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December 19, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Novel Appeal Filed with the European Court of Human Rights in Nuclear Weapons Protest Case

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022
By John LaForge

Two nuclear weapons opponents have filed a novel complaint with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasberg, France, alleging that German courts have unfairly refused to consider defense testimony from expert witnesses regarding the outlaw status of deploying US nuclear weapons in Germany.

On Nov. 11, 2021, Stefanie Augustin of Dortmund and Marion Küpker of Hamburg submitted the appeal through their lawyer Anna Busl. The ECHR will now decide whether to review the case and issue a ruling, or to deny it further consideration.

On Sunday, July 15, 2018, Augustin and Küpker were among eighteen people from four different countries who entered Germany’s Büchel air base, near Cochem, where approximately 20 US nuclear bombs are kept at the ready by the US Air Force’s 702nd Munitions Support Squadron. Seven of the activists came from the United States, six from Germany, four from The Netherlands, and one from England. In five groups, they clipped fences to enter the base and once inside some climbed onto a hangar where nuclear weapons may have been stored, and others read aloud to soldiers a warning about military and civilian laws that prohibit planning and preparing attacks using nuclear weapons.
Augustin said: “I took part in this action because it is the only way for me as a citizen to be able to take these state violations of the law to court. This includes the practice of Germany’s criminal nuclear participation in NATO. Since we have exhausted all national court appeals with our 14th constitutional complaint — which in our case was again rejected by the Federal Constitutional Court — we have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights for the first time.”

Küpker (a 2019 Aachen Peace Prize winner for the campaign “Büchel is Everywhere: Nuclear Weapons-Free Now!”) added: “International law is superior to federal German law. The courts should have examined whether we actually had sufficient and urgent reasons to draw attention to this state of emergency with such an action. Our requests to provide expert witness testimony were simply rejected by the courts. However, the courts are ordinarily obliged to examine questions of international and constitutional law. So the appeal is based on our ‘right to be heard’ under Article 6, Para. 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and on our ‘right to life’ under the convention’s to Art. 2, Para. 1 having been violated in the local, regional and constitutional courts.”

The appellants argue further that the deployed US nuclear weapons violate the public’s “right to life” and thereby the European Convention, because the perpetual threat to use Büchel’s 20 US H-bombs in attacks launched by Germany’s Tornado jet fighters is routinely practiced in exercises including October’s “Steadfast Noon” rehearsal. The US bombs hang “like the ‘sword of Damocles,’” Küpker said, “because the credible threat of nuclear war is continuous, raises the chances of a global nuclear war, and makes Germany a target.”

Over the past two years, about 50 prosecutions for nonviolent “go-ins” at Büchel base have taken place in Cochem district court and in the Koblenz regional court. (Trial reports can be found here: www.buechel-atombombenfrei.de). And over the past 25 years, 14 appeals by nuclear weapons critics to Germany’s highest court, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, have been rejected.

The July 15, 2018 action, and others in 2017 and 2019, were organized jointly by Nonviolent Action to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Germany (www.gaaa.org) and the US organization Nukewatch. The Campaign Council of Germany’s nationwide support group “Abolish Nuclear Weapons – Start with Us!” — made up of over 70 organizations (www.atomwaffenfrei.de) — has declared its support this first-ever anti-nuclear movement appeal to the ECHR.

So, after decades of protests and resistance to the US nuclear weapons in Germany (there were as many as 7,000 during the Cold War), the appeal to the ECHR provides its judges a rare opportunity. Without having to condemn the United States’ hubris, hypocrisy, or destabilizing nuclear threat-mongering, the judges can simply reaffirm a defendant’s right to a fair trial court — a court that is unbiased enough that defendants are allowed to present expert witness testimony — and then urge the German courts to listen to it.

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, US Bombs Out of Germany

December 15, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

US Peace Activist Convicted in Germany for Nuclear Weapons Protests

The go-in actions from July 15, 2018

 

HAMBURG – Long-time Nukewatch co-director John LaForge was convicted December 9 in Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany on two charges of trespassing, following a 4.5-hour appeal hearing stemming from two 2018 protests against the U.S. nuclear weapons stationed Germany’s Büchel air force base.

The Koblenz hearing was an appeal of two May 31, 2021 trespass convictions in Cochem District Court for “go-in” actions at the base during protests July 15, and August 6, 2018. Koblenz Regional Court Judge _____ van den Bosh ruled that LaForge’s affirmative defense of “crime prevention” was inadmissible and that such a defense would better be heard by a higher court. (German judge’s first names are not made public.) She ordered the long-time co-director of the nuclear watchdog organization Nukewatch (nukewatchinfo.org) to pay a fine of 600 Euros or about $680.00.

Judge van der Bosh denied motions from defense attorney Anna Busl to allow testimony from three experts regarding the status of nuclear weapons. Retired German judge Bernd Hahnfeld, a former board chair of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, and University of Trier Professor of Computer Science Karl-Hans Bläsius both arrived at court for the hearing. Judge Hahnfeld planned to explain that the 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty and the 1990 Two-Plus-Four Treaty (on German reunification) both prohibit the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons in Germany; and Prof. Bläsius would have testified about the growing risk of computer-driven accidental nuclear war. Univ. of Illinois Professor of Law Francis A. Boyle intended to explain via video conference from Champaign, Ill. the criminality of ongoing thermonuclear attack threats known as “deterrence.”

August 6, 2018, LaForge and Susan Crane of Redwood City, California

As is the practice in German criminal court, LaForge was able to testify at length and uninterrupted. With a German translator translating for the court, he spoke for 25/50 minutes, saying in part, “The ghastly effects of hydrogen bombs are well-known to be massacres caused by the weapons’ uncontrollable, indiscriminate, city-size blast destruction, ferocious mass fires, vastly widespread radiation burns, radiation-related diseases, and genetic damage. Deliberately planning to cause these effects is prohibited by international humanitarian law, the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Tribunal, and the Nuremberg Principles all of which are binding on Germany and the United States.”

By way of analogy LaForge said, “A fire fighter who breaks a door and rushes into a burning building to save someone is not charged with trespass. But what of a fire not yet burning but one that is planned, rehearsed, premeditated, and intentionally set to ignite with the heat, blast and radiation of a thousand suns? What if the premeditated fire would incinerate a city of 10 million people, or 20 cities — one each for the 20 US hydrogen bombs at Büchel?”

Before the hearing he said, “I participated in these actions because they are the only way to have the criminal status of nuclear weapons considered by the courts,” LaForge said. “The public wants these bombs out of Germany. But nuclear weapons’ programs are anti-democratic, controlled by presidential decree that ignore Congress and parliaments. Only a court of law can order them ousted.”

Marion Küpker of Hamburg, an anti-nuclear campaigner with Nonviolent Action to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (www.gaaa.org) and coordinator of the international action camps at the base, said, “In the last two years, about 50 court cases involving dozens of nuclear weapons protesters have taken place in Cochem and Koblenz for nonviolent civil disobedience actions at the Büchel air base.”

Büchel air base uses at least 20 U.S. thermonuclear gravity bombs known as B61s –like six other European NATO bases — under a controversial US/NATO program known as “nuclear sharing.” The U.S. Air Force’s 702nd Munitions Support Squadron maintains the U.S. bombs in readiness for German PA 200 Tornado jet fighter/bomber crews. According to Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, “The Belgian, Dutch, German, and Italian air forces are assigned nuclear strike missions with U.S. nuclear weapons.”* Küpker said protesters continue their 25-year-long campaign demanding the ouster of the U.S. bombs and a cancellation of US plans to replace the current B61-3s and -4s with a new “B61-12.” (Full disclosure: Küpker and LaForge were married in August 2020.)

At Nukewatch, LaForge helped coordinate delegations of U.S. peace activists to international protest camps at the nuclear weapons base in 2017, 2018, and 2019. He is a co-recipient of the 2004 US Peace and Justice Studies Association’s Social Courage Award, who has served over 54 months in jail and prison for nonviolent protests.

*“US Nuclear Forces 2021,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/premium/2021-01/nuclear-notebook-united-states-nuclear-weapons-2021/.

 

Filed Under: Direct Action, US Bombs Out of Germany

December 11, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

German Complaint Against Iran Rings Hollow with US H-bombs Still In Country

By John LaForge, Counterpunch, December 10, 2021

“Hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue.”

—Anonymous

US Air Force photo: A German air force crew chief assigned to the 33rd Fighter Bomber Wing, at Buechel Air Base, Germany, launches a Tornado fighter/bomber on a “training mission” conducted in the US. The crews at Buechel also prepare for attacks (with the 20 US nuclear weapons on base) in courses of the Defense Nuclear Weapons School (yes, that’s its real name). This school operates a “branch” for German Tornado pilots IN GERMANY — at the Ramstein air force base.

When it comes to double-standards, sheer hypocrisy, and laughable duplicity, Germany takes the cake this week — for nuclear weapons two-facedness.

The country helped create the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), along with China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US, in which Iran agreed to dismantle most of its nuclear program and open its facilities to extensive inspections in exchange for sanctions relief.

President ‘Rump tore up United States obligations to the JCPOA, but the Biden White House has said it wants to reestablish the US commitments. Negotiations began last April aimed at just that.

Now comes a spokeswomen for Germany’s Foreign Ministry Monday Dec. 6, saying that since April Iran had “violated almost all” agreed compromises.

This is rich coming from the Germany, but at least its Foreign Ministry is familiar with nuclear lawlessness.

To be clear Iran has no nuclear weapons, according a Dec. 6 statement by CIA director William Burns. On the other hand, Germany is home to 20 US hydrogen bombs known as B61s. These H-bombs are at Germany’s Büchel air base under a program called “nuclear sharing” which stands in open violation of binding international treaties.

With US H-bombs at Büchel, both Germany and the United States violate the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which is regarded by both as international treaty law to be applied domestically under Art. 59.2 of Germany’s Basic Law or constitution, and under Art. 6 of the US Constitution. The NPT’s Article 1 prohibits Germany from receiving nuclear weapons from the United States, and its Article 2 prohibits the United States from placing its nuclear weapons in other countries.

Furthermore, the stationing of US nuclear weapons in Germany violates Art. 3 of the 1990 Two-Plus-Four Treaty of re-unification, or Final Settlement Treaty, in which Germany renounced the possession of nuclear weapons and reaffirmed its commitment to the NPT.

Additionally, in its July 1996 Advisory Opinion the International Court of Justice ruled unanimously that: “There is an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” This opinion applies to Germany and all UN member states with the status of treaty law.

Regular planning and rehearsals of attacks with the US H-bombs at Büchel are conducted by German Tornado jet fighters of the 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing, with the help of the US Air Force’s 702nd Munitions Support Squadron, as is often reported. For example NATO announced on Oct. 18, 2021 the start of its nuclear attack “exercise” named “Steadfast Noon.” German Tornadoes participated as usual. According to NATO’s statement, “This exercise helps to ensure that NATO’s nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective.” Headlines from last year’s rehearsal declared: “NATO Holds Secret Nuclear War Exercises in Germany;” “German Air Force training for nuclear war as part of NATO;” and “NATO Holds Secret Nuclear War Exercises in Germany.” From 2017: “NATO nuclear weapons exercise unusually open.” In 2015: “NATO nuclear weapons exercise Steadfast Noon in Büchel.”

These unlawful and even criminal violations of the NPT, the 2+4 Treaty, the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, as well as the UN Charter, and the Nuremberg Principle’s prohibition of any “planning and preparation of wars in violation of international treaties…” make Germany’s chastisement of nuclear weapons-free Iran particularly absurd.

In order to end earn more than a comic’s voice in the JCPOA negotiations, Germany must end its violations of binding international law, by seeing the US nuclear weapons permanently withdrawn.

John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.

Filed Under: Direct Action, Nuclear Weapons, US Bombs Out of Germany, Weekly Column

December 9, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

US Peace Activist to Stand Trial in Germany for Nuclear Weapons Protests

A picture of the John LaForge (and Susan Crane of Redwood City, CA) during go-in action August 6, 2018

HAMBURG – A long-time U.S. peace activist will be tried on two charges of trespassing on Thurs., December 9 in Koblenz Regional Court, Germany on charges stemming from two 2018 protests against US nuclear weapons stationed at Büchel air force base, located in southeastern Germany.

The Koblenz hearing for John LaForge, 65, of Luck, Wisconsin, is an appeal of two May 31, 2021 trespass convictions in Cochem District Court for so-called “go-in” protest actions involving entry into the base during protests on July 15, 2018 and August 6, 2018.

LaForge, a co-director of the nuclear watchdog organization Nukewatch (nukewatchinfo.org) in Wisconsin, helped coordinate delegations of U.S. peace activists to three annual international protests at the nuclear weapons base in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The German base maintains at least 20 US thermonuclear gravity bombs, known as B61-3s and B61-4s, under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force’s 702nd Munitions Support Squadron and the controversial US/NATO program called “nuclear sharing.” Protesters have targeted the site for over 25 years demanding the ouster of the US H-bombs and a halt to their planned replacement.

LaForge has asked the court in Koblenz to hear testimony from three expert witnesses regarding the legal status of the nuclear weapons. If allowed by the court, retired Judge Bernd Hahnfeld, a former board chair of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, would testify regarding the illegality of stationing foreign nuclear weapons in Germany; University of Trier Prof. of Computer Science Karl-Hans Bläsius on the risk of accidental nuclear war; and Univ. of Illinois Professor of Law Francis A. Boyle on his 2002 book, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence.

The legal scholars say the stationing of US nuclear bombs in Germany violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) among others. The NPT prohibits any transfer of nuclear weapons to, or any reception of them from, other countries; and Germany’s reunification treaty, or Final Settlement Treaty, of 1990 renounced the possession of nuclear weapons.

“I participated in these actions because they are the only way to have the outlaw status of nuclear weapons considered by the courts. The public wants these bombs out of Germany. But nuclear weapons’ controllers are anti-democratic and they need a court of law to order them ousted,” LaForge said.

Marion Kuepker of Hamburg, an  anti-nuclear campaigner with Nonviolent Action to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (www.gaaa.org), reports, “In the last two years, about 50 court cases involving dozens of nuclear weapons protesters have taken place in Cochem and Koblenz for nonviolent civil disobedience actions at the Büchel air base.”

Filed Under: Direct Action, US Bombs Out of Germany

October 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Disarmament Activists Confront US Nukes in Germany During Flooding: “Stop the Nuclear Catastrophe Before it Starts”

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021
By Brian Terrell

On July 21, I was walking in the forests surrounding the German Air Force Base at Büchel in the Eifel region with three Catholic Worker friends, Susan van der Hijden of Amsterdam, Netherlands, Susan Crane of Redwood City, California, and Christiane Danowski of Dortmund, Germany. We were there at the end of an “International Week” of protests against the approximately 20 US nuclear gravity bombs known as B61s kept at the base in a “nuclear sharing” agreement with the United States.

In previous days we had visited the entrance gates to the base with our signs and banners and two days before we participated in a “Digging for Life” action outside the fence, near the other end of the runway, where the German pilots lift off and land their Italian-made PA200 Tornado jet fighters, daily training to drop US nuclear bombs on Russia when the order is given. This day we hiked to the other, less accessible, end of the runway, through a forest of dead and dying trees decimated by recent years of drought, unprecedented heat and a massive bark beetle infestation affected by climate change.

In the clearing near where the runway begins, we noticed a couple of “spotters,” hobbyists who got there before us looking to get dramatic photos of the jets taking off. In their company, while we were scouting and imagining potential future protests at the site, we also knew that some action was imminent.

Beyond the fence that marked the boundary of the base from the forest, there was a high berm of earth that shielded from our view the nearby Tornados warming up their engines for takeoff. We could not see, but we heard the purr of their engines turn to a roar and we felt the earth shake and we saw and then smelled a wall, a miasma, of acrid, black, stinking burnt and unburned jet fuel rising above the berm and over our heads, before the jets screamed off away from us to rehearse for the end of everything.

Outside the fence at the Büchel Air Force Base July 19, 2021, protesters including US citizens Susan Crane and Dennis DuVall, at center, joined a symbolic “Digging for Life” action. Photo by Dietrich Gerstner.

Not far from where these Tornado jets were spewing out more than 13 tons of CO2 per flight hour into the atmosphere, cities and towns in the river valleys were cleaning up from recent rains and floods that left more than 177 dead and hundreds more still missing at the time. In some places the rivers rose to the highest in over 100 years, possibly higher than any seen in the last 1,000 years.

Participation in the annual “International Week” in the Covid-19 pandemic was already hampered by the fact that it was held just days after Germany opened its borders to vaccinated visitors from places like the US, and by July 15, the day after my own arrival by air, many railroads and highways were closed by rising water. We heard harrowing travel stories from those few who were able to join us from various points in Germany. Our numbers were much less than expected and the catastrophe of the floods called us to reassess our plans for the week.

We had planned to have enough people to nonviolently blockade the various gates of the base on Friday, July 16, marking the 76th anniversary of the first atomic bomb detonation at Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945, and the 42nd anniversary of the 1979 uranium mine waste spill at Church Rock, New Mexico — the largest accidental release of radioactive materials in US history. We recognized that even with our reduced numbers, such an act of civil resistance would distract police from search and rescue work that many of them were doing in flooded places in the region. Members of our group met with local police and the commander of the base to inform them that instead of a blockade there would be a simple quiet vigil with signs and prayers outside the main gate on July 16; the planned “Digging for Life” action scheduled for three days later would go on.

The original concept of the event was to be a symbolic piece of theater around the base’s new highly armed security fence with surveillance cameras, motion sensors and a deep concrete foundation. The plan that some of us would dig with pink shovels with the impossible aim of making a tunnel under the fortification and get onto and close the runway while others would cheer them on from a picnic in the adjoining meadow, had to be adapted to our reduced numbers and in recognition of the devastation that had been unfolding around us in the preceding days.

The vibrant pink shovels were muted with black paint or tied with black ribbons. Banners with more light-hearted messages written in pastels were left behind and new ones made more in keeping with the moment, in German, white on black, Stop The Next Catastrophe Before It Begins — Abolish Nuclear Weapons!

As the event unfolded, 14 activists from Germany, the US, and the Netherlands were met at the fence by several times that number of civilian and military police, who after an hour arrested four of the most persistent diggers who were soon released without any charges. In light of the $14 million spent on the new fence meant to keep people like us out, the civilian police had better things to do and could easily have ignored our clearly symbolic effort; some in the local press and more in social media blamed us for distracting the police and military from dealing with the aftermath of the floods.

In the midst of their national disaster, only about 1,000 of the 150,000 soldiers in the German military were employed in flood relief and on the day we were digging for life at Büchel, Tornado jets were crisscrossing over our heads, causing police, protesters, soldiers, and members of the press alike to cover our ears from their deafening roar, illustrating what is often ignored and never mentioned in climate negotiations: the huge part that the militaries of the world play in the climate crisis, the US and its allies more than the rest.

Before the digging began at the fence and under the screaming jets, a police detective called my name and with some ceremony served me with papers from the court informing me that I had been accused, convicted and sentenced to a 900 euro fine or 30 days in prison in response to my actions on my last visit to Germany and to Büchel two years ago. It was decided by the court that “through the same act and acting collectively” and “within the scope of the annual meeting and demonstration against nuclear weapons at the airbase of fighter-bomber squadron 33,” I had “gained unlawful access to the military area and its security sector” by cutting holes in the fence. I remember that the military police sergeant who apprehended us was unreasonably upset about the hole we had made, not so much concerned about the weapons of mass destruction that he was guarding nor the violations of the German Constitution and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that they pose. Before leaving Germany, I filed an appeal of my conviction and sentence in the court at Cochem and I hope for the opportunity to argue against the assumed legality of nuclear weapons in a German court.

The United States is preparing to upgrade its current B61 nuclear bombs with the new B61-12, reportedly costing over $20 million each and the German government is looking to soon replace its fleet of Tornados with more sophisticated fighter bombers, both governments spending billions on systems that will significantly lower the threshold of nuclear war and contribute to global warming. There is no solution to the climate crisis and no hope for human life on this planet that does not include disarmament and an end to war.

— Brian Terrell is an Iowa-based peace activist who has spent more than six months in prison for protesting targeted assassinations at US military drone bases. He wrote this report for CommonDreams.

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, US Bombs Out of Germany

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