Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the West has used international courts and the U.S. justice system to impose its law. They convict those they fight and never try their own criminals. This conception of justice has become the absolute example of their double standards. Yet the weakening of Western domination since Russia’s victory in Syria and even more so since the war in Ukraine is beginning to have an impact on this system.
The end of Western dominance began in 2016
On May 5, 2016, President Vladimir Putin proclaimed the victory of civilization over barbarism, i.e., of Syria and Russia over the jihadists armed and supported by the West. He organized a televised symphony concert in the ruins of Palmyra, the ancient city where Queen Zenobia had made all religions live together in harmony. Symbolically, this concert of the Mariinsky orchestra of St. Petersburg was titled: “Prayer for peace”. Mr. Putin spoke via video conference.
Westerners did not understand what was happening because they were not aware that the jihadists were only puppets of their secret services. In their eyes, and especially since the September 11 attacks, they were their enemies. They did not understand that the damage done by jihadis at home and in the rest of the world was not at all the same. For example, the 9/11 attacks -attributed against all logic to jihadis- killed 2,977 people, while Daesh killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Africans.
The end of the instrumentation of international justice
The trial that began in The Hague in 2011 of an African leader overthrown by the West saw a change in atmosphere after the Palmyra concert. Let’s recall the facts: in 2000, Laurent Gbagbo was elected president of Côte d’Ivoire. The man was the candidate of the United States. He first established an authoritarian regime that favored certain ethnic groups to the detriment of others. Then, he realized that he was only getting richer thanks to his ally and decided to serve his country. Immediately, the United States and France encouraged a rebellion against him, arguing that they had made mistakes. Eventually, after intervention by the United Nations, the French army overthrew President Gbagbo in 2011 and installed President Alassane Ouattara, a personal friend of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The deposed Gbagbo was arrested to be tried by the International Criminal Court for “genocide. However, the Court, seeing the international tide turning, never succeeded in establishing the facts. It acquitted Laurent Gbagbo, in 2019, then on appeal in 2020. Since then, we saw the French presence in Africa inexorably receding.
The International Criminal Court, contrary to the project of its founders, had become an instrument of domination condemning only African nationalists. It has never investigated the crimes of US presidents, British prime ministers, or French presidents. Its bias in the service of imperialism was evident when its prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, falsely claimed to be holding Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in order to discourage Libyans from resisting NATO’s illegal war.
The Beginning of Equal International Justice for All
Similarly, on December 30, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution asking the International Court of Justice, the UN’s internal court, to judge the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This is a spectacular reversal of the majority since this occupation has lasted for… 75 years. There is no doubt that the Court will condemn Israel, forcing the 195 member states of the United Nations to draw the consequences.
The Western states are now trying to set up a new tribunal, since the existing ones are failing them. Its promoters intend to “condemn Vladimir Putin for Russian crimes in Ukraine”. The aim is to make people forget the responsibility of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande who co-signed the Minsk Agreements, without ever having the intention of applying them, and who allowed 20,000 Ukrainians to be murdered. It is also a question of denying that, by virtue of the responsibility to protect, Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened militarily to enforce these Agreements, validated by Security Council Resolution 2202.
Any military operation causes victims. Often unjustly. This is the nature of wars, which differentiates them from police actions. The problem is not to judge those who wage wars, but to prevent the use of war.
International criminal justice should not punish those who have to kill to defend their homeland, but those who artificially create conflicts and those who kill without reason. This is not the same thing at all.
The end of the instrumentation of Western Justice
The United States and the European Union have invented an extra-territoriality of their local laws. In total contradiction with the United Nations Charter, they violate the sovereignty of other States in the name of their national law.
Since 1942, the United States has adopted numerous extraterritorial laws: Trading with the Enemy Act (1942), Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1977), Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (known as Helms-Burton) (1996), Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (known as Amato-Kennedy) (1996), USA PATRIOT Act (2001), Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act (known as Sarbanes-Oxley or SarbOx) (2002), Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FACTA) (2010), CLOUD Act (2018).
This system permanently associates the US Justice and the US secret services. According to the DGSI (French counter-intelligence): “Extraterritoriality translates into a wide variety of laws and legal mechanisms that give the US authorities the ability to subject foreign companies to their standards, but also to capture their know-how, to hinder the development efforts of competitors of US companies, to control or monitor troublesome or coveted foreign companies, and in doing so to generate significant financial revenues” [1].
It discourages foreign companies working in the US or using US dollars anywhere from contravening Washington’s policies. It also legalizes economic warfare, falsely called “sanctions”, even though these provisions violate the UN Charter because they are not approved by the Security Council. It is strong enough to, for example, totally isolate a state and starve its population, as was the case in Iraq with Bill Clinton, and is now the case in Syria with Joe Biden.
Following the American example, the European Union is gradually adopting its own extraterritorial laws. In 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (known as the Luxembourg Court) found the overseas parent company of a Spanish search engine guilty of violating European laws by its subsidiary.
This Western model is also being shattered. The economic war waged by the West against Iran, on the occasion of the Western aggression in Syria by proxy jihadists, and against Russia, on the occasion of Moscow’s implementation of resolution 2202, is too broad to be applied.
Oil tankers no longer hesitate to load Iranian or Russian oil at sea by transshipment. Everyone knows this, but pretends to ignore it. If the Pentagon does not hesitate to sink ships off the coast of Syria, it does not dare to do so off the coast of the European Union after sabotaging the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines. This time, the offenders are no longer “enemies”, but “allies”. These economic wars are only unpopular in the West when Westerners start paying the exorbitant price.