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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (198993)	8/24/2006 1:46:52 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Not being subject to China and Cuba and Syria voting on American policies, is not saying we are not subject to standards. The US being subject to such a decision would not advance solid international standards but would rather give such countries a club to use against the US when they don't like our policies. It wouldn't be about justice, or human rights, or respect for law. The countries judging the US would themselves continue with their considerably worse human rights record. For serious war crimes with solid evidence your more likely to get justice through something like the UCMJ. For trumped up charges, or cases where there is insufficient evidence some international tribunal might possibly be more likely to convict but conviction doesn't equal justice, esp, in such cases. not to mention the laws and legal system of the countries that we invade and occupy. In a true occupation you are always immune to the legal system of the country occupied. If you are the occupying power than that country no longer has a government, or it has a government that no longer functions as a government, either being underground or in exile. The occupying power is the ruling power in an occupied country. They could decide to impose the countries previous laws on their soldiers but I can't think of a single case where that has happened. In Iraq we are not longer really an occupying power, so in theory our soldiers could be subject to the local law. But no power that is putting its soldiers on the line, in an ongoing conflict, to prop up the local government is likely to routinely subject its soldiers to the local government's prosecution, esp. if the local government is still somewhat unstable, and doesn't have a solid track record of protecting the rights of the accused. In this specific case there is an agreement between the government and the US specifying that the US government has jurisdiction over American soldiers. Such agreements are not unusual.