To those who dedicate ourselves to the study or teaching of international law, it is easy for us to understand that states – not their governments, because they pass and those remain – are their subjects par excellence. They must submit in their relationships, guided by the rules of reciprocity and mutual respect, the fulfillment of good faith of what they agree, cooperation, the reserve of their own or internal affairs and the obligation of each, therefore, of not invading the sovereign sphere of the other, intervening it. That is the most basic, as a predicate.
However, it is now forgotten as yesterday that, after the second great war of the twentieth century, once the holocaust that some dismembered deny for their biliary enclosures against Israel, no state or its government can be abroquer after the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention when you agree and arbitrarily disrespectful human rights. That makes the cartels and who protect them. Or to make war or not to another state, even in legitimate defense, without consideration of their non -belligerent victims.
As of 1945, enshrined as the norm of international public order of the protection and universal guarantee of human rights, international law, therefore, recognizes the individual as a subject of his order, to protect him or to punish him, in parity to each State. For this reason, the issue of human rights and those who threaten them were ceased to be internal or exclusive issues.
Such a matter, above all, victims, like Venezuelans. His perpetrators are pointed out and persecuted today as criminals against humanity. For what was certainly my great and consistent friend Karel Vasak, Czech-French victim of the communist dictatorship and father of fourth generation human rights. After hearing me expose about human rights at the Unesco headquarters, in Paris, in the presentation of a book tribute to its meritorious career, congratulating me left me petrified: – “Excellent your exhibition. Do not forget that you will only know about human rights when you lose them.”
The states and their governments do not have human rights and do not believe them either. They weigh on them, yes, obligations for recognition and protection. And when they forget or omit them causing violations they have to face sanctions by each state and/or the set of states. And its rulers as individuals, narco autocrats or utilities, including those who officiate as Democrats under their splint, at the same time, must respond from their acts to international criminal justice. There they do not tell their voters’ votes.
That some governments do not know these imperative norms or reinterpret them for convenience, it only says of the expected behavior in every victimizer. That the prosecutor before the International Criminal Court – that is not the Sancta Santorum of Jerusalem – be a colluded or that has betrayed his oath in the case of Venezuela, only shows that he makes crisis the will of the Court to enforce the international law to which it serves! But this does not repeal the basic principle of all civilization: everyone who causes damage must repair it.
If the same states and their rulers are unable to fulfill among themselves the minimum international order that they agreed and tied, returning their mutual relations to the scope of the tribal and primitive, must be cured of cynicisms. If the institutions have broken or have postponed for ideological and even criminal interests, the return for their fueros of the law of the talion, the eye for an eye, tooth tooth, acquires full legitimacy.
Let’s look at the examples. The Ukrainians were victims of an act of aggression in 2022. Nothing did the UN Security Council. Even more, the Zelensky government, by informing him to ask for his assistance, rather than realizing what happened he gave him the previous letter that he directed in 2014 to make him see that Russia was annexed to Crimea, his territory, by force. And nothing happened.
In case of little, the genocide in Rwanda occurred, who presided over the Security Council, Colin Keatin, from New Zealand, in the same 2014 asks for forgiveness for not having recognized what was happening and not having done something to stop the killing of more than one million people. Only, the UN Secretary, António Guterres, confesses that “we are on the edge of the abyss and move forward in the wrong direction”, while occupying and worries that the states discuss, meanwhile, about gender equality. Thus, are the victims who seek to defend themselves by other means?
The only undisputed, as the maximum of the experience, is that transnational and structured organized crime, that of financial terrorism or terrorism to dry or occupied drug trafficking and/or/or dirty money washing, or the one dedicated to global human and children traffic, reissues to Roman lanistas – traffickers or merchants of human flesh – in the middle of the 21st century. They do not comply with rules, except to execute everyone who is going through them on the way. They are covered behind the networks and the digital ecosystem, they emphasize in territories that have submitted and returned niches of impunity, where there is no state or this is failed, or simulates it as a power franchise to artificially add their attributes: sovereignty, independence.
The posters and organizations of terrorism exist, or to doubt it. But they do not exist as subjects of law. They have to be contained through international police laws and their decentralized action, if they worked. Given its lack or omission, it is precisely what is opening free space for tribal regression, for the reissue of the “Mayan war”: its goal was to capture as many enemies as possible, not kill them. “Elite status captives generally became subjects of human sacrifices, while commoners were sentenced to slavery,” the chronicles say.
