The battle of ideas over the legal ownership of Nagorno-Karabakh

Just as no individual country can exist without a legal framework within which its citizens can operate, so the world cannot get by without the concept of international law. And that law has to be based on one fundamental tenet: that of territorial integrity.

Without territorial integrity, chaos, war and bloodshed inevitably ensue. That, sadly, is what we have seen in the South Caucasus for the last quarter century. An international body is needed that can promote that principle, and ultimately introduce sanctions when it is flouted. Countries that invade their neighbours have to know that there is a price to be paid.

Fortunately there is such a body. It is called the United Nations, and it has made its position crystal clear. Its Security Council has passed four resolutions (numbers 822, 853, 874 and 884) and its General Assembly has passed resolution 62/243 saying the same things: Nagorno-Karabakh and the seven surrounding districts currently under Armenian military occupation are Azerbaijani sovereign territory. They also demand that Armenia withdraw its armed forces.

The UN’s word should be enough. However, other bodies (including the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) have said the same.

Armenia’s responsibility for the occupation of Azerbaijani land has been spelt out by The European Court of Human Rights, acknowledging that: “Armenia exercised effective control over Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories.”

To date, not even Armenia recognises the puppet state that it helped to set up by bloody force of arms.

Of course, the Armenian people need their own homeland, which, fortunately, they already have: Armenia. This country has a struggling economy and a shrinking population. All the more reason for it to give up its expansionist ambitions and concentrate on restoring its own fortunes so that it is no longer dependent on international handouts.

Armenians living in multicultural Azerbaijan, by contrast, have prospered, and all future inhabitants of a post-settlement Nagorno-Karabakh have been offered the highest level of autonomy.

The Government of Azerbaijan, the people of Azerbaijan and the hundreds of thousands of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) have been patient for many years. The OSCE Minsk Group has had every chance to bring about a diplomatic solution, and in due course it developed the ‘Madrid Principles’.

This compromise solution would have allowed Azerbaijanis and Armenians to live side by side once again. Azerbaijan accepted it, but sadly Armenia walked away. The status quo leaves Armenia holding onto the land it has occupied; talk of conflict resolution threatens that grip.

The UNHCR has stated that “Azerbaijan hosts one of the largest IDP populations per capita in the world” and over the last few years I have spoken to scores of them. Although they are well cared for, I have yet to hear one of them say that they did not want to return to their ancestral homes and lands.

Attempts to visit, like that of DilgamAsgarov, ShahbazGuliyev and HasanHasanov who returned to tend their family graves, are met with violence. Of these three, one was killed and the others were sentenced to life incarceration.

Despite the harsh treatment many of them received from the invading Armenian forces, I have yet to hear one refugee or IDP declare anything other than a desire to once again live next to their Armenian neighbours in peace – as they had previously done for generations. In multicultural Azerbaijan, Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant communities continue to thrive – in stark contrast to mono-ethnic Armenia.

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Euronews enables both sides to state their case over Nagorno-Karabakh

Press Release: The respected Lyon-based TV channel Euronews has facilitated an exchange of views between Azerbaijani and Armenian representatives in the battle of ideas over the legal ownership of Nagorno-Karabakh. An estimated 350 million households in 155 countries watch the channel.

The brief was to produce a 600-word article and a two-minute video setting out the legal case for legal ownership of Nagorno-Karabakh. The two organisations tasked with making these presentations were The European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS) and the European Friends of Armenia.

Lionel Zetter, Director, TEAS clearly and calmly set out the legal framework within which such disputes are settled. He pointed out that the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) all backed Azerbaijan’s legal claim to the territories.

His counterpart from EUFOA somewhat obscurely referred to Stalin, Lenin and some long-abolished oblasts.

Lionel Zetter’s video message can be seen at http://lawnewsindex.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/22nd-may-law-news.html

London riots need not be a prerequisite for illiberal lawmaking!

August is muggy. The balmy evenings of crimson glow across the horizon turns the ordinary man litigious and the not-old-enough-man into a tactile reactionary frenzy. Riots broke out this August in London, Birmingham and Manchester. 'Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, Asleep in granite Aberdeen, They continue their dreams..'. Yet the youth of London, Brum, Madchester and the smaller cities where rampaging youths steamed along the streets like W. H. Auden's Night Train were dreaming of something else. What were they dreaming of? Politicians, litigators and intelligentsia debated as dawn broke out over the charred horizon now not so crimson, but ashen grey.

As planes landed one by one on ashpalt not too dissimilar in colour to the morning after the riots, Boris, Dave and others returned to the capital having cut short their summer holidays. Before the events in Tottenham I read in The Independent that the Prime Minister had gone back to the same busy cafe somewhere in Tuscany to tip the waitress who had not been tipped the morning before, apparently, for poor service. He returned to London on the first available flight after the riots had been raging for three consecutive nights to chair a meeting of COBRA. Cobra is the extraordinarily dramatic name for the civil contingencies committee which leads responses to a national crisis. On that very same night, heavy police presence ensured that very little happened.

The Coalition government had averted the crisis from turning into something far worse. Law and order was the order of the night again. After three nights of staying in largely due to a cold, my friend Charlotte decided to go to the pub again. As the police raided properties in search of rioters in the usual locations, they slept in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and in my very own Cardiff dreaming of something no doubt very different from the near two and half thousand arrested elsewhere. What do teenagers dream of?

Much has been attributed to teenage gangs operating in deprived neighbourhoods. The youth vilified all over England. Yet so many of the rioters were not teenagers. CCTV pictures which in itself seems to have been accepted as a necessary evil have revealed faces of men and women, largely black and white, but a few belonging other ethnicities too were within an age range of 12 to 35. What is it that they all have in common? The obvious answer seems to be criminal intent. Proving intent to commit a crime isn't difficult after poking one's right hand through the broken glass of a convenience store to steal a packet of £1 Haribo sweets. They are all criminals. Lump them into the same jail cell and throw away are key. A 'broken society' has descended upon us as David Cameron had declared. To mend this broken society new laws on rioting are required in addition to those allowing councils the power to evict rioting families. The parents of the children rioting are brandished with the same brush. Theresa May, the Home Secretary alluded to possible new curfew powers for the police. The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had defended orange jumpsuits, Guantanamo style that could be worn by prosecuted rioters and made to clean up the streets themselves, and mend broken windows.

Broken glass can only be replaced not mended. The shards laying on the pavement and inside of shops get brushed up into dustpans by the broom-army and put away. The rioters are like the very same shards of broken glass. They have been broken. Perhaps they broke themselves. What started out as an 'old-skool' protest by the gangsta-designer label wearing black men in Tottenham soon became diluted into a general protest mele with the word protest losing any significance soon after dusk. New anti-terror laws and stop, and search powers brought in by the previous New Labour administration of Tony Blair, and never really repealed by Gordon Brown thereafter had often been misused by the authorities. The ethnic minorities have faced the brunt of it alongside the odd Holocaust surviving pensioner and Labour Party activist within conference settings. A young black man is more likely to be stopped and searched.

The criminal intent of the rioters in whatever capacity is unjustifiable in a civilised society. Clapham Junction is indefensible. Yet, by labelling each and every one of the rioters a criminal, and ushering in illiberal anti-riot laws ignores the social conditions that led to the first night of rioting in Tottenham.

Glasgow, Edinburgh and granite Aberdeen slumbers. Long ago the Night Mail Train stopped crossing the border whistling all the way, shaking gently but a jug in the bedroom. No jugs of water in Clapham bedrooms, only vials of Tamazepam and white-brown-black powder stains on the bedroom floor. This is England

© TTR

Let's never bring back the death penalty!

Treason remains the only legally viable excuse to hang. Considering that the Crown Prosecution Service is unlikely to bring on a case for treason against any individual, we shall be spared the medieval repeat of dark retribution. The arguments for hanging someone on the ground of treason is perhaps twice as heinous to those who would like rapists, murderers and shoplifters persecuted by hanging from the noose - 'let this be a lesson to the odious scumbags!'. Yet the principal argument against hanging is that it does not work as a deterrent to would be perpetrator of such crimes as treason. There might be greater powers at play. The terrorist bomber might be driven to one's destructive state of mind by following alternative philosophies. On a lesser scale, the rapist, murderer (whether predetermined or accidental) and shoplifter had never been deterred by even the mere prison term, fixed penalty and in their day, the ASBO.

The nature of punishment is that it always takes place after the criminal act had taken place. E. M Forster rued over how christening, wedding and funeral always took place after the physical acts of birth, coitus and death, striking too early or too late to really add any realistic meaning to the events. Perhaps, Forster, writing in the years before the Great War was taken in by a spirit where the celebratory nature of such events for those associated with the individual had not been properly taken into account. I for one would add the greatly emancipating event of graduation to the group of irrelevant events. Getting a 'first' in Philosophy is itself an achievement and needs no further accolade. Yet the day is served up on a photographic frame as a permanent reminder on the proud living room of middle class parents up and down the country. The reader might argue whether the gravity of getting a first, being born, getting married or death as acts could ever be compared to committing a crime. Yet these are all events where the act of working hard, physical communion on the part of the parents to bring about new life, falling in love (one shall ignore all the other reasons for getting married) and death are never really premeditated under reasonable circumstances. Coitus might well be initiated over a period to conceive, a first might be studied for, death could be the result of a lifetime of poor lifestyle choices making the body prone to incurable disease or mere exhaustion, and a crime can be planned, yet the punishment does not really dawn on the individual before they are committing the act.

The principal difference between committing a crime and the other acts is that the criminal punishment is never celebrated by the one being punished. Not in the normal criminal circle that is and for the purposes of this discussion we shall refrain from referencing the masochist. The other events, christening, wedding, funeral and graduation might well be. However, christenings and weddings are affairs of hope. It is hoped that those involved would have a long, joyous and righteous life under the gaze of a watching creator. The criminal is expected to rot in jail or be hanged. We need never look back upon their lives as positive events even if they had been christened, graduated and married. Death, whether initiated immediately through the direct play of state legal machinery or a line on page 5 of the Independent is as close to a ceremony.

Miscarriages of justice is never really a consideration when the jury or judge is sentencing. The scope of the legal framework is that it can only examine evidence and the sentence is delivered based on available evidence. This process is exactly the same when the criminal is contemplating the act of crime. The ability to get away with it might play a part but any future punishment after having been caught is not in mind as the crime is being committed.

Either way, the death penalty is long buried under the ashes of Derek Bentley, Guildford Four, Renault Five and Birmingham Six. The various arguments have lost any semblance of meaning in every quarter but the staunch right wing Daily Mail reader's breakfast table.


© TTR

Justice is not retribution but rather an opportunity for realisation and rehabilitation

A cross section of my Facebook friends' lists contain a bunch of ardent football lovers. For the purpose of this argument, nameless, they shall be sectioned to one group - staunchly patriotic, right-wing and largely working class. It suits my purpose to contain the soccer and rugby-football lovers within the very same group. Although the experience of attending a soccer match is so vastly different to the passing by hand game that as a passionate soccer fan myself, I'd rather be in a rugby game any day just for the sheer friendliness. The infield brutality of a hard nut-crushing tackle inspires those in the stands with a rather gentler spirit. The level of passion feels less visceral. This need not be translated as a complete turn down of courtesy tickets to see West Bromwich Albion play any other premiership team should any come my way but, a mere admission that if I had no interest in either sport, I'd still rather see Blues playing the Scarlets rather than see lower league soccer in any blisteringly cold winter evening. The winter breeze in these parts is so cold.

Yesterday, my football friends, proudly working class, engaged in a tame exercise of highlighting how preposterous the recent claim by Milli Dowler's killer against the Prison Service had been. Apparently, he had been physically abused in prison by other inmates. The ground of their disconcert lay in wanting the individual to be punished in all forms by natural and poetic means for what they did to Milli. The latter mean, an elaboration of whatever punishment self righteous inmates might dictate upon newcomers on the grounds that they are deserving of further punishment. The problem with this argument is that the deliverer of poetic justice are themselves accused of other crimes and perhaps as violent, and heinous as the Dowler killer. My football friends have no sympathy for rapists, murderers, dole-scroungers, shoplifters, pushers and pimps but seem to be utterly sympathetic to poetic punishments channeled through them.

When the tabloid and for that matter the broadsheet print media take on the part of judge, jury and executioner, a climate of fear descends upon whoever is at the receiving end of such cases, whether justified or not. The Dowler family will never be united with Milli again, at least not in this life if one believes in reincarnation or predestined life there after. Yet retribution does not stop with the family who have emotive grounds for demanding harsher punishment. The general populace have no such justification other than thinking of their own children, nephews or nieces and take on the role of a moral adjudicator.

The prison system, in principle remains an opportunity for the individual to realise what had gone on. Any reality over prison overcrowding, drug-infestation, habitual gang rape over passing the soap games need not cloud our judgments as possible additional punishment for the odious few who are locked up. A prison sentence is a banishment from society for the duration of the sentence. No further qualification or addition required. Period.




© TTR