Last week, a US federal court in Florida ruled that two Salvadoran retired generals resident in the state must pay $54.6 million in compensation to three Salvadorians also now resident in the US. The court decided that the two — former Defense Minister Jose Garcia and former head of the National Guard Carlos Vides — were responsible for torture committed in El Salvador during the country’s vicious civil war in the 1980s by troops then under their command.
But also last week, Washington was busy trying to derail the UN’s proposed anti-torture pact, which would open the way to visits from independent inspectors to any place in the world where prisoners are held, so as to insure that torture is not taking place. The Bush administration is bitterly opposed to such inspections, claiming that they would infringe the United States’ rights in the matter. It used the same claim in its opposition to the International Criminal Court, which finally came into being at the beginning of the month.
There is an inherent contradiction here. On the one hand, the US says that its courts have universal jurisdiction. The Florida case was possible because of two US federal laws which allow anyone who claims to have suffered serious human rights abuses, regardless of nationality, to pursue their persecutors even if the crime took place in a foreign country. Yet, on the other hand, Washington does not want its citizens and its prisons, including the one at the US base at Guantanamo in Cuba, where Al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects are detained (and that is what this is in part all about), to be subject to anyone else’s authority.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the notion that crimes committed in one country can be tried by the courts of another. There can be good reasons: the evidence, the witnesses, the defendant, the plaintiffs, access to sound forensic skills which may be more accessible in one country rather than another and so on. This was so in the case of the two Salvadoran generals. They had no intention of ever going back to face justice in El Salvador, and the plaintiffs were in the US as well. Furthermore, there is the sad truth that legal proceedings are more just in some states than others. It is because of this that an increasing number of countries now try offenses committed outside their territory, particularly cases involving sex and war crimes. As for the Florida trial, justice has now been done. No one can object to that.
But the US cannot give itself the right to try crimes committed outside its jurisdiction by non-US citizens but deny other countries — and certainly not the international community — the same right. That is precisely what it is trying to do in its opposition to the International Criminal Court and the UN’s anti-torture treaty, which it will presumably block when it comes to the vote in the General Assembly. The unavoidable message that comes from this pursuit of double standard is that the US thinks itself superior to the rest of the world. This attitude is not in its interests. It serves only to reinforce antagonism among its enemies while exasperating, even alienating, its friends and allies. That is bad policy, especially at a time when it needs partners in the war against international terrorism.
