Two Minneapolis friends who have been monitoring immigration officers’ actions during the Trump administration’s latest crackdown say they were detained without charge for several hours in distressing conditions, denied phone calls, and pressured to rat out protest organizers and people living in th
This is fucking torture
Fun fact: Tear gas is banned by the Geneva Convention as a weapon of war under the chemical weapons provision, but it’s a-ok for use on civilians by law enforcement.
People bring this up frequently but there are lots of things banned in wars that are not banned domestically, so what’s your point?
In response to a comment saying that it’s torture, me stating that it’s banned for use in war by the geneva convention?
Well, connecting the dots there, that if it’s too inhumane/painful/uncontrollable for warfare, it probably shouldn’t be allowed to be used on masses of civilians expressing their rights.
It’s banned in warfare as a blanket ban on chemical weapons, not because it’s too “dangerous/painful/uncontrollable”. Chemical weapons are banned because of the horrific effects of the worst of those weapons, not because of the effects of tear gas, so the ban doesn’t give you much information about tear gas in armed conflict.
There is no appetite for removing the ban for tear gas because there is no appetite by militaries to start lobbing gas of any type at each other, because of the risk of the other side panicking and lobbing back something worse. This obviously is not a concern when police forces use tear gas on a civilian population.
Use of tear gas is a use of force. It can be justified or unjustified. It is wholly unlike the use of chemical weapons in warfare.
Note: I’m not arguing that it’s legal for cops to use them against civilians, just that it’s fucked up that it’s legal for use against civilians but not soldiers.
If that were true, there would be a carve out in the provision for the use of gasses with transient effects, like cs gas. There is none. Just the opposite, there is a carve out for their use against civilians, but they are prohibited in warfare.
Many other countries do not use CS gas in warfare due to the CWC (Australia, Canada, Greece, India, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, etc. - there are a lot). https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule75 => pulls provisions from the laws of various countries as well as combat manuals detailing the usages of riot control gasses and their various rationales.
The US chooses not to interpret the CWC as banning riot control gasses for war, that is a minority position and the US gets away with it like it does many breaches of international law. The US uses riot control gas weapons against civilians… liberally and in a way that most of the world would see as police brutality. It’s use is on the rise globally, but it has been used extremely widely by US cops for a long time and in problematic ways.
If it is used to disperse dangerous protests as a deterrant to advance, sure, I get it. But that is not how it is typically used by US cops. In the US cops have killed a number of people by firing tear gas cannisters at them from close range. They deploy tear gas in the middle of crowds causing panic and the risk of stampede deaths/crowd surges. They deploy tear gas behind crowds causing them to move toward police. They deploy tear gas in situations that do not warrant it, on peaceful protests that may involve at-risk people. They use tear gas in enclosed spaces or against kettled crowds, increasing the risk of death due to respiratory distress.
Human rights groups have noticed this pattern of behavior by cops in the US and increasingly globally. You can find dozens of articles and studies by the CFC, ACLU, Red Cross, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, etc. It is a majority position among human rights groups that these agents should be banned or heavily restricted.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/CCPR/LLW_Guidance.pdf#2006362_E_inside.indd:.7975:1077
I refer you to the following line of my reply:
I refer you to the following line of my reply:
Hopefully it is clear from what I have said that I have not in any way tried to justify the US police’s use of tear gas or their other use of force, though it does seem like you might not be reading what I wrote very carefully.
I’m just pointing out that referring to Laws of War when discussing police action is a non-sequitur.