MONTREAL — Liberal human rights critic Irwin Cotler, LEFT, has chided Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson for not backing a series of proposed legal “remedies” that would bring Iran and its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to justice.
Cotler said he wants the Canadian government to be among a number of western democracies – including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France and Israel – that would back a “model indictment” of Ahmadinejad that he and a group of “leading lawyers and parliamentarians” are working on.
A draft of the remedies is to be distributed Sept. 22 to all state-signatories to the UN’s High Commission for Human Rights Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, he told reporters recently.
Cotler said he hopes to discuss the issue later this month with Prime Minister Stephen Harper so that he can explain why Ottawa should support the model indictment and remedies, despite Emerson’s reluctance to do so. Cotler attributed Emerson’s stance to incorrect advice from his bureaucrats.
Cotler said he was astonished that the international community appears to be unaware of the legal avenues available that could hold Iran and its president to account, chief among them being a “model indictment,” or application to petition the UN Security Council about what what the Mount Royal MP called Iran’s “state-sanctioned incitement to genocide.”
That main indictment will include other factors, such as Iran’s demonization of Israel and Jews; its violations of UN resolutions on its nuclear weapons ambitions; its “complicity” in crimes against humanity through its financing of terrorist groups; and its “massive” human rights violations domestically against minorities, dissidents and others.
The four other “remedies,” Cotler said, include:
• having the UN Security Council refer Ahmadinejad’s incitement to genocide to the International Criminal Court;
• having countries that have signed the genocide convention make an “interstate complaint” against Iran to the Security Council, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice;
• asking UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon himself to refer the issue to the Security Council because Iran poses a “grave threat to international peace and security”; and
• seeking to have Ahmadinejad, who has expressed a desire to address the United Nations in the near future, put on a “watch list” and refused admittance to the United States.
Although the last proposal is “admittedly a difficult problem, we take the view that a person who incites genocide” should not have the privilege to address the UN, Cotler said.
Cotler noted that this was done in the case of the late Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, himself a former UN secretary general, who in 1987 was put on a watch list and banned from the United States after his involvement with the Nazi regime became known.
“So there is no reason it should not be done” in the case of Ahmadinejad, he said.
On the issue of supporting the proposed indictment and remedies, Cotler said the Conservative government “has not been responsive.”
He said he believes Emerson’s position is due to bad legal advice he is getting from his ministry’s legal division.
“Frankly, I really don’t think they understand the remedies… [and are] misinformed about their validity and efficacy,” Cotler said.
“It is Emerson who is writing to me, but clearly the advice is coming from the Foreign Affairs legal division.
“The government position is unfounded both in fact and in law.”
Alluding to Emerson, Cotler said, “I served as minister of justice and attorney general, and sometimes you get advice that is not well-founded.
“It’s the responsibility of the minister to say: ‘Look, you know this advice is outdated, or not based on fact, or not based on an understanding of the law.’
“In the end, it is Emerson who writes to me, not his legal advisers.”
Cotler praised Harper for comments he has made on terrorism and for supporting Israel, but suggested the message on Iran has yet to really get through.
“I want to operate on good faith, on the hope that the Canadian government, when it understands the nature [of the remedies], will seek to act upon them,” Cotler added.
The type of sanctions that could ultimately be imposed on Ahmadinejad and Iran will be specified in more detail in the model indictment to be distributed next month, Cotler said.
“There are personal, criminal and country sanctions. Our model application will specifically identify the remedies we seek.”
Over the last few months, Cotler has been working to build the case for the model indictment through a series of articles, including in the Jerusalem Post last June, where he described the leadership role France could play in pursuing Ahmadinejad.
Cotler and his colleagues are also trying to get support for their initiative from Democratic and Republican U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.