Undermining the law becomes a problem

by Guy Mettan,* Geneva

(16 May 2023) What to do when the law is bent and is no longer the “law”? For the last 15 years or so, there has been a strong tendency to bend the law – international law, commercial law, and the higher law of nation states – in favour of interests that no longer have anything to do with justice and fairness.

Like a fish, law rots from the head, from the top. There are countless examples for that.

Take the case of the International Criminal Court. In just a few months of investigation, it has indicted Vladimir Putin for crimes against humanity. Fair enough. But how credible is it, given that its chairman is Polish, and its prosecutor is British, and both are outspoken Russophobes? The fact that former prosecutor Fathi Bensouda was punished by Washington for wanting to investigate American war crimes in Afghanistan? That the current prosecutor has filed documented charges against Colombian paramilitaries and far-right governments? Finally, the ANC, the majority party in the South African Parliament, demanded that South Africa withdraw from this court, which was so lacking in impartiality, before it backed down. Are these the harbingers of a judicial debacle?

The European Court of Human Rights has been affected by similar aberrations. The once respected court has come under the influence of the Soros networks, which have managed to appoint some 20 judges close to the Hungarian American billionaire’s NGOs, as revealed by the in-depth research of the French weekly “Valeurs actuelles”; it has never been denied. In the meantime, it has fallen for “wokist” and neoliberal values. For three years, petitions, parliamentary resolutions and the setting up of a group of experts to “safeguard the independence and impartiality of judges” have been passed – without any result. That’s how effective the lobbying has been.

The US Supreme Court is now totally politicised. The French Constitutional Court, composed of members of the ruling forces who are totally dedicated to their respective interests, has become nothing more than a registration chamber for government decisions, as their recent ruling on the pension law showed. It has even taken the liberty of prohibiting the holding of a referendum!

However, the independence of judges and the impartiality of courts are not the only problem. The extraterritoriality of certain rights, especially American law, and the privilege of universal jurisdiction that some courts have usurped are also problematic. They circumvent the rights and thus national freedoms insofar as they impose their rules without any democratic decision.

Where is the law when an obscure North Carolina judge sues Julian Assange and imprisons him in a British maximum-security prison in defiance of English law? When American courts take the liberty of fining European companies billions for “misusing” the dollar, when Congress imposes arbitrary sanctions and seizes the property of companies or individuals that have not been approved by the United Nations, the sole authority on international law –where is the law? Where is the respect for private property guaranteed in the constitutions of democratic countries, including Switzerland?

And if every Western court has the jurisdiction to try a war criminal, that means that every African, Chinese or Russian court has the jurisdiction over the war crimes committed by the West in Iraq, Serbia and elsewhere in the world, since these crimes are not subject to a statute of limitations. If the law of a particular state is superior to the entire international law, then what is the purpose of international law?

To justify the superiority of Western law over UN international law and national rights, the West and the US always invoke the “rules-based order”. But what rules are these? What do they refer to? Who established them, according to what democratic procedures? All this is never explained in detail. It is very similar to the laws of the “Ancien Régime”,¹ which one had to know, but which were kept secret because they were not published in any official gazette...Our countries, which pride themselves on being constitutional states and democracies that respect citizens’ freedoms, are therefore proving, on closer inspection, to be very prone to disregarding their own laws as soon as a crisis occurs: the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent war on terrorism, the economic crises of 2008 and 2023 and the bailout of the banks, the Covid pandemic and the abrogation of freedoms through the introduction of a green pass, the war in Ukraine... Actually, they should be the first to set a good example and prevent the law of the strongest from having the last word.

* Guy Mettan (1956) is a political scientist, freelance journalist, and book author. He began his journalistic career in 1980 at the “Tribune de Genève” and was its director and editor-in-chief from 1992 to 1998. From 1997 to 2020, he was director of the “Club Suisse de la Presse” in Geneva. Guy Mettan has been a member of the Geneva Cantonal Parliament for 20 years.

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)

1 The “Ancien Régime” in France is characterised by an absolute monarchy with divine rights and social inequality based on birth privileges for the nobility and the important role of the clergy. There is no written constitution, and the king is the embodiment of the state.