UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : OHCHR Special Procedures - Press Conference: Special Rapporteur on Countering Terrorism

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us at this press briefing today.

Today's briefing will be by Professor Ben Sol, the Special Rapporteur on a promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.

He'll brief today on the topic of counterterrorism abusers challenging the international order, including the definition of terrorism, the use of force under the protects of counterterrorism and narco terrorism.

We'll begin with opening remarks from Special Rapporteur and then move on to questions.

[Other language spoken]

Good afternoon, everybody.

I'm pleased to be with you.

I think we we have entered a new dark age of abuses in the name of countering terrorism.

Recently, it's excused naked aggression and renewed imperialism against Iran and Venezuela, reigning death and violating the right to life and making the world less safe.

Overnight, the Security Council in New York passed a resolution which failed to condemn Israeli and US aggression contrary to international law and instead condemned the excessive and unlawful response only of Iran.

I think this is part of a broader moral and legal failure from the Security Council we've seen in addressing crises in recent times.

At the end of last year in Gaza, the Security Council endorsed a peace plan that does not guarantee Palestinian self determination and independence.

It does not accord with the findings of the International Court of Justice and it's advisory opinion not so long ago.

It says absolutely nothing about justice for atrocities or the obligation on Israel to pay compensation for unlawful war damage in Gaza.

Why should Arab states?

Why should the United States, why should any state, pay for the damage in Gaza, which Israel has illegally caused?

Now this impunity for lawbreakers has contagiously stoked more law breaking elsewhere.

It's emboldened other states to believe that there are no cost or consequences to violating the most fundamental rules of international law, like the prohibition on the use of force, the prohibition on international crimes and other serious violations of international law.

In Lebanon, again partly on the basis of the arguments about countering terrorism and Hezbollah, Israel has launched a massive operation which is displaced now over 800,000 people killed, more than killed large numbers of people and this against the background of over according to the United Nations, over 10,000 violations of the ceasefire agreement of 2024 by Israel, not by Hezbollah.

The the peace plan for for Gaza, endorsed by the Security Council, of course, is an entirely unjust peace plan because it it it also fails to recognise representative Palestinian governance through the transitional government.

The the Board of Peace is controlled by the United States, although it has the the rubber stamp of the Security Council.

This is not at all a multilateral operation under collective control, but is something which places Gaza's future and Palestine's future entirely in the hands of the US President in concert with Israel.

The the requirement that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and any future settlement be conditional on Israel, on negotiations with Israel, and therefore Israel's agreement is like putting the the fox in charge of the hen house.

I mean, we would never have accepted this in Yugoslavia, for example.

We never would have said the Serb government should dictate the conditions on which Kosovars are to be protected from ethnic cleansing.

And yet this is exactly the position the Security Council has endorsed in, in, in, in Gaza.

Nothing in the the peace plan and the Security Council resolution addresses the root causes of the Gaza conflict, occupation, settlements, borders, refugees, compensation for for loss of property over 60 years or more.

So I think unfortunately, the one organ we look to for hope in the United Nations system, Security Council, which has binding powers to compel governments to to do things, is a chronically failing to do its job because it's, like many governments, increasingly fearful of the United States in South Asia.

I've been concerned in recent times of about the eruption of conflict between India and Pakistan over terrorism concerns and again between Afghanistan and Pakistan, most recently again over terrorism.

The International Court of Justice has been very clear about the conditions for the exercise of force in self defence under international law and the kind of escalating violence amongst these three states does not meet the requirements of international law for self defence.

Like in other places, refugees have also borne the brunt of of these conflicts.

Pakistan has expelled huge numbers of Afghan refugees over the last year or or two.

I'd like to say something briefly about a very troubling trend in the Americas over the past six months or so.

That is the declaration of a new phoney war on narco terrorism in Latin America.

the United States has extrajudicially killed 151 civilians on the high seas in 45 illegal military strikes alleging they were carrying drugs towards the United States.

This is utterly illegal under international law.

It's not national self defence.

Drug smugglers are not mounting an armed attack on the United States.

It's not an armed conflict, again because cartels are not organised armed groups engaged in military hostilities with the United States, so there's no authority to target them as combatants.

It's not authorised under the law of the sea, which requires a law enforcement based interception of drug trafficking vessels, not their extermination through military means.

Unfortunately, almost no country in the world has said anything about those strikes.

You can count on one hand the number of countries who have said anything.

And it goes to the the heart of the the collapse in the current international legal order that too many states are afraid of the United States.

They're afraid of of tariffs or retaliation or even their leaders being abducted contrary to international law, as in as in Venezuela.

But the more the international community remains silent, the more the United Nations organs are unable to address these problems, the more it emboldens bullies like the United States and and Israel.

And I encourage all governments to collectively push back against this kind of lawlessness.

We know that the United States does back down.

It's not omnipotent and all powerful.

It back down on tariffs in relation to to China.

It it has backed down when Europe finally got some spine and pushed back over over Greenland.

So I don't think we should be fatalistic and and think that the US can do whatever it likes in international law.

Now, this problem of of narco terrorism, of course, was a pretext for the invasion of Venezuela, which was not really about drugs at all.

In Ecuador, the government is waging, it says, an armed conflict against 22 drug cartels.

Ecuador's own constitutional court has said repeatedly there is no armed conflict.

International humanitarian law does not apply.

There is no right to shoot, to kill members of drug cartels on site.

And in the last week, the United States military has announced it is now cooperating with the Ecuadorian authorities in military operations in Syria.

For years my mandate has been warning about the failure of states to resolve the situation of at one point 40,000 arbitrarily detained people in relation to the Daesh conflict held in Kurdish camps in North East Syria.

With the Syrian government's offensive and the, the, the, the, the transfer of authority to the central government, we've had a situation where almost 7000 Daesh alleged Daesh and alleged Daesh prisoners.

Of course we don't know if they are Daesh because in six or seven years there has been no legal process whatsoever to determine who they are.

Were put on buses and in a matter of weeks shipped across the border to Iraq with no legal process, no assessment of whether they would be at risk of unfair trial or torture or the death penalty, contrary to international law in Iraq.

And this has been on top of this incredibly destabilising because significant numbers have simply left camps disappeared and we don't know what the security consequences of that will will be in too many countries.

Counter terrorism laws also continue to punish civil society and human rights defenders within borders and across borders.

And even in states that are normally relatively rights respecting, like the United Kingdom, we've seen governments ban pro Palestine protest organisations criminalising that people legitimately exercising their freedom of expression to criticise Israel or their own governments casting them as terrorists In circumstances where eventually even EU KS own courts have said these were disproportionate restrictions by banning Palestine action and that these are protected freedoms under international and European human rights law.

The international norms and institutions that protect human rights are under relentless attack, including attacks on the International Criminal Court, attacks on some of my own colleagues in special procedures, and at the same time, the things that prevent terrorism from spreading, like supporting humanitarian relief, development aid, peacemaking, human rights have been drastically defunded to buy more weapons.

I call on all states to unite in rejecting impunity, to raise the price of law breaking, not remain silent or to appease superpowers, but to stand up to them together and stand for justice and victims.

These are hard times for human rights, when even the pretence of respect for human human rights has been stripped away by some countries who believe only in their own power and their own national interests.

But for me, human rights are in the national interests of every country.

Respect for human rights makes us all safer.

And the appropriate way to deal with these kinds of disputes over terrorism or weapons of mass destruction or migration or or drugs is to resort to the many peaceful dispute settlement methods we have under international law which are not being utilised or, or when they are utilised.

The result is bad faith actors for sometimes killing negotiators, as in the case of Israel's attacks on a Hamas negotiate negotiating team last year, or or duplicitously engaging in negotiations one day and then resorting to bombing the next.

Thank you and I'll happily take some questions.

Thank you, Professor Sal.

So we will now open the floor for questions.

Please state your name and organisation before asking.

[Other language spoken]

Just with regards to the the current war in in the Middle East, how do you read what each of the United States, Israel and Iran has done?

It's one of the one of the justifications given for the war was Iran's alleged role in in sponsoring terrorism across the region.

So, yeah, I'd like to ask what do you make of what, what each of those three countries has, has, has done in, in this war?

[Other language spoken]

So under international law, launching pre emptive war to prevent another country acquiring a nuclear weapon or or some other dangerous weapon is not lawful.

We have very clear rules about self defence.

There must be an armed attack occurring or an armed attack must be imminent.

[Other language spoken]

There's some elasticity in that concept, of course, but it does not extend to bombing a country when they don't even have the weapon yet that you say you fear, let alone having made any decision to use it against any other country.

You know, imminent means you've intercepted an order to the state's military to fire a weapon at some point in the in the very near future.

We were a long way from that in, in, in Iran and when these kinds of pre emptive attacks have happened previously.

And and remember, I mean, there is some history on this.

In 1981, Israel attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor said to be, you know, potentially a threat for nuclear weapons.

It was only under construction.

I mean, it, it wasn't, it was light years away from having any kind of military nuclear capability.

Many states condemned that at the at the time.

In 2007, the the Israelis attacked a Syrian nuclear facility, again on the same pretext.

But these kind of arguments have never been accepted by the international community in the last 80 years of international legal practise.

I think that's what's it's very disturbing that at the moment you're seeing states kind of all over the map sympathising with these attacks, not calling it as illegal or calling it as illegal, but then saying we support the US anyway.

It's kind of illegal, but you know, maybe morally acceptable or or justifiable.

You know, international law has been against this for a very long time because of the acute risks it poses.

You know, we live in a world where many states have adversaries, many states would like to absolutely disarm, you know, any capability of their adversaries to attack them at some point in the future.

And if you accept a world in which unilateral subjective decisions by one or a few states are acceptable to launch military attacks on foreign governments, that's an incredibly slippery slope.

It's also one which we we can't control, you know, as in as in the present war.

Nobody knows how this is going to end.

And when we look at the last series of US-led interventions, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, these were all disasters.

Huge numbers of people were killed in those conflict.

That the consequence were consequences were utterly unexpected, at least by those who launched the wars, not by anybody who had studied what usually happens in these kinds of wars.

And so it doesn't actually, you know, on a net basis improve global security.

It's a recipe for further destabilisation, possible insurgency, fragmentation politically within Iran in the region, destabilisation of neighbours through refugee flows.

We're seeing the attacks on the Middle East.

To go to the other part of your question, the attacks on neutral Gulf states, which themselves are clearly illegal under international law.

They're not mounting aggression against Iran.

They they can't be attacked in response, only if U.S.

military bases in those countries were being used as part of the aggression against Iran and those states failed to stop that use by telling the Americans they can't use those bases in that way.

Only then would that be a lawful part of Iran self defence.

And then of course it must be limited to military objectives, not attacking civilian targets etcetera.

So the fact that a country might be sponsoring terrorism, this is another part of the the justification is also not a reason unless through those terrorists, Iran were ordering Hezbollah to mount an armed attack on Israel and the US.

And and that's not factually what has has has been has been the case.

Just to go to one, one final part is, you know, this, this argument that this is kind of good for Iranians because they get to be freed from oppression, etcetera.

You know, of course, everybody understands the, the, the moral argument that maybe, you know, sometimes there could be a, a justified case of military intervention to stop, you know, they're a Rwandan genocide, for example, or ethnic cleansing in, in Kosovo.

That's not the reason for this war.

This isn't a humanitarian intervention.

This is an intervention to stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon, which it has wanted in significant part because Israel.

Has nuclear weapons and given the history of offensive attacks on Iran itself, including by Israel, of course it feels insecure and has been trying to build a capability to deter those other states from attacking it.

That's not to excuse Iran's own terrible behaviour over many, many years, including destabilising a significant number of states, but it doesn't make what the other side does lawful under international law either.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much, Mr So for doing this.

[Other language spoken]

Could you give us your view on the American and Israeli policy of regime change in the context of counterterrorism?

[Other language spoken]

Under international law, you know, the fundamental organising principle of world order since 1945 is the right of self determination.

That means it's the right of the Venezuelan people or the Japanese people or the Australian people to decide for themselves who is their leader, what kind of political system they want.

There's an explicit prohibition in international law on intervention in the political affairs of another state, the use of force against another state, and the violation of a foreign state's sovereignty.

Those are fundamental rules of of world order and the only circumstance in which regime could conceivably be lawful is if that were necessary in exercising lawful self defence against an armed attack by that other country and that other country.

The the only way you could stop a continuing attack by that other country is if you overthrew its government.

You know, as happened in the Second World War, you only stop Nazism in in Germany by overthrowing the Nazi government.

I mean that that is an acceptable exercise of, of self defence.

But you know, these kinds of wars of choice, you don't like a, a foreign leader, they've got policies you don't like you, you want to ****** back resources like oil, you, you say belong to you when actually legally they don't.

None of that, including to counter terrorism, alleged terrorism is a, is a justification under international law.

Now, there are other tools, as I mentioned, under international law for dealing with those threats, including through dispute settlement, diplomacy, sanctions, mechanisms like the Security Council, if they function as they as they should, judicial settlement through international courts.

There are lots of tools.

They're not perfect.

They don't always work.

But the solution is not if you don't like how things are going to launch an aggressive war against a foreign state to prosecute your foreign policy.

Thank you, professor.

Excuse me, Emma online from writers.

Hi, good afternoon.

So you spoke about the Security Council's failures in acting or not acting on the Middle East.

But I'm wondering if you think Geneva also has some responsibility given it was designed as the city of peace, and who is to blame for the UN not being able to address these problems?

Is it the member states?

Is it the leadership of the UN or is it not the UNS fault because it's undergoing massive defunding and job cuts?

[Other language spoken]

And I know the US president has claimed he's the peacemaker where the the UN is failing to do its job and, and make peace.

But I think we have to remember, I mean, it was the United States which exercised its veto power six times in the last 2 1/2 years to oppose calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The UN was trying to do its job.

It was the US That was because it was shielding Israel, obstructing the the, the functioning of the collective security body in the United Nations.

You know, if the US were serious about empowering the UN to do its job, it would offer to give up its veto power and in the hope that the other permanent members of the Security Council would likewise give up their veto power.

The existence of that veto is a fundamental block on the ability of the Security Council through a majority vote to do what is necessary for international peace and security.

Everybody's frustrated with this.

You know, even the US is frustrated with the UNS inability.

But it's part of the problem and it's not offering to, to reform the Security Council in a way which would which would make a difference.

Now, that's not to say the UN is perfect.

And, and you know, more might, may well more could have been done perhaps by the UN in in certain areas, but ultimately the UN is just a collection of states.

The UN otherwise is an administrative body which discharges the collective will of member States.

And if member states hamstring the United Nations, impose all of these obstructions on its ability to get things done, that's the fault of the member state.

They're the they're the only ones who can change it.

They're the ones who have to fund the system so that it can work properly.

And in a a climate where again, the United States has been the single greatest point of obstruction on the UN budget, trying to bend the United Nations will to what the US wants.

Yes, it's the biggest contributor of the United Nations budget.

Yes, it has a legitimate interest in ensuring the organisation is effective, efficient, is able to achieve it's it's it's high purposes.

But at the same time, it can't hold it to ransom.

It can't hold the United Nations hostage to somehow make it an appendage of what the US president of the day may or may not want it want it to do.

So it is for the member states to push back against those sources of obstruction.

It's not just the United States, by the way.

I mean, all of the permanent members share a, a, a very significant responsibility for the lack of effective functioning of the Security Council.

[Other language spoken]

Are there any other questions?

[Other language spoken]

Just on Venezuela, given the the paralysis in the international system that you've just outlined, what would you, what would you like to see the international community do now given that we are where we are?

[Other language spoken]

I think the key is for all states to protest when there are these violations of international law and not appease.

And so the fact that essentially the United States is dictating the economic and political policy or trying to, of Venezuela through its capture of the, the, the oil revenues and, and and so on.

States should stand up and say that's not an acceptable way for international relations to be run, that you can't have a a kind of US hegemony in the Americas where somehow because they think it's their backyard, they get to tell other countries how they should conduct themselves.

I mean, yes, international relations is a tough business.

Yes, states will always try to get what they want from other states.

But you have to act.

You have to do that by acting within the rules.

No, no armed intervention, no unlawful political or economic coercion, no Co optation of another state's natural resources.

And I think unfortunately with AUS, which sees itself, I mean, the president has said this above international law only ruled by his own mind and morality, members of his administration saying that superpower, they're a superpower, they'll conduct themselves as a superpower and and everybody else has to to live with it.

We don't have to live with that.

And it's only by speaking out, not somehow trying to make yourself the smallest possible target to avoid any kind of backlash from the United States.

That's not effective.

That kind of appeasement emboldens the United States to do more and more lawless things.

It's the same with Israel.

We we haven't held Israel to account for 60 years.

They've lived with near complete impunity for that.

For whatever they do to Palestinians.

There's no serious functioning justice system within Israel which holds Israeli forces to account when they destroy property in violation of the Geneva Conventions, build illegal settlements, kill Palestinians in violation of humanitarian law.

And look what's happened.

You know, now they're, they're, they're, they have the run of the Middle East in the last two years.

They've bombed Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Qatar.

They feel utterly above the rules.

And the United States now is, is allowing that and taking that approach itself.

So that kind of assertion of strength has to be met with strength by other states.

You can't just roll over or or be silent and expect that somehow it won't come back to bite you at some point as well.

[Other language spoken]

Are there any other questions for the special rapporteur?

No, Anything else you'd like to add for you, Sir?

[Other language spoken]

Got it done in that case.

Thank you all for joining us and thank you very much for the special rapporteur for being here.

Have a good afternoon.