UN must act on Saudi killing of civilians in Yemen: Lawyer

Press TV has conducted an interview with Edward Corrigan, an international human rights lawyer in Ontario, to discuss Saudi Arabia’s use of US-supplied cluster bombs in the deadly airstrikes against Yemen.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: HRW (Human Rights Watch) has stated that the Saudis are using US-supplied cluster munitions, which are banned by numerous international conventions. Many see this as the US being complicit in the attacks that are killing civilians in Yemen.

Corrigan: Well, I agree that the cluster bombs are a terrible weapon and they are banned by many countries and there are conventions that of course restrict the use of these weapons. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. They're drop by a plane to cover a massive area. They are designed for a concentration of troops. However, in Yemen there are no concentration of troops, there are no real military defined targets.

You are looking at small military targets interspersed with civilian areas and when you have cluster bombs, they are anti-personnel weapons, they spread out over huge distance and invariably in almost every instance they kill a massive amount of civilians, and they kill them and they also injure them.  

And part of the problem of cluster bombs is that a lot of them do not explode, so they stay in the ground for a long period after the initial attack and then when people run into them or pick them up or kids play with them, they blow up and again you have got more deaths. That is exactly what happened in Lebanon.

One thing that should be considered is that it is actually illegal under American law for a country to use American weapons for an act of aggression. So I think the vast majority of the world community sees Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen as an act of aggression so therefore it is a violation of American law but they are not going to enforce that. They are still trying to sell weapons and they sold weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE a number of years ago.

So Human Rights Watch is very correct in drawing attention to this fact and these are horrific anti-personnel weapons that invariably kill a majority of civilians and maim women, children and innocent people and again the acquiescence of the United States is deplorable. And of course the Saudis can in no way guarantee that they are using these weapons against clearly defined military targets when the evidence is totally to the contrary and a lot of civilians are being killed and again this is in violation of American law.

What American weapons supposedly are not supposed to be used for, for wars of aggression and this is a war of aggression. They are killing many civilians and the United States, the world community, United Nations needs to speak up about this and we need to sort of work to bring the parties together and have some sort of peaceful resolution before thousands of more civilians get killed and women and children and other people are maimed, which I guess it is horrible, horrible consequence of the use of this type of weapon.

AHK/HMV  

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