The Responsibility to Prevent Petition
GPN Editorial Blog
GPN calls upon the leaders of the world to act on the recommendations of the Cotler Report, without further delay. The world is now facing a plateau effect, similar to what happened in the Darfur campaign in 2004 when protest and publicity failed to get governments to do their job: to use whatever was necessary, including force, to stop the Janjaweed. Some analysts of genocide studies and efforts at prevention believe that in the Darfur campaign we have protestors who make believe they are doing something when in fact they are going through the motions to stop the genocide. We call this genocide shadowboxing. Real history prevails and the killing continues. The mission of those concerned with genocide prevention is to make governments do their job. We need now to bring Ahmadinejad and his accomplices to justice for their very real vitriolic incitement to genocide, their suppression of human rights, to stop their support for terror in other countries, and to prevent, preempt or foil Iran's march toward making nuclear weapons. The clock is ticking.
Introduction to Professor Cotler's Report
GPN is posting a revision of Professor Irwin Cotler’s 200-page report, “The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition.” This report updates the earlier Responsibility to Prevent Petition which GPN posted in its first webmag in February 2010 (Issue 1).
Cotler, a former Minister of Justice in the Canadian government, stated that Iran is in violation of four distinct threats: the nuclear, state-sanctioned genocidal incitement, the support for genocidal terror, and the massive repression of human rights. The world has been taking action only against the nuclear threat, while ignoring the Iranian regime’s other offenses. In a Jerusalem press conference held in July, Cotler called for more “threat specific” sanctions to be placed against Iran. The keynote speakers at the July press conference were Cotler, former Chief justice Meir Shamgar of the Israel High Court of Justice, Professor Amnon Rubinstein, former Minister of Justice, and Bassam Eid, the Palestinian Human Rights Activist.
“We want to sound the alarm and wake up the international community,” Cotler said. “The Western belief is that if we turn a blind eye, we will be better off,” said former Israel High Court of Justice president Meir Shamgar, who also spoke at the conference. “This is exactly what occurred in the 30s.”
The report, endorsed by 100 scholars, former world leaders, parliamentarians and human rights activists, contains witness testimony and documentary evidence of each of the four threats. Among the signators are:
- Per Ahlmark, former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden
- Professor Fouad Ajami, Johns Hopkins University
- Jose Maria Aznar, former Prime Minister of Spain
- Prof Yehuda Bauer, Hebrew University
- Sen. Romeo Dallaire, former Senator Canada and Force Commander for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda
- Prof. Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University
- Kamal Hossain, former Minister of Justice and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh and United Nations Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan
- Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Cairo
- Anthony Julius, University of London
- Irshad Manji, New York University
- Salih Mahmoud Osman, Sudanese Member of Parliament and winner of the Sakharov Prize in human rights
- Prof. Walter Reich, George Washington University
- Prof. Sheri Rosenberg, Cardozo School of Law
- Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, Interdisciplinary Center in Herziliya and former Minister of Education in Israel
- Soli Sorabjee, former Attorney General of India
- Prof. Gregory Stanton, former President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars
- Prof. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Laureate
- Sein Win, Prime Minister of the Burmese government in exile
The full list of signators with details of their identities can be found in the Executive Summary.
The report proposes an 18-point road map for action. It calls upon the international community to heed their obligation and stop such violations before they begin. Incitement to genocide is not only considered an early warning sign of potential genocide, but also is a prosecutable crime in itself.
In this issue of GPN, we also post a GPN timeline for incitement to genocide by Ahmadinejad, his predecessors, and his associates. In upcoming issues, we will post the timelines for Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, its suppression of human rights, and genocidal terror. All predate Ahmadinejad.
“Iran has emerged as a clear and present danger to international peace and security, to the Middle East and regional stability, and increasingly and alarmingly so, to the rights of its own people,” Cotler said. “Unless we have… a comprehensive set of remedies and sanctions, for the fourfold critical mass of threats, we will not begin to properly hold up Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account.”
“There had been a critical mass of precursors to genocide in Ahmadinejad’s Iran, constituting thereby not only the prelude to a preventable tragedy, but a crime in and of itself under international law,” said Cotler. “Simply put, Iran’s leaders have already committed a crime of incitement to genocide.”
Cotler said violations could be prevented by limiting foreign visits from Iranian leaders and by freezing their assets. If governments terminate their contract with companies doing business with Iran, these leaders will stop getting money in their pocket, he said, which would help to stop the repression of the Iranian population. However, Cotler warned that in order to succeed, countries like the US need to stop sending “mixed and disturbing messages to the corporate world regarding doing business in Iran.” According to the report, the US government gave $107 billion in contracts to firms trading with Iran while sanctions were in place. “The United Nations of Security Council Resolution has been honored more in the breach then in the observance,” Cotler said. “So in the matter of sanctions, not only is it crucial that they be adopted, but that they be enforced and done multilaterally.”
Human rights violations including deaths and serious injuries in Iran attracted world attention for a short while after the disputed 2009 elections, but the outrage over violence to Iranian citizens has died down and new violences are an everyday event and are ignored.
Cotler noted that Iran has the highest number of juvenile executions in the world. From 2005 until 2008, the country executed 26 offenders, making up 80 percent of total amount in the world.
Click here for the full reportClick here for the Executive Summary
