Standards for the Bush Crime Commission
When the possibility of far-reaching war crimes and crimes against humanity exists, people of conscience have a solemn responsibility to inquire into the nature and scope of these acts and to determine if they do in fact rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity. That is the mission of the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity. This tribunal will, with care and rigor, present evidence and assess whether George W. Bush and his administration have committed crimes against humanity.
- From the Charter of The International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration of the United States
The need for this tribunal, as an instrumentality of world humanity, arises from the historical, moral and political responsibility of people of conscience to sit in judgment of this administration: to inquire and assess whether this administration has committed crimes that do in fact rise to the levels of crimes against humanity as popularly understood and conceived, that is, acts that, by their scale or nature, shock the conscience of humankind.
Crimes against humanity are brutal crimes that are not isolated incidents but that involve large and systematic actions often cloaked with official authority. These include mass murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts perpetrated against a population, conducted in wartime or not. Apartheid and persecution on political, ethnic, and gender grounds have also been considered inhumane acts causing great suffering, and therefore crimes against humanity.
We see the need to proceed from this first-principles definition of crimes against humanity precisely because of the singular nature of some of this administration’s actions and the lack of relevant precedent in existent law. This is especially true for judging categories of crimes other than wars of aggression and torture, where precedent and conventional standards do exist within international law.
We are not pre-determining a minimum quantitative level required to constitute a “mass scale” -- or “large and systematic action” -- within our definition of crimes against humanity. Rather, we are focusing on the overall nature and scope of the impact of these actions and policies. Nor are we making a criterion of explicit intentionality. The jury of conscience will inquire into and assess whether the Bush administration policies involve foreseen or foreseeable risk of catastrophic or genocidal proportions. The question is not whether the Bush administration is intentionally setting out to make millions suffer with its global warming and global health policies, for example. Rather, the question is, whether such suffering is clearly the predictable consequences of policies guided by ideological and political goals?
Such culpability must also distinguish actions specific to the Bush administration from general systemic causes and the actions of previous administrations (even where such actions themselves may rise to the level of crimes against humanity).