue of supercession. And, moreover, if that state breaches it, there are dispute resolution mechanisms in most treaties they become subject to. You can decide not to play ball if you’re big enough, but you cant then stand around badgering others (eg, say, Iran) about not fulfilling theirs , can you.

As for Kosovo - that was a NATO action, with a dubious status under international law, owing to the lack of a security council resolution on it (Russian veto, they like Serbia). That highlights the problems of decision making, sure, but not their status as law when made.

The UN ended up working closley with NATO though, eg, the UN handles all the war crimes trials.

There wasn’t any Un resultion which specifically declared the act illegal either.

So Iraq in a sense did fall within the same ambit as the Sebian attack. There was no resolution preventing that either, was there?

Interantional conventions don’t supercede domestic law. Never will, never can. Not here, not the US not the UK.

There is nothing illegal with breaking a convention.

What WMD bollocks. There was no WMD bollocks.

That’s double, triple and quadruple and more dipping though and not strictly necessary. For example Clinton didn’t use a UN security council resolution for his war did he?

What you are talking about is Bush family scrupulousness. Quite apart from being ruthless illegals acting criminally outside the law they are actually pendantic sticklers for all the laws their are. This is a criticism of Bush The Younger especially. The exact opposite of what people are being told.

And the left drop this legalism when they want to. Bush was criticised for not breaking Posse Comitatus immediately when Katrina came.

But dont confuse it with the facts of the matter. The WMD ruse was critical because the US knew it was illegal, absent “self-defence” justifications.

In any case, treaties are voluntary, accession is a decision made by elected parliaments. What your saying actually has more in common with say, me deciding not to honour my contracts, voluntarily made, just because Im pwoerful enough that noone can arrest me.

True of the US; but not true of Australia.

You are a little bit off focus here Mark. Kemp’s claim is that there is international law AND that the invasion was illegal under. Now that’s the absurd part of it. But its not so much a wrong opinion as a straight lie.

” One wonders why Bush, Howard and Blair went to such great lengths to demonstrate their claim that the invasion of Iraq was legal, if there is in fact no such thing as international law.”

No good Mark. That’s a misrepresentation of what happenend. They weren’t demonstrating anything. They were piling on legal backing to the nth degree. They were following all legal channels necessary or not.

No invasion ever went ahead with so much legal overkill. In other words they obeyed all laws real and or imagined. For them to do this and for leftists to still lie about it is pretty disgraceful. You shouldn’t sway in their direction with this ambiguous wording.

You are then saying that we cannot change our law without authority from the treaty obligations. This is incorrect as I see it.

We took a vote in parliament that authorized use of force. That immediately takes precedence over the treaty.

First off Australia. The parliament can sign such a treaty as the Vienna one and at a later stage simply run a law through Parliament that is totally at odds with that Treaty and still not be braking the law.

Parliament makes our laws.

Any of us could have mounted a legal argument and taken it to the High Court and would have lost even in the unlikely event we would have got a hearing in the first place.

The US in even clearer. The Congress and the president will always decide on what is law with the supreme court watching over it it if need be.

The declaration of war is a domestic legal matter.

The US does not allow any foreign body to make laws in the US. THat’s what they fought a bloody war over against the British over.

As I said, there are conventions but there is no binding law unless properly inscribed within the contextual framework of the internal legal structure.

Otherwise the policy of pre-emption would be unlawful under US law. It is not. Neither is it here.

Sorry JC, but you’ve been confused by recent Neo-Con propaganda. Treaty law normally must be ratified by a domestic parliament - but once they are, they are binding. All member states have in fact agreed to UN jurisdiction over matters relating to peace and order; voluntarily. Some placed reservations, as they are entitled to wrt any treaty, but to date the US has only attmepted to exclude Cental american disputes in that way (when they were funding the contras in Nicaragua).

As say “attempt”, as the non-use of force is a peremptory norm, and you’re breaking customary international law even with a treaty reservation in place, if you attack without a self-defence justificaiton.

In other words: There’s a difference between breaking the law; and the law not exisiting. The US was breaking it in Gulf War 2.