In Germany, sharia isn’t the rule of law – like in Iraq.

In Germany, we have no death penalty – like in Iraq and the U.S.A.

Germany has signed and ratified all relevant human rights treaties.

Unlike some notorious ‘lead nations’.

These covenants are very easy to violate. That doesn’t really make them worthless, though. International law is often said to be non-existent, when it’s really just rarely enforced. It’s kind of like a SPEED LIMIT 55 sign: people slip over the line all the time, and only get busted if they really flagrantly disregard it.

The political will to make these covenants work is certainly lacking, but the problem is that every nation is living in a glass house. The CCPR includes a number of restrictions that even the US and European nations would be uncomfortable with. For instance, it says that “any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.” Damn, there goes the Fox News Channel…

To any who question the logic of my previous posting, let me explain.

The treaty obviously assumes that propaganda for war is inherently bad and ignores the reality that anti-war propaganda can be equally dangerous.
Let’s consider that war and the propaganda that came out if it, the propaganda most think of when they hear the word – the Second World War.
US gov’t (as well as British, Russian,etc) propaganda during the war helped to galvanize support at home and turn the war effort into a winning one. Few dispute the fact that Allied victory in WWII was a just and fortuitous one. Was that propaganda inherently wrong? Much of it was largely factual and the good propaganda never had to coerce or manipulate the viewer (see “Prelude to War” and Frank Capra’s “the Nazi Strike”).
On the flip side, what about the propaganda created in America in the 1930s by the isolationists. It was clearly propaganda against a war, yet in hindsight we see how awful it would have been had the “America First” crowd succeeded in keeping us out of the war (though with Pearl Harbor that would likely have been impossible).

To wrap it all up and go back to the topic at hand, the treaty Joe mentioned is laughable to me if it categorically bans propaganda for war. Such treaties deserve the contempt with which they are shown by so many signatory nations.

Sorry, I forgot another obvious explanation for the propaganda clause: By making it illegal, it would be possible to use a violation of the ban as grounds for the “legal” use of collective force through the Security Council.

Of course, we all know how meaningful that is in this day and age…

These covenants are very easy to violate. That doesn’t really make them worthless, though. International law is often said to be non-existent, when it’s really just rarely enforced. It’s kind of like a SPEED LIMIT 55 sign: people slip over the line all the time, and only get busted if they really flagrantly disregard it.

Ah, so it’s not that it doesn’t exist, it’s that it’s arbitrary and capricious.

So instead of “irrelevant,” it’s better classified as “malevolent.”

heh

Yeah, basically. Law is never applied uniformly; you only have degrees of arbitrariness.