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Military - new material (72)

01 January 2011

Human Rights Groups Announce Bush Indictment for Convention Against Torture Signatory States. European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, 7.2.11. Torture victims were to have filed criminal complaints, with 2,500-pages of supporting material, in Geneva against former US President George Bush, who was scheduled to speak at an event there on 12 February. When Bush cancelled his trip to avoid prosecution, the complaints were made public and it was announced that the Bush Torture Indictment would be waiting wherever he travels next. According to international law experts at the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), “former presidents do not enjoy special immunity under the Convention against Torture (CAT)”. Human Rights Watch has called for Bush to be prosecuted in the USA. This website article includes links to key documents. http://www.ecchr.eu/news_details.402/items/bush-indictment.html

The SIPRI Top 100 arms-producing companies 200. Stockholm International Peace research Institute, 21.2.11. The SIPRI Top 100 lists the world’s 100 largest arms-producing companies (excluding Chinese companies), ranked by their arms sales. It is based on the SIPRI Arms Industry Database, which contains financial and employment data on the world’s major arms-producing companies. It observes that: “Despite the continuing global economic recession in 2009, the total arms sales of the SIPRI Top 100 of the world’s largest arms-producing companies increased by $14.8 billion from 2008 to reach $401 billion, a real increase of 8 per cent.” The report lists the US company, Lockheed Martin, as the world’s leading company, followed by Britain’s BAE Systems with the US companies Boeing, Northrup Grunman, General Dynamics and Raytheon next. The largest western European firms were BAE, followed by EADS and Italian-based Finmeccanica.