{"id":4487,"date":"2008-08-30T06:17:50","date_gmt":"2008-08-30T05:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=4487"},"modified":"2008-08-30T06:17:50","modified_gmt":"2008-08-30T05:17:50","slug":"blair-has-no-right-to-lecture-on-the-rule-of-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/politics\/blair-has-no-right-to-lecture-on-the-rule-of-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Blair has no right to lecture on the rule of law"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Inayat Bunglawala<\/a> | Britain\u2019s foreign secretary, David Miliband, has been lecturing Russia<\/a> on the need to respect Ukrainian and Georgian sovereignty. He doesn\u2019t seem to realise how incongruous this sounds to much of the world, given Britain\u2019s own disregard of international law.<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, our former prime minister, Tony Blair, also caused wry smiles earlier this month when he visited Malaysia<\/a> to give the Universiti Malaya\u2019s 22nd Sultan Azlan Shah lecture on Upholding the Rule of Law: A Reflection<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Blair argued that this means \u201crules and procedures that are transparent, and rules of evidence that make sense and are fair. These basic principles apply universally and without them, the rule of law means little or nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, the topic Blair sought to address was a source of both amusement and disbelief among the Malaysians.<\/p>\n

This is what the vice-chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak<\/a>, had to say: \u201cIt is quite obvious from casual observation that someone who has been known to have misled others, including the country\u2019s parliament, has lost the moral authority to preach about the rule of law and good governance \u2026 One wonders then what \u2018basic principles\u2019 Blair had in mind when he gave an almost unconditional support for the unilateral decision to invade Iraq against the wishes of the international community and without the approval of the UN \u2026 Indeed, as late as April 2006, when an eminent British former law lord attacked Guantanamo Bay as \u2018a stain on American justice\u2019, Blair reportedly refused to follow suit. According to Lord Steyn, who just retired from Britain\u2019s highest court: \u2018While our government condones Guantanamo Bay, the world is perplexed about our approach to the rule of law. You may ask: how will it help in regard to the continuing outrage at Guantanamo Bay for our government now to condemn it. The answer is that it would at last be a powerful signal to the world that Britain supports the international rule of law.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad<\/a>, was characteristically blunt: \u201cIt is disgusting to see this criminal of the highest order being welcomed in Malaysia and worse still to talk on the rule of law when he broke all international laws and the laws of his own country by deliberately lying and sending young British soldiers to die in a war of aggression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mahathir added<\/a> that: \u201cSaddam has been hanged, Karadzic was recently arrested, but this man goes around the world, lecturing on the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roger Tan, a member of the Malaysian Bar Council, asked if, \u201cby supporting and participating in the 2003 United States-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, I wonder whether Britain, being the world\u2019s oldest democracy, still possesses moral authority in a comity of nations to lecture on the principle of rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

I visited the official Tony Blair website<\/a> to read his own account of what had transpired in Malaysia. Unfortunately, I could find no mention made of the trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Inayat Bunglawala | Britain\u2019s foreign secretary, David Miliband, has been lecturing Russia on the need to respect Ukrainian and Georgian sovereignty. He doesn\u2019t seem to realise how incongruous this sounds to much of the world, given Britain\u2019s own disregard of international law. In a similar vein, our former prime minister, Tony Blair, also caused […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1615],"tags":[55],"class_list":{"0":"post-4487","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-politics","7":"category-uk-news","8":"tag-uk-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}