Read the full interview here.
Latest News: Posts Tagged ‘law versus power’
“End the Double Standard: U.S. Accuses Russia of War Crimes While Continuing to Oppose the ICC” — LAW VERSUS POWER author Wolfgang Kaleck speaks with Democracy Now!
Thursday, April 14th, 2022“The Man Who Wants to Take Down Bashar Al Assad” — LAW VERSUS POWER author Wolfgang Kaleck profiled in the New Republic
Tuesday, December 15th, 2020Read the article here.
“…shaking up the status quo by challenging power relations and prosecuting those with total impunity is undeniably a first step towards justice.” —Fiorella Lecoutteux on WOLFGANG KALECK’S new book, LAW VS. POWER in Peace News
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019Fiorella Lecoutteux calls LAW VS. POWER “a manifesto for international law and how it can be used to change the status quo”
How can we hold dictators to account? The list of those who have enjoyed complete impunity is long. Lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck has spent his whole life fighting to reverse this state of affairs: using the law to challenge Latin American ex-dictators, representing the families of US drone-attack victims in Yemen, and filing criminal complaints against the likes of ex-US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld.
Kaleck’s latest book is a manifesto for international law and how it can be used to change the status quo. As Edward Snowden writes in the foreword: ‘when the history of our era is written not by the torturers and their apologists, but by those who never gave up on the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights… Wolfgang Kaleck will be one of the primary authors.’
A compelling read, Law Versus Power offers much more than the dry rhetoric of a seasoned lawyer. Kaleck’s writing is personal, passionate and self-questioning. The narrative thread provides a chronological and reflective account of the cases that he and his partners have researched and submitted over several decades.
Ranging from the first conversations with the victims to the first tentative results (or disappointments) emerging years later, his writing skilfully draws us into the complexities of each case and what’s at stake.
Read the full review here.
“The tragic history of U.S. military interventions in Latin America in the last decades… is one of the causes of why the world is in such bad shape right now.” – WOLFGANG KALECK, author of our forthcoming Law Versus Power: Our Global Fight for Human Rights, on Democracy Now!
Friday, January 25th, 2019EDWARD SNOWDEN’S LAWYER, WOLFGANG KALECK ON THE GLOBAL FIGHT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the global state of human rights right now, as you see it. You generally live in Berlin. You are here visiting the United States.
WOLFGANG KALECK: Yeah, I mean, everybody’s talking now about Putin and Erdogan, Turkey’s president, and, of course, also about Trump, and rightly so. They have to be criticized on every level. No question about that. But we shouldn’t forget the former “troika of tyranny”: Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. And everybody tends now, in the light of, you know, the performances of President Trump, to think of these men as honorable, respectful politicians. They weren’t. They were war criminals. And the only reason why they are not in the prison is because the U.S. is so powerful and avoided any kind of accountability. And that is tragic.
And so, like de Zayas, I really think we have to remind what happened after 9/11/2001 here in this country, the serious breaches of international law. And that helped people like Erdogan, like the Chinese and others, to argue, “Why do you remind us of our human rights violation, when you have a prison like Guantánamo and when you’re invading Iraq without any legal justification?” And that is something which is really, really important to consider now.
And the other thing is, all these U.S. interventions, military interventions, all these military dictatorships led to really, really dramatic disasters on the level of these societies. Countries like Chile and Argentina have to struggle with their past until now, because torture is not something that happens at some point in the past. It has an impact on the individuals, on their families, but also on the society. And that is really, really important to bridge between the current situation and that past.
Watch the interview here.
