by Lawrence Wittner | Mar 26, 2025 | Global Justice, Peace
Although the nations of the world have pledged to respect a system of international law and global responsibility, the recent behavior of several countries provides a sharp challenge to this arrangement.
For over three years, the Russian government has conducted a brutal military invasion, occupation, and annexation of Ukraine―the largest and most devastating military operation in Europe since World War II. Defying Russia’s international obligations―including a peace treaty it signed with Ukraine, a ruling by the International Court of Justice demanding Russia halt its military operations in Ukraine, the UN Charter, and repeated UN General Assembly condemnations of Russian behavior by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations―the Putin regime has stubbornly persisted with Russia’s imperialist aggression against its smaller, weaker neighbor.
The consequences have been horrific. Russian and Ukrainian military forces are estimated to have suffered a total of roughly a million deaths or injuries. Moreover, the war has taken a severe toll on Ukraine’s civilian population, with some 42,000 civilians killed or injured and over 10 million more fleeing the country or internally displaced. In July 2024, it was estimated that, thanks to the Russian military’s indiscriminate bombing and shelling of civilian infrastructure, Russia had damaged more than 1,600 Ukrainian medical centers and destroyed over 200 hospitals. In the first year-and-a-half of the war, Human Rights Watch reported, the Russian invasion “devastated schools and kindergartens throughout the country,” with “over 3,790 educational facilities . . . damaged or destroyed.” A more recent study by this leading human rights organization noted that, in areas of Ukraine that Russian forces occupy, they have “committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. These include torture and killings of civilians, sexual violence, enforced disappearances, and forcible transfers and unlawful deportations of Ukrainians” to Russia.
For its part, the Israeli government has long been at odds with the United Nations over Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and, particularly, its refusal to end its military occupation of the Palestinian territory it conquered during the 1967 Mideast war. Committed to building a Greater Israel, rightwing Israeli government officials have seized Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and flooded it with about 700,000 heavily-subsidized Israeli settlers. In turn, the UN General Assembly, by an overwhelming vote, has called upon Israel to comply with international law and withdraw its military forces, cease new settlement activity, and evacuate its settlers from the West Bank.
The simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict erupted once again in October 2023, when, in response to an Hamas terrorist attack, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, launched a full-scale military invasion of Gaza with a colossal humanitarian impact. An estimated 46,788 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, and 110,453 have been injured. According to the United Nations, 1.9 million people (90 percent of the population) have been internally displaced thanks to the Israeli bombing campaign, 69 percent of all structures have been destroyed (including 50 percent of hospitals, with the rest just partially functional), and about 1,060 medical workers have been killed. Thanks to the Israeli government’s blockade of food and water supplies, an estimated 91 percent of the population have faced severe levels of hunger.
Although only recently restored to the White House, Donald Trump has already embarked on an ambitious program of scrapping U.S. international commitments and proceeding, instead, with U.S. empire-building. Ordering U.S. sanctions on the International Criminal Court, as well as a U.S. pullout from two key UN agencies (the World Health Organization and the Human Rights Council), he has also chosen a U.S. ambassador to the UN, Representative Elise Stefanik, who has promised to bring the world organization into line with Trump’s “America First” priorities. Moreover, the American president has abruptly terminated nearly all USAID programs, putting millions of people around the world at risk of starvation, disease, and death. In sharp contrast to the severe cuts in domestic social spending that Trump is implementing, he has called for increased military spending, potentially raising the annual U.S. military expenditure from $842 billion to over $1 trillion. This enhanced military power should prove useful, for since returning to office he has championed seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland, taking over Gaza, and annexing Canada as the 51st American state.
In all three cases, the reckless pursuit of narrowly-defined national interests has taken precedence over the shared interests of the world community.
Nor is this an accident, for Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump are caught up in overheated nationalist dreams quite out of touch with global reality. Today, as human survival is threatened by climate catastrophe, a renewed nuclear arms race, disease pandemics, and widespread poverty―crises that cry out for global solutions―these government officials and their rightwing counterparts in other lands are driven by nationalist fantasies. Putin is enamored with Russian imperial glory, Netanyahu is obsessed with visions of Greater Israel, and Trump is intoxicated with America First. And, in their respective fantasies, each of them takes on heroic stature as the Supreme Leader.
Unfortunately, we have seen this phenomenon, along with its catastrophic consequences, many times before.
Fortunately, however, multitudes of people realize that things need not be this way. Indeed, Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump are out of line with the views of many national leaders and social movements that have recognized, and continue to recognize, that the reckless pursuit of narrow national interests is a recipe for disaster. To avoid this disaster, our far-sighted predecessors created the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other international institutions. That is also why these institutions must be strengthened, for without the enforcement of world law, national irresponsibility will thrive.
Indeed, if humanity is to survive in coming decades, it is imperative that reckless competition and conflict among nations give way to cooperation and collective action. War must be replaced by peace, privilege by equality, and the rule of force with the force of law.
Above all, no nation can go it alone, for we are all part of one world and must act accordingly.
by Matt McDonough | Oct 17, 2024 | Peace
This summer, Citizens for Global Solutions lost a valuable member of our National Advisory Council, Randy Kehler, who, at age 80, passed in July.
Randy was a peace activist, dedicated to the eradication of war and to the expansion of justice at both the local and global level. In 1969 Randy refused to go to war. He returned his draft card, thereby committing a felony and blocked entrance to an induction center. For these actions Randy served nearly two years in federal prison.
I first met Randy when my ex-wife became his administrative assistant. Over the ensuing years I got to see his passion and commitment up close. I don’t know if I have ever met a harder worker.
Randy was known as the father of the Freeze Campaign, a national effort to get the two superpowers to agree to freeze their nuclear arsenals at the then current levels. Observers claim that these efforts influenced the Reagan administration to push for arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union.
Randy is perhaps best known as the person who influenced Daniel Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers. The release of that document led directly to a substantial increase in resistance to the Vietnam war. On a number of occasions Mr. Ellsberg said, “No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers.”
Randy was a lifelong tax resistor. He felt that he could not support the U.S. military. He calculated the tax that he owed and contributed that amount to charity. In 1989, this resulted in the Internal Revenue Service seizing his house in Colrain, MA. When he refused a judge’s order to vacate, he once again found himself in jail. He eventually lost his home and he and his wife, Betsy Corner, moved into a house owned by her parents.
Over a cup of coffee, I once mentioned how unjust I thought it was that he was jailed for resisting the draft. He immediately corrected me. His conscience told him that he had to resist the draft, but he broke the law, and the government did what it had to do. He felt no resentment. This was a typical example of Randy’s integrity.
Randy will be greatly missed.
Image Source: Daniel Ellsberg and Randy Kehler seated at a bench, ca. 1971. Daniel Ellsberg Papers (MS 1093). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
by Sovaida Maani Ewing | Aug 30, 2024 | Peace
The intensifying cascade of global crises including intractable wars, massive human rights atrocities, nuclear proliferation, climate change and environmental degradation, the growing inequality between the rich and the poor, recurring bouts of global financial instability, and the increasing risks of pandemics to name but a few, call to mind the warning sounded by Arnold Toynbee, one of the most highly-regarded authorities and foremost experts on international affairs and world history in the 20th century, that humanity would be faced with an existential crisis followed by his recommendation as to what we, the family of nations, should do in response.
Toynbee contended that in the atomic age, humanity would have to choose between political unification and mass suicide. He believed the chief obstacle to political unification was a long-standing destructive habit of the West which he referred to as the habit of “divisive feeling” to which we tended to easily succumb as opposed to reaching for our more recently-adopted habit of “world-mindedness.” The good news he said was that just as new habits could be adopted, old ones could also be modified or abandoned. He stressed that as a general rule, we humans would opt to abandon even our most deeply-rooted habits once it became clear that clinging to them would spell disaster.
He recommended that we replace our outworn habit of divisive feeling with a new habit of common action on a worldwide scale through the creation of some form of limited world-state that would be empowered to act in humanity’s collective interest in certain narrow fields of endeavor. Already, as far back as the 1970’s he believed that the global community needed to engage in common action on a world-wide scale in at least two areas: to control atomic energy through a World Authority and to administer the production and distribution of food through another World Authority. Now, just over fifty years hence, we can confidently add climate change to this list.
Toynbee predicted that global circumstances we unwittingly created through our technological advancements would eventually force us to submit to a limited world government once we realized it was our only hope for salvation in the face of an existential threat. He believed we would wait until the eleventh hour before making a radical shift to establish such a government even though we would do this kicking and screaming all the way.
He was very clear in recognizing our visceral fears about and knee-jerk reaction in opposition to a world government that might become a draconian centralized bureaucracy imposing its will on local governments around the world. He made the following compelling arguments to dispel these fears.
Firstly, a world government should be minimal and should be limited in its sphere of action. World leaders should therefore confine the authority of a world government they established only to that which was strictly necessary for their self-preservation right now.
Secondly, he stressed that in the atomic age, world government should come about voluntarily through the mutual consent and cooperation of world powers rather than through the use of force. He warned that any attempt to impose political unity by force would be ineffective as it would only lead to stiff resistance and a resurgent nationalism as soon as an opportunity to revolt presented itself.
Thirdly, the prerequisite for such an endeavor to succeed lies in the universal adoption of an ideology of world-mindedness that we had never achieved before.
Toynbee believed that the structure of a limited world state would likely be a federal one in which previously independent units would voluntarily come together in a global union. He argued that this was the most likely scenario given that states generally prefer to preserve their identity and retain their autonomy to act locally; they would likely be willing to cede power to a world government only in limited areas in which it served their collective interests to do so.
Lastly, he believed that humanity needed to forge some unity of thought as to what constituted right and wrong. In other words, it was necessary to adopt a shared set of moral values that would serve to harmonize the disparate social and cultural heritages that had evolved independently of each other over the course of human history. Without fundamental agreement on moral issues he argued, it would be difficult to achieve political unification.
Given the rapid disintegration of countries and societies around the world and the accelerating fragmentation and polarization that are rending apart the fabric of our global society, is it not time for us to step up and make the choice to collaborate, cooperate and deepen our integration as a global society? To this end is it not time we take a step in the direction of collective maturity by voluntarily consenting to political unification by forming a limited democratic federal world government? Imagine what we could achieve if we engaged in collective and consultative decision-making in order to meet the pressing needs and the greatest global challenges of our time as opposed to opting for what Toynbee coined the “Great Refusal” that would inevitably result in carnage and devastation on a scale never before seen.
Image source: rawpixel.com
by Lawrence Wittner | Aug 8, 2024 | Peace
Although the current U.S. presidential campaign has focused almost entirely on domestic issues, Americans live on a planet engulfed in horrific wars, an escalating arms race, and repeated threats of nuclear annihilation. Amid this dangerous reality, shouldn’t we give some thought to how to build a more peaceful future?
Back in 1945, toward the end of the most devastating war in history, the world’s badly battered nations, many of them in smoldering ruins, agreed to create the United Nations, with a mandate to “maintain international peace and security.”
It was not only a relevant idea, but one that seemed to have a lot of potential. The new UN General Assembly would provide membership and a voice for the world’s far-flung nations, while the new UN Security Council would assume the responsibility for enforcing peace. Furthermore, the venerable International Court of Justice (better known as the World Court) would issue judgments on disputes among nations. And the International Criminal Court―envisioned at the time but created nearly four decades later―would try individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. It almost seemed as if a chaotic, ungovernable, and bloodthirsty pack of feuding nations had finally evolved into the long-standing dream of “One World.”
But, as things turned out, the celebration was premature.
The good news is that, in some ways, the new arrangement for global governance actually worked. UN action did, at times, prevent or end wars, reduce international conflict, and provide a forum for discussion and action by the world community. Thanks to UN decolonization policies, nearly all colonized peoples emerged from imperial subjugation to form new nations, assisted by international aid for economic and social development. A Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, set vastly-improved human rights standards for people around the world. UN entities swung into action to address new global challenges in connection with public health, poverty, and climate change.
Even so, despite the benefits produced by the United Nations, this pioneering international organization sometimes fell short of expectations, particularly when it came to securing peace. Tragically, much international conflict persisted, bringing with it costly arms races, devastating wars, and massive destruction. To some degree, this persistent conflict reflected ancient hatreds that people proved unable to overcome and that unscrupulous demagogues worked successfully to inflame.
But there were also structural reasons for ongoing international conflict. In a world without effective enforcement of international law, large, powerful nations could continue to lord it over smaller, weaker nations. Thus, the rulers of these large, powerful nations (plus a portion of their citizenry) were often reluctant to surrender this privileged status.
Symptomatically, the five victorious great powers of 1945 (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) insisted that their participation in the United Nations hinged upon their receiving permanent seats in the new UN Security Council, including a veto enabling them to block Security Council actions not to their liking. Over the ensuing decades, they used the veto hundreds of times to stymie UN efforts to maintain international peace and security.
Similarly, the nine nuclear nations (including these five great powers) refused to sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which has been endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations. Behind their resistance to creating a nuclear weapons-free world lies a belief that there is much to lose by giving up the status and power that nuclear weapons afford them.
Of course, from the standpoint of building a peaceful world, this is a very short-sighted position, and the reckless behavior and nuclear arrogance of the powerful have led, at times, to massive opposition by peace and nuclear disarmament movements, as well as by many smaller, more peacefully-inclined nations.
Thanks to this resistance and to a widespread desire for peace, possibilities do exist for overcoming UN paralysis on numerous matters of international security. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to abolish the Security Council veto outright, given the fact that, under the UN Charter, the five permanent members have the power to veto that action, as well. But Article 27(3) of the Charter does provide that nations party to a dispute before the Council must abstain from voting on that issue―a provision that provides a means to circumvent the veto. In addition, 124 UN nations have endorsed a proposal to scrap the veto in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities, while the UN General Assembly has previously used “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to act on peace and security issues when the Security Council has evaded its responsibility to do so.
Global governance could also be improved through other measures. They include increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and securing wider ratification of the founding statute of the International Criminal Court (which has yet to be ratified by Russia, the United States, China, India, and other self-appointed guardians of the world’s future).
It won’t be easy, of course, to replace the law of force with the force of law. Only this May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court took a bold step toward strengthening international norms by announcing that he was seeking arrest warrants for top Israeli officials and Hamas commanders for crimes in and around Gaza. In response, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act,” legislation requiring the U.S. executive to impose sanctions on individuals connected with the ICC.
Despite the nationalist backlash, however, the time has arrived to consider bolstering international institutions that can build a more peaceful world. And the current U.S. presidential campaign provides an appropriate place for raising this issue. After all, Americans, like the people of other lands, have a personal stake in ensuring human survival.
by Donna Park | Jul 12, 2024 | Peace
Although I am now a mother and grandmother, when I was in college in the early 1970s I protested against the Vietnam War. Thankfully, all the protests I joined stayed peaceful. I was lucky I wasn’t at Kent State University, where, on May 4, 1970, four unarmed student protesters were shot and killed and another 9 were wounded by the Ohio National Guard, which had opened fire on them with high-powered rifles.
Even though the demonstrations in which I participated were peaceful, we were often told we were “anti-American” if we were against war. “Love it or leave it,” we were told. My dad was a veteran of World War II. He wasn’t happy with my participation in the protests, and he was especially upset when I wrote a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, publicly stating I was against the war. Indeed, he threatened to pull me out of college.
But my friends and I were not anti-American. We were anti-war…and many of us still are. I love America, but I do not love the war machine that makes some people wealthy while causing widespread death, suffering, and environmental disasters. I am against war, but still insist we care for our veterans who are injured physically and emotionally by war.
The traditional argument for war is that it makes us safe and secure. But it is hard to see how any war in this century has made us either safe or more secure. One could even argue that wars are making us less secure by creating more enemies. In my opinion, we need more Americans standing up and saying we are against war and need to find a better way to make us safe and secure.
So I am proud of the college students who have protested peacefully against the war in Gaza. Just as I was called anti-American in the 1970s, many of them are being called anti-Semitic 50 years later. I believe the vast majority of them are not anti-Semitic but, rather, are anti-war, against the killing of civilians (especially children), and opposed to the destruction of people’s homes and hospitals. In fact, there are many Jewish students who are protesting the war. Some of them are facing harsh criticism from their parents for failing to defend the state of Israel. I applaud these students for holding onto their convictions that war and killing are wrong, even in the face of criticism from home.
I would like to encourage today’s students―and people in general― to promote an alternative way to solve the conflicts among nations that sometimes lead to wars. Within the United States, we avoid violence and wars among our states by relying on judicial action to resolve disputes. The same peaceful settlement of disputes is possible on the international level through the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.
Currently, though, only 74 nations accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ. Legal Alternatives to War (LAW Not War) is a recently-launched global campaign to extend this Court’s jurisdiction. The principal objective of the campaign is to increase the number of States accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ, with the goal of achieving universal acceptance of jurisdiction by 2045, the 100th anniversary of the United Nations. In addition, the campaign works to enhance ICJ jurisdiction by promoting greater use by UN bodies of the option to request Advisory Opinions from the ICJ, such as the current requests for opinions on State responsibility for climate change, and encouraging disputing States to make more frequent use of the option of taking cases to the ICJ by mutual agreement.
Relying on the force of law instead of the law of force is a better way to address conflicts among nations and, in this fashion, keep us all safe and secure.
by Sovaida Maani Ewing | Jul 2, 2024 | Peace
We live in a global family of more than 190 countries. Disputes and squabbles inevitably arise in all families; what matters is how we settle them. Just as immature families might see bullying and violence, at the global level we see countries threatening and waging war, paying dearly in unnecessary death and suffering. By contrast, a mature family resolves its disputes peacefully, often with the help of a dispassionate third party. Providing the world family such a dispassionate dispute settler was the driving purpose for creating the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (colloquially known as the World Court) in the aftermath of the Second World War. Unfortunately, the Court suffers from fundamental flaws that have hindered its ability to preserve peace and avoid violent conflict between countries.
The first flaw is that the World Court does not have compulsory jurisdiction over all disputes arising between countries. When such disputes arise, it can only obtain jurisdiction in one of three ways: if a country chooses to grant it permanent jurisdiction for all disputes (although even this jurisdiction can be limited in time or type of dispute by “reservations” registered by a state); if a country grants it ad hoc jurisdiction over a specific issue; or if the Court is granted jurisdiction under the terms of a treaty agreed between countries. In other words, the World Court does not automatically have jurisdiction over all disputes between states; the disputing countries must have opted to grant it such jurisdiction.
It is obvious that such a system is untenable if we are to have any prayer of maintaining law and order. Consider the uproar that would ensue were we to propose a similar system domestically, in our localities, cities, and countries. None of us would stand for it. Law and order would be impossible to maintain. Would anyone who commits murder opt in to trial before a court? If we are serious about ending war, and about resolving our intra-state disputes amicably, it is high time that we reform our international system of justice and the rules governing it. All countries must agree to renounce war as an instrument of resolving disputes and instead submit themselves to compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court.
We see the urgent need for compulsory jurisdiction in countries’ tortured work-arounds to obtain justice in major breaches of world peace today. One example is the recent case brought by South Africa against Israel about the latter’s treatment of residents of Gaza. In a properly functioning system, South Africa should have been able to challenge potential violations of the Geneva Conventions for the treatment of non-combatants in war in the World Court. Yet, it resorted to bringing this case under the Genocide Convention instead, for two reasons. First, Israel had not granted the Court either permanent or ad hoc jurisdiction over the case. Second, the Geneva Conventions do not confer jurisdiction upon the Court, whereas the Genocide Convention does. This sort of work-around is not unusual: countries resort to suing each other under the Genocide Convention, or the Convention against Torture, or the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, because they each grant the World Court jurisdiction. By contrast, none of the International Humanitarian Law Treaties, like the Hague Conventions or Geneva Conventions, confer mandatory jurisdiction.
But this work-around leaves the Humanitarian Law Treaties a dead letter and reduces the chances for international justice to be done, at the ultimate cost of failing to resolve international disputes. For the Genocide Convention outlaws an extremely serious crime that, appropriately, requires South Africa to meet an extremely high and difficult standard, as demonstrated by the Court’s prior case law. For example, when Croatia took Serbia to the World Court for genocide, the Court in its 2015 decision found that Serbia had engaged in actions that satisfied the physical element of the crime of genocide, but there was insufficient evidence of mental intent to commit genocide—the second element required to prove the crime of genocide. Moreover, it found that while Serbia had engaged in the forced displacement of large numbers of Croats, such actions did not rise to the level of genocide. These actions might well have violated the Geneva Conventions’ rules for treating non-combatants, but the Court did not have jurisdiction to decide. The South Africa / Israel case will face the same hurdle and similarly risks leaving bitterly disputed events unadjudicated by peaceful means.
The second fundamental flaw in the design of the World Court is that, although its decisions are binding under Article 94 of the UN Charter, no effective means have been provided to enforce them. Consequently, nations often disregard the decisions of the Court with impunity. It is crucial that we apply all the ingenuity with can muster to come up with an effective system of enforcement or else resign ourselves to a world in which nations have carte blanche to act in defiance of a rules-based order. In the case of our murderer, even if he could be tried and convicted, it would be nonsensical to expect him to enforce his own sentence.
Recent decisions of the World Court, including its recent ruling demanding that Israel halt its military assault on Rafah and its 2022 ruling directing Russia to immediately suspend its military operations in Ukraine, demonstrate the bankruptcy of our international judicial system. In both cases, defendants have been able to flout the Court’s rulings with impunity due to the absence of an adequate enforcement capability.
The time has come to cure these defects in our international system of justice by amending the UN Charter to grant the World Court compulsory jurisdiction over all disputes between nations and to create a viable mechanism for enforcing its judgments against recalcitrant states.
Image source: International Court of Justice; originally uploaded by Yeu Ninje at en.wikipedia., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
