ICC needs to investigate crimes against humanity committed by US, allies

"If the International Criminal Court had any moral authority and credibility.it would investigate the use of depleted-uranium weapons in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the alleged use of chemical weapons, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus in Fallujah and elsewhere," wrote an opinion piece that appeared on the Asia Times website on Monday. In the article titled "Russia booted from UNHRC: weaponizing human rights", the authors argued that the vote on Russia's suspension from the United Nations Human Rights Council last Thursday demonstrated the instrumentalization of defending human rights by the US-led NATO countries which themselves had committed a lot of rights-related sins around the world. According to Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at least 180,000 to 200,000 Iraqi civilians died in the war that lasted more than seven years after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, using weapons such as depleted uranium bombs and white phosphorus bombs, which led to a sharp rise in the rate of birth defects in Iraq after the war. In 2001, the largest bomb short of a nuclear weapon ever was used, the "mother of all bombs", in Afghanistan, and the stream of bombs that lasted for 20 years there has "carried depleted uranium into groundwater systems in the east and south especially, where birth defects among both humans and animals are now possibly endemic, as appears to be the case in Fallujah, Iraq," wrote the London-based RSA.