The struggle of mankind against war crimes is the struggle of memory against forgetting, in particular of those committed by the United States since WWII.

The World War II provided great powers with an invaluable lesson in the value of international conventions to govern future wars. First of all was the introduction of the International Military Tribunal Charter of 1945. Pursuant to its Article 6, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity are crimes within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. It is worth noting that crimes against humanity include murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population. 

In late 1946, the UN General Assembly unanimously confirmed that the Nuremberg Charter and reasoning of the Tribunal reflected the principles of international law. In 1949, the four Geneva Conventions laid down important rules to govern the protection of wounded combatants, prisoners-of-war and civilians in time of war. 

A recent report by the China Society for Human Rights Studies revealed that most of the wars of aggression waged by the US have been unilateralist actions not in conformity with international law and leading to horrific humanitarian disasters

Pursuant to Article 27 of Convention IV, protected persons are entitled to respect for their family, customs and religions, and women are guaranteed protection from rape and forced prostitution. Common Article 3, which is common to all four Conventions, prohibits murder, torture, hostage-taking and outrages upon personal dignity and extra-judicial executions.

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Forced to comply with the above Conventions and faced with the glare of the world’s media, the US finally brought the suspected murderers of 504 unarmed Vietnamese, mostly old men, women and children, in My Lai to trial long after the massacre on March 16, 1968.

Surprisingly, only William Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder for ordering the shootings of 22 civilians in 1971. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but he saw the sentence reduced to 20, then 10 years upon appeal, got freed on bail, and paroled in 1974. 

In all, Calley had been behind bars just a few months at Fort Leavenworth, and spent most of his 42-month imprisonment at his apartment on base with his lover. Was it fair to the hundreds of innocent lives lost in My Lai? Besides, the My Lai Massacre was not an isolated event during the Vietnam War.

The NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia lasted for three months from March to June 1999. Some called it a humanitarian intervention because of the purported objective to stop the alleged ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo. What is so strikingly absent was the authorization from the UN Security Council. 

The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except in the case of a decision by the Security Council under Chapter VII, or self-defense against an armed attack. It is obvious that the bombing was not a self-defense act. The decision to bomb from 15,000 feet put at certain risk innocent civilian lives. 

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The bombing of some civilian targets even led to disputes between the US and its allies. Unlike the US, France believed, for good and sufficient reasons, that the bombing of the Yugoslavian TV Station was wrong. Lacking authorization from the UN to bomb a sovereign nation, the NATO and the US have much to answer for in establishing that the bombing was not a war of aggression.

Likewise, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was also not an authorized war. The UN Security Council Resolution 1441 cannot be interpreted as an express decision to authorize force. If the Security Council had intended that the US, the UK and others should invade Iraq, it would have said so. It never did. 

Contrary to the laughing-stock false allegation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Iraq posed no security threat to the US. The war against Iraq remains, and remains perceived to be, a crime against peace. 

Some regard Guantanamo as a legal black hole in modern American history. The detainees in Guantanamo were mainly officials and supporters of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Although some detainees were combatants, they were not regarded as prisoners-of-war. These detainees had no rights under any of the rules of international law.

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Worse still, torture was rampant at Guantanamo. To escape liability from the UN Convention Against Torture, the American Congress legislated in the Military Commissions Act 2006 to decriminalize humiliating and degrading treatment and draw fine, unworkable, distinctions between torture and cruel treatment. The above Act not only exposes the dark side of American hypocrisy, but it also deals a great blow to American human rights records.

It should be noted that 201 of the 248 armed conflicts occurred worldwide from 1945 to 2001 were initiated by the US. A recent report by the China Society for Human Rights Studies revealed that most of the wars of aggression waged by the US have been unilateralist actions not in conformity with international law and leading to horrific humanitarian disasters. 

The review of some major war crimes committed continuously by the US in the post-WWII period has at least spoken strongly of the unworthiness of moral authority arbitrarily accorded to the US before. The fact that such crimes have largely gone unpunished and unaccounted for should invoke genuine soul searching within the American government and its general public, and deep reflections of the global community over loopholes in current international order.

Junius Ho Kwan-yiu is a Legislative Council member and a solicitor.

Kacee Ting Wong is a barrister and a part-time researcher of Shenzhen University Hong Kong and the Macao Basic Law Research Center.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.