Bush Cancels Swiss Trip; Fear of Arrest

International law is a conundrum for war criminals. It used to be that you could commit crimes in one nation and live in impunity, after exile, in another. Not any more. The birth of international conventions following the Second World War, and especially since the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague in the 1990s, law is not transnational and prosecution a prerogative not just of domestic bodies but supranational institutions.

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Thus consider the case of Tunisian ex-president Ben Ali. He fled the country after a domestic uprising in the name of democracy. A few decades ago that would be the end of Ben Ali and he could live out his years in the humiliating exile in Saudi Arabia. But the Tunisians government has issued an arrest warrant against him and his dethroned entourage for illegally stealing public funds when they left the country. Interpole, the international police agency, has followed that order and is seeking his extradition to Tunis for trial.

U.S. President Bush now faces a similar dilemma: Bush ordered water boarding against suspected terrorists in Americans custody, none of whom were tried let alone convicted of anything, and although he denied any "torture" during his presidency, and often admittedly so, his recent memoirs acknowledges the use of such outlawed, under U.S. and international law, practices and Bush defends them on the dubious grounds that they protected American lives.

President Obama has decided not to prosecute Bush and other past administrations officials for war crimes despite their open admission solely on nonsense bipartisan grounds of "moving forward, not backwards", but other people have more decency and courage and a commitment to the rule of law than Obama:

A planned trip by former President George W. Bush to Switzerland this week has been canceled in the face of threatened large-scale protests and calls for an investigation into whether his administration committed human rights abuses in the fight against terrorism.

The visit to Geneva was to have been Mr. Bush’s first trip to Europe since his memoir, “Decision Points,” was published in November, and the first since he publicly stated in interviews on his book tour that he had personally authorized the use of waterboarding in the questioning of terrorism detainees.

As a result, international human rights groups, including Amnesty International, seized on the scheduled visit to petition the Swiss authorities to open an investigation of Mr. Bush while he was in the country. The groups argued that he had admitted to torture and thus could be prosecuted in Switzerland and other countries that have signed on to the international convention banning torture.

Shall we call it a Swiss Miss for Bush?! Hahahahah...