The United Nations Charter requires the USA to protect human rights in Afghanistan

Though it may have been a canker for Washington and the Pentagon since 1948, the United Nations Charter sets the UN a present responsibility to maintain international peace and security.

It is too late and preposterous for any nation today, including a superpower, to creditably argue after 50 years of the UN that incidental civilian casualties are not inconsistent with either the spirit or the peace objectives of the UN. This incredulity equally extends to the United States of America and Australia, as both were, and remain, key founding State Parties to the UN Charter.

But the grave questions facing policy, populations, and powers now are not whether this was a surprise act of war equal to Pearl Harbor 1941, or how comparable the barbaric loss of human life is to the WWII firebombing of Dresden and the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From WWII all global power has developed alongside a deepening interest in the furtherance of international judicial institutions and international human rights law. Today they are best suited to bring to justice those responsible for terror, rather than the cold instruments of war, violence and destruction. A multilateral legal approach is essential to resolving the World Trade Centre and Pentagon horrors, rather than unilaterally declared militarist action of a "war on terrorism", which treats coalition support as being almost incidental. This is counselled, if not by experience or a need for effectiveness, then by the need to respect and uphold a future for human rights.

Starkly, the very future of global human rights is in the balance, unless the United States adopts moderation and restraint, and avoids war as its response to renewed domestic terrorist attack.

Although there may be no explicit Charter provision providing a direct obligation on member nations to protect civilians during war, the accepted perception is of a consistent abhorrence of armed force as anything but a solution of last resort in self-defence or "in the common interest".

Equally important, the preamble spells out the Charter’s primary aim "to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained". Subscription to the Charter asserts a set of certain legal and inalienable human rights for all peoples under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Also, non-terrorist governments may not be justly condemned for the attack without compelling evidence of their cooperation or complicity with those individuals who actually committed the crimes in question. For the concept of a national government is separate and distinct from any terrorist crimes that may operate from within national borders, and therefore governments cannot be held unduly accountable for crimes for which there is no sound evidence implicating them.

Likewise, no innocent civilians residing in a nation that may be, partly or fully, implicated in any crimes perpetrated against the US, must bear any responsibility for the actions of their national government. They must be guaranteed safety and immunity from military or judicial action taken against states in which they reside. It is against their legal and human rights not to do so.

As well, the Geneva Conventions, which do explicitly provide for the protection of civilians, are a cornerstone of customary international law (notwithstanding very regrettable inconsistencies in their application). Accordingly the application of the Geneva Conventions, among such other legal international instruments, is incumbent by force of the UN Charter on member nations.

Australia has the duty and right as a good friend of the US to ensure the conduct of a just, but peaceful, international response to the Sept 11 crimes against humanity. To withdraw ANZUS support for any unlawful retaliatory action on civilians outside the UN Charter, is one such step.

Such a course is compatible with human rights and with Article 6 of the ANZUS Treaty which states: "This Treaty does not affect and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations of the Parties under the Charter of the United Nations or the responsibility of the United Nations for the maintenance of international peace and security." (Treaty Article 6)

The treaty clearly asserts the primacy of United Nations Charter rights and obligations over the provisions of the treaty, including Article 5, which Australia has invoked to support the USA.

Human rights obligations incumbent on members of the UN include the obligation to protect civilian populations in the conduct of armed conflict, and extend to protection from the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, and from indiscriminate destruction or mass terror.

The obligations are inconsistent with any "acceptable" level of civilian casualties from weapons, both as applicable norms of International Law, and legal duties incumbent under the UN Charter.

In gaining UN membership, states freely covenant to abide a legal assertion of inalienable human rights in all people to live in a world free from a use of weapons of mass terror, or indiscriminate destruction , and other nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, by powers capable of so acting.

In so being against the Charter, the use of such arms is unacceptable and all members of the UN , including Australia and the US, are bound to uphold our basic human rights, and thereby work to maintain a legal responsibility in the UN for the maintenance of international peace and security.

By dint of the basic human rights of all peoples, Australian moral and practical support to the US under Article 5 of the ANZUS treaty must be withdrawn should war on terrorism in the theatre of military action as declared by the US, begin to exact civilian casualties, by a use of such arms.

Accordingly, the recent call of Opposition foreign affairs spokesperson, Laurie Bereton, for a new scrutiny of security is truly overdue. Likewise is his realisation that old freedoms may be restricted in reaction against "the worst single act of evil terrorism perpetrated in our life times".

To our loss, Laurie Bereton hasn't gone far enough with human rights, while the zealous global media has gone way too far over the top, with each having missed putting core questions shaping who we are to be in this millennium: ie, Whose freedoms are to be restricted; and how, and why?

Freedom of the press to publish unrestricted propaganda, from any quarter, with a real propensity to incite racial, ethnic or sectarian hatred, is a prime candidate among a few western democracy's hard won democratic freedoms to be put on the line for hard questioning, and to go if necessary for the future of any human rights, the attainment of justice against terror or a prospect of peace.

The press has a role to lead by example and must make needed hard choices itself, by giving up divisive "infoganda". It can no longer peddle clearly slanted diatribe which is unacceptable to human rights and the attainment of a victory against terrorism. The press must abandon the new diversionary option that in western democracies there are inessential personal freedoms we all enjoy as individuals, and which we may ill afford to keep as luxuries in the face of this barbarity.

Syndicated news reports, whose principal merit lies in denying universal human rights by openly demonising Palestinian people, top the list of grave threats to human rights, security and peace. Such propaganda are two sets of syndicated press photographs of cheering Palestinian children.

The first was published under the emboldened headline: "They celebrate while everyone else mourns" (The Adelaide Advertiser, Thursday 13/09/01). The same newspaper replicated the technique two days later with a different group of Palestinian children (15/9/01- Weekend - p.8). Each publication was accompanied by a scant story line omitting to say how these children, let alone children, comprehended the enormity of the excess and why it was known they understood.

The first photograph is of a boy about 10 years old, depicted in adult victory pose, and chomping on a Palestinian flag; behind him is his slightly older whistling companion; the third grimacing child was depicted only from the bust up, at the back, and of similar age. The second depiction again has three Palestinian refugee children of the same age group apparently from the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, photographed in a supposed celebration of the massacre in New York. But this time under the watchful and approving eye of a clapping adult, while in the background, a few teenagers among other men and the head of a curious woman, are to be seen milling around at a street rally, most looking decidedly uncomfortable, or in a stance of disbelief.

A measured intelligence with humane compassion and a firm bent for human rights and security must insist they are only children without an adult potential for deeply considered understanding.

In the context of the children's known Palestinian home town circumstances, and the infamous history of the Shatila refugee camp, the photographs are crude propaganda with a propensity to incite hatred against Palestinians, or their supporters, among at least equally ignorant adults. The snaps exploit children, inviting bigoted inferences they are monsters or the children of monsters.

An equally grave issue is whether the media ought have an international obligation, in addition to currently enforceable human rights standards, to meet UN sourced global measures of objectivity designed to temper racial, ethnic and sectarian bias in media assessments of State policy (both domestic and foreign) that lie enmeshed in the web of such obscene and insanely evil terrorism.

The excess has forced the US, and the western democracies, to face the fact that Globalisation is not a one way yellow brick road, but has negatives as well as positives. One terrorist message is that the World Trade Centre, New York, was ripe for the picking. At a truly less raw time, the US will come to terms with the fact that the brutal harvest of the World Trade Centre and murder of thousands of its workers, will inevitably increase US GDP in line with capitalist economics.

The total US recovery cost will be used, in solely economic terms, as an input to the measure of aggregate increases in GDP, and the horror crashes may contribute more than a spike to growth.

Sadly, any diminution of the enjoyment of what little human rights are enjoyed today by poverty stricken civilian populations in the road of the US war on terrorism, will be not equally so count.

Freedom requires news about these grave issues of human rights, and their impacts for security, foreign policy and the economics of tragedy; and not more syndicated acts of religious, racial or ethnic hatred arising in race, ethnic and sectarian propaganda, parading as a free press and media.