LAWS to punish human-rights abusers are growing teeth, says The Economist.
The reason for the newspaper's elation is the arrest of a former Syrian policeman, Anwar Raslan,57, alleged to have murdered at least 58 people and tortured more than 4,000, by German judicial authorities applying the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Not so fast, we tell the newspaper. Universal jurisdiction will only be universal if it applies, without fear or favour, to human-rights abusers of any nationality no matter where the crimes are committed. It also means that the crimes can be tried in any country with a reputable legal system.
Do not get us wrong. We are not against an Arab, an Asian or an African to be so charged and sentenced. If Raslan is found guilty as he is charged, he must be put behind bars for life.
So must Benjamin Netanyahu, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Dick Cheney and John Bolton be so charged and sentenced. Germany must not pick and choose.
Neither should the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, under whose encouragement the German judicial authorities are said to have applied the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Other countries, too, mustn't be similarly selective. Fear or favour has no place in laws that are just.
Sadly, fear and favour blunt the bite of many human rights laws. Consider the case of Bush and Blair. If there was an invented war, the Iraq war must be it.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and yet, the transatlantic pair conspired to come up with some. Both wanted a regime change in Iraq and went on a "preventive war" marketing campaign to justify the Iraq war.
Never mind if the so-called "preventive war" was a violation of the United Nations (UN) Charter. There was no self-defence to speak of, as the Charter demands. Nor any form of aggression displayed by Iraq.
From the start, the duplicitous duo never had the intention to seek the authorisation of the UN Security Council. They just wanted the war. In the end, tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives in a war invented by the United States and Britain.
Civilians continue to lose their lives today as a result of the mess that Bush and Blair have left behind. If this isn't prima facie responsibility of the British and US governments for crimes against humanity, what is? Yet there is no German judicial authority to charge, let alone sentence, the recalcitrant Bush and Blair.
They continue to strut the Earth knowing fully well that fear and favour will save them. Malaysia has been an exception of sorts. A tribunal set up in 2007 by former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission Tribunal, found Bush and Blair guilty of war crimes in Iraq in a 2011 judgment.
But it was just a paper victory for the concept of the principle of universal jurisdiction, arguably first expounded in 1980 in Filártiga v. Peña-Irala.
Being not part of the Malaysian criminal court system nor one constituted by an international agreement, the tribunal's judgment remains unenforceable. Neither the International Criminal Court nor the UN, with which the judgment of the tribunal was lodged, has been courageous enough to at least set in motion an investigation into Bush and Blair.
Perhaps human rights laws are growing teeth to bite only a defined few. Fear and favour often do that.