John Laughland

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John Laughland is a British journalist, academic and author who writes on international affairs and political philosophy. He has taken a number of controversial positions, such as when he criticised Western support for the Serbian opposition to Slobodan Milošević, and when he condemned the November 2003 revolution in Georgia as a "coup d'état".

Laughland has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford, has studied at Munich University, and has been a lecturer at the Sorbonne and at the Institute d'Études Politiques de Paris. He also holds the French post-doctoral degree, the 'habilitation,' for his work on sovereignty in international relations.

He has condemned the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on the grounds that the UN Security Council resolution that created it was illegitimate (the Security Council acted ultra vires by creating it) and because he disagrees with its judicial procedures. He criticises it as a political tribunal and draws attention to its double-standards for refusing to open an investigation into whether NATO committed war crimes in Yugoslavia in 1999. Laughland was as strong a critic of the Kosovo war in 1999 as he was of the Iraq war in 2003.

Laughland has claimed that Ukraine's Presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko's coalition, to whom significant elements of Ukraine's Jewish community have given support [1], were linked with "neo-Nazis", (in The Guardian[2]) that his ultimately successful attempts to seize power were backed on the streets by "druggy skinheads from Lvov" (The Spectator); that reports of mass graves in Iraq were being exaggerated for political purposes; and that concern for the massacres in the Sudan was driven by a lust for oil.

Laughland appears on the list of trustees of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, to whose controversial orientation he may have contributed, and has co-operated with the website antiwar.com, a group of self-described "libertarians" which publishes investigations into the alleged "crimes" of the US government and its allies.

He is also the European director of the European Foundation, a Eurosceptic think-tank chaired by Bill Cash MP. He writes a fortnightly column for www.sandersresearch.com.

[edit] Books

• The Death of Politics: France Under Mitterrand (Michael Joseph, London, 1994)
• Le tribunal pénal international: Gardien du nouvel ordre mondial (François-Xavier de Guibert, Paris, 2003)
• The Tainted Source, the Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea (Little Brown, London 1997; later translated into French, Spanish, Czech and Polish)

'Forthcoming books: 'Israel on Israel,' co-edited with Michel Korinman (Vallentine Mitchell, London, 2006); 'Travesty: the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the corruption of international justice,' (Pluto Press, London, 2007); 'A History of Political Trials,' (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2007); 'Schelling versus Hegel: from German idealism to Christian metaphysics,' (Ashgate, 2007). John Laughland is editor of the January 2007 issue of 'The Monist,' the American journal of philosophy, an issue devoted to the concept of sovereignty.'

[edit] Articles about John Laughland

• "Loons Look to Sudan", The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, 2 August 2004.
• "PR man to Europe's nastiest regimes", The Guardian (UK), 30 November 2004

Articles by John Laughland can be read on the web sites of The Spectator, www.spectator.co.uk and The Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk