U.S. President Joe Biden

Australian PM First Western Leader Referred to ICC as ‘Accessory to Genocide in Gaza’

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Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks during a press conference on February 20, 2024 in Perth, Australia. (Photo: Matt Jelonek/Getty Images)

More than 100 lawyers endorsed the referral, which points to the military, intelligence, and rhetorical support Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has provided to the Israeli government.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is one of several Western leaders who have provided political and material support of the Israeli government and military over the past five months as their bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 30,000 people, but on Monday he became the first to be referred to the International Criminal Court for being an “accessory to genocide.”

More than 100 lawyers supported the referral under Article 15 of the Rome Statute, arguing that Albanese, a member of the Labor Party, as well as members of his Cabinet and of Parliament, have provided Israel with “rhetorical support in their public statements, their press conferences, their speeches” as well as material assistance, as attorney Sheryn Omeri told ABC‘s “News Breakfast.”

Omeri said the aid Australia has “most particularly” provided since Israel began attacking Gaza has been the export of F-35 fighter jet parts as well as military intelligence through the government’s surveillance work at Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap in Australia’s Northern Territory.

While Albanese has recently called on Israel to respect international law, said Omeri, “it’s been months since the 7th of October, 2023, and between then and now there has been very little in the way of urging restraint on Israel and discouraging what the International Court of Justice found on the 26th of January was a plausible case of genocide.”

The 92-page document compiled by the legal team lays out a number of specific ways Albanese and other Australian officials have acted as an accessory to genocide, including:

  • Freezing $6 million in funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East amid a humanitarian crisis based on unsubstantiated claims by Israel;
  • Providing military aid and approving defence exports to Israel, which could be used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the course of the prima facie commission of genocide and crimes against humanity;
  • Ambiguously deploying an Australian military contingent to the region, where its location and exact role have not been disclosed; and
  • Permitting Australians, either explicitly or implicitly, to travel to Israel to join the IDF and take part in its attacks on Gaza.

“The Rome Statute provides four modes of individual criminal responsibility, two of which are accessorial,” Omeri explained in a statement.

Along with Albanese, U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are among the Western leaders who have repeatedly defended Israel’s actions in Gaza—despite the genocidal intent expressed in numerous public statements by Israeli leaders.

Biden was sued in federal court in January for alleged “complicity in the Israeli government’s unfolding genocide.” That case is still making its way through the U.S. appeals process.

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Zionist Keir Starmer supports Israel's Gaza genocide.
Zionist Keir Starmer supports Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Continue ReadingAustralian PM First Western Leader Referred to ICC as ‘Accessory to Genocide in Gaza’

It Is ‘Strange,’ Says Greta Thunberg, That Biden Is Seen as a Climate Leader

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Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. In August 2018, outside the Swedish parliament building, Greta Thunberg started a school strike for the climate. Her sign reads, “Skolstrejk för klimatet,” meaning, “school strike for climate”. Author Anders Hellberg

“The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist said in a new interview.

JAKE JOHNSON December 28, 2021

In an interview published in The Washington Post Magazine on Monday, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg said it is “strange” that some consider U.S. President Joe Biden a climate leader even as his administration fails to take the ambitious steps necessary to tackle the intensifying planetary crisis.

When asked whether she is “inspired” by Biden or other world leaders, Thunberg pointed out that “the U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure” under the current administration.

“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things.”

“Why is the U.S. doing that?” she asked. “It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.”

“People ask us, ‘What do you want?’ ‘What do you want politicians to do?'” added Thunberg, who helped spark a global, youth-led climate protest movement with a solo strike outside of the Swedish Parliament building in 2018. “And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency.”

“We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand,” she continued. “For example, in Sweden, we ignore—we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative.”

While Biden has touted his decision to bring the U.S. back into the Paris agreement, his pledge to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and other initiatives as a show of leadership in the face of an existential threat to humanity, his administration has also approved oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than former President Donald Trump’s did.

During Biden’s presidency, according to a report released earlier this month by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved an average of 333 oil and gas drilling permits per month this year alone—40% more than it did over the first three years of Trump’s White House tenure.

“When it comes to climate change policy, President Biden is saying the right things. But we need more than just promises,” Alan Zibel, the lead author of the report, said in a statement. “The reality is that in the battle between the oil industry and Biden, the industry is winning. Despite Biden’s campaign commitments to stop drilling on public lands and waters, the industry still has the upper hand. Without aggressive government action, the fossil fuel industry will continue creating enormous amounts of climate-destroying pollution exploiting lands owned by the public.”

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Thunberg’s interview with the Post came at the end of a year that saw planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions quickly rebound to pre-pandemic levels as the U.S. and other major nations continued to burn fossil fuels at an alarming and unsustainable rate.

As Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research noted Tuesday, “2021 saw the second-biggest absolute increase in fossil CO2 emissions ever recorded.”

Despite the failure of world leaders to act with sufficient urgency as the climate crisis fuels devastating extreme weather events across the globe, Thunberg said she is “more hopeful now” than she was when she kicked off her lonely school strike in 2018.

“In one sense, we’re in a much worse place than we were then because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher and the global emissions are still rising at almost record speed. And we have wasted several years of blah, blah, blah,” said Thunberg. “But then, on another note, we have seen what people can do when we actually come together.”

“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things,” she added. “That we can treat a crisis like a crisis.”

Republished from https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/28/it-strange-says-greta-thunberg-biden-seen-climate-leader under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Continue ReadingIt Is ‘Strange,’ Says Greta Thunberg, That Biden Is Seen as a Climate Leader