Posted on 02/03/2005 9:28:16 AM PST by knighthawk
BRUSSELS - Suicide bombing should be considered a crime against humanity, European Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said on Thursday.
Frattini's comment in a speech to a Brussels conference on EU counter-terrorism policy staged by the New Defense Agenda think-tank was a boost to Jewish organizations campaigning to have suicide bombing specifically outlawed internationally.
"Terrorism is a crime against ... fundamental and universal rights. We believe that this crime must be fought by the law and within the law," the former Italian foreign minister said.
"My opinion is that suicide bombing can be considered as a crime against humanity," he said in prepared remarks.
The U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, is trying to organize an international declaration on what it calls suicide terrorism.
The group says it has won support from Pope John Paul, and the foreign ministers of Turkey, Spain and 10 Latin American countries and a Russian deputy foreign minister.
"We are first trying to get a feel for the political will to make a declaration on suicide terrorism, and then, if there is the political will, to put forward some type of convention to characterize it as a crime against humanity," Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal Center's representative in Europe, told Reuters.
That could give the families of victims of suicide attacks the possibility of taking legal action against political or religious leaders who blessed or incited such bombings, he said.
Samuels said Muslim states such as Iraq, Turkey and Indonesia had been victims of such attacks as well as Israel, which has suffered a series of Palestinian suicide bombings over the last decade, and the United States, which lost almost 3,000 lives in the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide attacks on New York and Washington.
Ping
Considering it a crime will really make them stop. What is left of them to prosecute?
Suicide bombing is fine; it's homicide bombings that are a problem. I just love it when these would-be homicide bombers manage to blow themselves up without blowing anybody else up -- THAT is a suicide bombing.
Gee, I thought one man's terrorist was another man's freedom fighter. Or a "patriot" in the words of Michael Moore.
Or a stupidcide bombing.
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