Bolivia: President Proposes to Take US to International Tribunal

from The Argentina Independent

by Chelsea Gray, 07 August 2013.


Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, announced yesterday that he will propose UNASUR to bring the US before an international tribunal for human rights violations after his plane was denied airspace in Europe in the beginning of July.
Speaking yesterday to local newspaper La Razón, Morales announced that “I’m going to propose in the next UNASUR meeting with all the other presidents to bring the United States before an international court in respect to human rights and international diplomacy treaties. This action is fundamental so that other presidents in the world will not have to go through what I went.”
The diplomatic scandal in question took place on 2nd July when Morales’ plane was re-routed on its return journey from a conference in Moscow as several European countries denied him airspace mistakenly believing that former US Intelligence Agent, Edward Snowden, was smuggled on board. The Bolivian President has since accepted the apologies from the European states involved, but has attributed the incident to Europe cow-tailing to the “repressive policies” of the US.
In addition, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) -an organisation that brings together South American and Caribbean countries- has “commissioned a legal and technical study to find out what legal arguments exist” in order to prosecute the US for espionage. The diplomatic violation came to light when Snowdon leaked the extent of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance of energy, military, politics, and terror, activity across Latin America.
While Morales has stated the importance of restoring US ambassadors in Bolivia, which have not been present since Ambassador Philip Goldberg and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) were expelled in 2008, he also claimed that there would always be mistrust.
He asserted that “there is a look about the US, of pride, of submission, of using geopolitics for monopolistic purposes… It is never going to change…We must re-establish ambassadors, formalities, but we are not going to be trustful.”
Speaking of his disappointment with the US President, Morales declared that “I used to have confidence in Obama, who himself comes from a discriminated sector. But I cannot understand it when one who was discriminated against then discriminates against another.”