https://www.thebernician.net/repealed-genocide-act-precludes-indicting-uk-government-officers-to-icc/
Repealed Genocide Act Precludes Indicting UK Government Officers To ICC
Repealed Genocide Act Precludes Indicting UK Government Officers To ICC
Difficult though it may be for many to believe, given the events of COVID-1984, British diplomats played an important role in the debates that led the United Nations in 1948 to adopt the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
However, like the United States, Britain failed to give effect to the Genocide Convention in domestic law until many years after its promulgation, in technical breach of Article V of the Convention, which stipulated that:
“The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or of any of the other acts enumerated in article III.”
It was not until 1969, eighteen years after the Convention came into force in 1951, that Parliament passed “an Act to give effect to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
Moreover, since the purpose of the Act was specifically to give legal effect to the articles set forth in the Convention, it naturally follows that they were of no legal effect under UK law prior to that Act of Parliament being passed.
UN Genocide Convention
The Genocide Act gave effect to Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defined the most serious of all crimes against humanity as:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Furthermore and most importantly, it also implicitly gave effect to Article IV, which stated that:
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
In other words, the Genocide Act 1969 enabled the prosecution of any and all Officers of the Crown in the International Criminal Court [ICC] for crimes of genocide, which remained the case for the next 32 years.
History of the Genocide Bill
According to documents contained in the National Archives, in late October 1968, Gordon Rudd prepared draft notes on the clauses of the Genocide Bill, for circulation to the House of Lords before the second reading debate.
These notes were sent to the Parliamentary Clerk for duplication and circulation by the Home Office. Paragraph 2 of the notes confirmed that the Home Office and Parliament understood that Article IV of the Genocide Convention was implicitly covered by the Genocide Bill:
“During its first session in 1946 the General Assembly of the United Nations approved two resolutions. In the first, it affirmed the principles of the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal. In the second, the Assembly affirmed that genocide was a crime under international law and that those guilty of it, whoever they were and for whatever reason they committed it, were punishable.”
In a later section of the notes, the Home Office expressed its support for extraditing persons who had committed genocide crimes under color of law in their home countries:
“[…] The most likely situation for the commission of genocide, moreover, is one where the genocidal acts are initiated by some controlling authority within a country which will have taken care to legitimate its actions under the domestic law of that country, e.g. by legalising concentration camps, experimental surgery, etc.
In the view of H.M. Government any practical value of the extradition provisions of the Bill would be substantially impaired if extradition could be avoided in these circumstances. While therefore the Genocide Convention does not expressly require such a provision, it has been thought right to provide that offences of genocide should be extraditable even if they were lawful under the law of the country where they were committed at the time of their commission.”
Pinochet Extradition Case
Nevertheless, almost three decades later, when the Spanish Government applied to the High Court to extradite former Chilean military dictator, General Pinochet, Lord Chief Justice Bingham gave the following reasoning in support of the court’s decision to deny the application:
“[…] a former head of state is clearly entitled to immunity in relation to criminal acts performed in the course of exercising public functions.”
On the purported basis that:
“[…] when partial effect was given to the Convention in the United Kingdom by the Genocide Act, 1969, Article IV [of the UNGC] was not incorporated in the statute.”
However, that decision must be considered void ab initio, on the ground that it failed to take into account section 2(3) of the 1969 Act, the intent of which was to give effect to Article IV of the convention:
“2(3) It shall not be an objection to any proceedings against a person under this Act in respect of an offence which, if committed in the United Kingdom, would be punishable as an offence of genocide or as an attempt, conspiracy or incitement to commit such an offence that under the law in force at the time when and in the place where he is alleged to have committed the act of which he is accused or of which he was convicted he could not have been punished for it.”
International Criminal Court Act 2001
Around three years later, on 01/09/2001, Tony Blair’s New Labour government sponsored the repeal of the Genocide Act 1969, by way of the enactment of the International Criminal Court Act 2001.
Whilst the 2001 Act also adopted the definition of genocide in the 1948 Convention, the lack of a provision echoing the intent of Article IV was and remains treacherously conspicuous by its absence.
Ten days after the Act came into force, the 9/11 black-op was perpetrated on an unsuspecting public, which was immediately used as a pretext for wars of aggression in Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Lest we forget, the justification for the UK and its coalition partners invading Iraq was the Blair government’s ‘dodgy dossier’, which erroneously claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction with the capability of destroying Britain.
Had it not been for the 2001 Act implicitly rescinding the UK’s commitment to punish “constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”, Blair and his accomplices might well have been indicted and tried at the ICC for crimes of genocide, when it became evidently apparent that their actions breached Article II (a), (b) and (c) of the Convention.
COVID-1984 Crimes
Fast forward two decades to COVID-1984 and the British People can bear witness to crimes of genocide never witnessed on these shores in any previous age.
Despite an abundance of prima facie evidence that Parliament has legislated for the current rogue regime to be held unaccountable for mass murder by government policy, there is currently no existing domestic legal mechanism by which government officers can be extradited by the International Criminal Court to be tried for their horrific crimes against the British people.
Therefore, the only potential remedy for bringing genocidal Officers of the Crown to justice is to lay a Private Criminal Prosecution for mass murder by government policy in a Common Law Court.
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