On Violating the Human Rights of Migrant Children

The Case for Prosecution of the Individuals Who Viollate the Human Rights of Children at the Border:

What follows here is a condensation and paraphrasing of materials gleaned from Wikipedia…

The United States has signed the UNConvention on the Rights of the Child(UNCRC), but is the only United Nations member state that is not a party to it. … It emphasizes the right to survival, development, and protection against abuse, neglect and exploitation.

The United States government contributed to the drafting of the Convention. It commented on nearly all of the articles, and proposed the original text of seven of them. Three of these come directly from the United States Constitution and were proposed by the administration of President Ronald Reagan. The Convention was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 20 November 1989 and came into effect on 2 September 1990.

On 16 February 1995, Madeleine Albright, at the time the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, signed the Convention. However, though generally supportive of the Convention, President Bill Clinton did not submit it to the Senate. Likewise, President Bush did not submit the Convention to the Senate.

President Barack Obama has described the failure to ratify the Convention as ’embarrassing’ and promised to review this. The Obama administration said that it intended to submit the Convention to the Senate, but failed to do so. As of June 2019, the Trump administration has not submitted the convention for Senate ratification.

Superior orders, often known as the Nuremberg defense, lawful orders, just following orders, or by the German phrase Befehl ist Befehl (“an order is an order”), is a plea in a court of law that a person—whether a member of the military, law enforcement, a firefighting force, or the civilian population—not be held guilty for actions ordered by a superior officer or an official.

The superior orders plea is often regarded as the complement to command responsibility.

One of the most noted uses of this plea, or defense, was by the accused in the 1945–1946 Nuremberg trials, such that it is also called the “Nuremberg defense”. The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the main victorious Allies after World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany. These trials, under the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal that set them up, established that the defense of superior orders was no longer enough to escape punishment, but merely enough to lessen punishment.

Insubordination is the act of willfully disobeying an order of one’s superior. Refusing to perform an action that is unethical or illegal is not insubordination; neither is refusing to perform an action that is not within the scope of authority of the person issuing the order.

Not only should an unlawful order not be obeyed, obeying such an order can result in criminal prosecution. Military courts have long held that military members are accountable for their actions even while following orders.

The United States of America, though in clear violation of  the UNConvention on the Rights of the Child(UNCRC), may well escape the consequences of being a violator of the human rights of children because of the failure to become a party to the UNCRC.

However, the individuals who committed and are yet commiting human rights atrocities may well and should be prosecuted within the context and framework of the principles established by the UN, The military tribunal at Nuremberg, and the US Code of Military Justice…

Legal principles migrate from one context to another. American jurisprudence is a compendium of principles of law and justice drawn from a variety of sources domestic and foreign, military and civilian, civil and criminal…

To date, presidential hopeful, Elizabeth Warren is the only candidate to openly express the willingness and desire to prosecute the bastards of ICE and the thugs and goons of the for profit warehousers of innocents,who are abusing and harming migrant children in violation of everything designed to protect and safeguard kids….

She insists that following orders from the White House will not be sufficient justification as a defense to the crimes being committed in the name of American voters and taxpayers…

Another solid reason to take a good look at what she has to offer as President of the United States…