From North of the Border

By Bob Olsen, Toronto

On June 7, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War ( www.nowar.ca ) adopted my suggestion that we start an Indict Bush campaign here in Canada.

Here is the text of a handbill that we will print next week, to be handed out at local events.

Indict: to charge with a criminal offense.

George Bush should be charged with war crimes under Canada's "Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act".

"This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada's ineffectual laws in line
with the rules of the new International Criminal Court. While never
tested, it lays out sweeping categories under which a foreign leader
like Bush could face arrest." Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, Nov 16,
2004.

We need to tell Ottawa, and the world, that laws apply to rich and poor
alike and that we want Bush indicted as a war criminal.

Walkom wrote that Canada's Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act
"....holds that anyone who commits a war crime, even outside Canada,
may be prosecuted by our courts. What is a war crime? According to the
statute, it is any conduct defined as such by "customary international
law" or by conventions that Canada has adopted."

"War crimes also specifically include any breach of the 1949 Geneva
Conventions, such as torture, degradation, wilfully depriving prisoners
of war of their rights "to a fair and regular trial," launching attacks
"in the knowledge that such attacks will cause incidental loss of life
or injury to civilians" and deportation of persons from an area under
occupation."

"After 1945, Allied tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo, in an astonishing
precedent, ruled that states no longer had the unfettered right to
invade other countries and that leaders who started such conflicts
could be tried for waging illegal war."

The "United Nations outlawed all aggressive wars except those
authorized by its Security Council."

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The War Resisters Support Campaign http://www.resisters.ca/ is also
part of our work.