Stephen Sefton, June 25th 2023 *
Thirty-seven years ago, on June 27, 1986, the International Court of Justice condemned the United States for President Ronald Reagan’s bloody terrorist war against the people of Nicaragua. Speaking of the sentence in 2019, our Comandante Daniel observed: “The Court ruled in favor of the People of Nicaragua, and we cannot forget that, Nicaraguan brothers and sisters, we must always keep this in mind, that Justice has been on our side and Justice continues to be on the side of the Nicaraguan People, on the side of Nicaragua's Families.”
From the moment of its issuance, the judgment of the International Court of Justice has had pre-eminent importance in international law. Dr Carlos Argüello, Nicaragua’s representative in The Hague, commented in an interview five years ago this week, “ if you go to any University in the United States, in Europe, in Asia, anywhere, and the University talks about International Law Public, and one of the main texts is precisely this Judgment. So it’s a historic matter in every sense of the word.”
Colleague Dan Kovalik, a leading American specialist in international law, comments that: “That ICJ decision is considered one of the most important in international law because it enunciated the following principles of customary international law that jurists still apply today: 1. that aggressive war is illegal; 2. that a nation’s right to self-defense is only triggered by an actual armed attack; 3. that there is no right to ideological or humanitarian intervention; and 4. that a State cannot legally support armed insurrections against another sovereign State.”
Although the Court’s verdicts are binding on UN member states, the United States has never complied with the judgment against it. The compensation ordered by the Court, which was US$17 billion at that time, is still pending. Although it is true that, after the sentence, the US Congress did not want to approve more financing for the war against Nicaragua, the government of President Reagan rejected the sentence emphatically. Covertly, he continued to promote his brutal, murderous terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people, including through criminal financing, linked to drug trafficking, exposed during the Iran-Contra scandal.
The aftermath of the June 27th 1986 ruling demonstrated the utter bad faith of the US ruling class, its blatant rejection of the fundamental principles of international law and its violation of the founding norms of the UN of which it is a member state. In fact, the decision of the Court in favor of Nicaragua vindicated the diplomatic-legal strategy of the government of President Comandante Daniel, executed decisively and brilliantly by our Chancellor of Dignity, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann and his team. The judgment of the Court was issued at crucial moments in the development of the regional processes for Peace in Nicaragua and the Central American region.
It forced the countries of the region to recognize the good faith and moral authority of a Nicaragua committed to regional peace. In the case of Honduras and Costa Rica, their governments could not deny their complicity in the monstrous criminal aggression of the United States against Nicaragua. A major obstacle to the peace process in Central America promoted by the Contadora group had been that the Reagan government did not want to recognize the legitimacy of the elected government of the Sandinista Front and its president Comandante Daniel. The issuance of the judgment of the International Court of Justice facilitated a vigorous Nicaraguan diplomatic offensive to remove that obstacle.
An important resolution was reached in the General Assembly of the United Nations demanding that the United States comply with the decision of the Court. The Court’s sentence also allowed the main European governments to openly question the criminal US policy against Nicaragua. This new context, resulting from the Court’s ruling, facilitated full and firm recognition at the international level of the justice of Nicaragua’s defense of national sovereignty.
This recognition was of great importance at the regional level among the eight governments of the Contadora process, Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, supported by Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay, in addition to the Central American governments. And this facilitated the signing by the five Central American presidents in August 1987 of the Esquipulas II agreements, which in turn made it possible to advance towards Peace, step by step, in Nicaragua, El Salvador and finally in Guatemala. Without the judgment of the International Court of Justice of June 27, 1986, it is doubtful whether it would have been possible to finalize the Esquipulas II agreements in order to open new spaces for meeting and understanding in the region.
The grotesque failure of the United States to comply with the Court’s ruling, apart from being a repugnant challenge to international law, highlighted the inability of the United Nations system to comply with the principles of its own Charter. The first article of the Charter stipulates that the purpose of the UN is “Maintaining international peace and security, and to that end: taking effective collective measures to prevent and eliminate threats to Peace.” But even with the condemnation of the Court, the supreme body of the international law system, complemented by a UN General Assembly resolution demanding that the United States abide by the sentence, the Ronald Reagan government simply acted in a way that deepened its rejection of the verdict.
This absurd moral and institutional contradiction of the UN underlies practically all the international crises that have developed since that time. The United States flouts international law by appealing to the spurious fabrication of “a rules-based order” revealed exclusively to the United States and its allies. When the United States and its allies cannot manipulate the UN system to achieve their imperialist goals, they simply ignore it. From the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the war against Iraq in 2003, to the destruction of Libya, and the coup in Ivory Coast in 2011, or the continuous occupation of the territory of Syria and the theft of its oil and wheat or the cynically support for Ukraine to slaughter its Russian-speaking population for more than eight years, the United States and its allies have in effect stripped away the raison d’être of the United Nations.
In the midst of the failed 2018 coup attempt, on the then anniversary of the June 27th 1986 sentence, Dr. Carlos Argüello commented “Maybe now they are using the term “undercover” a little more literally and doing things differently. another way; but frankly it is sad because, that is to say, what seemed to have already been a settled matter, a page from the Past, is being opened again… What is happening is a violation of International Law, of the Rights of Nicaragua”. Even so, for having defended its sovereignty and national dignity, it is Nicaragua that has been accused, in the most perverse way, in the United Nations system.
The experience of Nicaragua after the sentence of the International Court of Justice allows us to conclude clearly that a key element for the resolution of regional conflicts is to eliminate from these regional processes the risk of contagion from the imperialist and militaristic culture of the United States and its allies. The United States wanted to sabotage the Esquipulas agreements in the same way that it did with Ukraine in relation to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran on the development of its nuclear program. Similarly, NATO governments pressured Ukraine to reject the peace agreement with Russia agreed in March 2022.
As president of the United Nations General Assembly, Father Miguel d’Escoto noted in 2009, “Selfishness and greed cannot be corrected. They must be replaced by solidarity, which obviously implies radical change. If what we really want is a stable and lasting Peace, it must be absolutely clear that we must go beyond the controls and corrections of the existing model to create something that strives towards a new paradigm of social coexistence.”
And as our president Comandante Daniel has insisted “…we have been repeating it for years. The United Nations has to be totally remodeled, reconverted, refounded… It has to be refounded, that’s what Father D’Escoto said when he was President of the United Nations Assembly. It has to be refounded and he took the Nicaraguan flag there, proposing the refounding of the United Nations, the refounding of all United Nations instruments, the refounding of those regional instruments that are totally discredited, decrepit and worn out.”
* Thanks to Stansfield Smith for translating this article