Sigh. Back to the World.

Per­sonal evol­u­tion on my hol­i­day does not seem to have magic­ally cre­ated a world in which evil does not occur. Why is that?

Anyway, fol­low­ing art­broken’s excel­lent ana­lyses of the vari­ous depress­ing and sur­pris­ing events of the last few days (Habib being released without charge from Guantanamo Bay but Howard still having aphasia when it comes to a cer­tain five-letter word start­ing with S, insight about Howard’s loan to Indone­sia rather than out­right aid and Graner using the Nurem­berg defence regard­ing his actions in Abu Ghraib), I thought I’d do a little research about the phrase Nurem­berg defence. Inter­est­ingly, it seems to be a very Aus­tralian phrase, judging by the number of Aus­tralian pages in the top 40 Google hits. Either that or weasel Aus­tralian gov­ern­ments tend to use the defence a lot.

But I also found another really inter­est­ing thing: an Aus­tralian act­iv­ist rights page that argues that the Nurem­berg decision (that fol­low­ing orders is not a defence when crimes against human­ity are con­cerned) can actu­ally be turned around in court to an act­iv­ist’s advantage:

Another act­iv­ist defence case involved the use of lit­er­at­ure on the Nurem­berg trials, which states that any person who, “with actual know­ledge that a crime against human­ity (or war crime or crime against peace) is being com­mit­ted, and having such know­ledge, was “in a pos­i­tion to shape or influ­ence the policy that brings about ini­ti­ation or ‘con­tinu­ation’ of the crime” to the extent of his ability…will be respons­ible if he could have influ­enced such policy and failed to do so’ ”. Martin J., Limbo v. Little 65 NTR 19 at 45 , quot­ing from Frank Lawrence, “The Nurem­berg Defence”, 40 Hast­ings L. J. (1989).

From this “Nurem­berg defence”, Len Linden claimed that inter­na­tional law places a per­sonal respons­ib­il­ity upon him as an indi­vidual, to do everything pos­sible to pre­vent such crime not only if he knows that such a crime is being com­mit­ted or planned, but also if he sus­pects that such cir­cum­stances exist.

They also talk about a “duty to protest”. I like these people…