The Outgoing US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton is backing a call for the president of Iran to be charged with inciting genocide because of his speeches advocating the destruction of the state of Israel.
Bolton will appear today among a panel of diplomats and lawyers calling for the prosecution of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The panel has been convened by a Jewish umbrella group in the US, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.
Bolton was forced to quit his post after his appointment was blocked by Democrats and several Republicans in the Senate foreign relations committee.
PHOTO: EPA
The call for legal action came as the Iranian president repeated his onslaught against Israel at an international gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran. The president, who has dismissed the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis as a "myth" told up to 70 visiting speakers that the Israeli state would soon be wiped out.
"Thanks to people's wishes and God's will, the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want," he said.
"The Zionist regime will disappear soon, the same way the Soviet Union disappeared," Ahmadinejad said, according to ISNA, a government-financed news agency. Thus, "humanity will achieve freedom."
He was praised by several participants for his "bravery and democratic actions" according to a source who was present.
The event came under fierce attack abroad. British Prime Minister Tony Blair condemned the conference as "shocking beyond belief" and singled out the decision to invite David Duke, a former leading Ku Klux Klan member, as proof of Iran's extremism.
Meeting Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, in Berlin, German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Germany rejected the conference and would "act against it with all the means that we have."
Franco Frattini, the EU's justice commissioner, denounced it as "an affront to the whole democratic world."
Duke praised the event as "a tremendous step forward" and said Ahmadinejad said "sensible things".
Bolton will be joined in today's launch of the legal action against Ahmadinejad by Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, and former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, together with experts from the US, Canada and Israel.
A suit will be lodged with the international court of justice at The Hague, which will decide whether to hear the action.
The panel said the Iranian president was guilty of inciting genocide "by making numerous threats against the United States, calling for the destruction of Israel and instigating discrimination against Christians and Jews."
His words violate a 1948 UN genocide convention, to which Iran is a signatory, they said.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
‘THE RED LINE’: Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised a thorough probe into the attack on the senator, who had announced his presidential bid in March Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a possible candidate in the country’s presidential election next year, was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Bogota on Saturday, authorities said. His conservative Democratic Center party released a statement calling it “an unacceptable act of violence.” The attack took place in a park in the Fontibon neighborhood when armed assailants shot him from behind, said the right-wing Democratic Center, which was the party of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The men are not related. Images circulating on social media showed Uribe Turbay, 39, covered in blood being held by several people. The Santa Fe Foundation
RSS