For the first time in history, one country has attacked—at the same time and in one audacious move—all the other ones.
China committed that horrific crime by taking steps, in December 2019 and January of last year, to deliberately spread COVID-19 beyond its borders.
The international community must now impose the most severe costs on the Chinese regime to, among other things, establish deterrence. Why? China’s regime committed the crime of this century and may well be planning another horrific act.
There are extremely disturbing indications that the People’s Liberation Army of the Communist Party either engineered SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus causing this disease, or warehoused this pathogen in a laboratory, most likely the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. The lab was storing more than 1,500 strains of coronavirus, it conducted dangerous gain-of-function experiments, it failed to adhere to safety protocols, and it is located just miles from the first identified COVID-19 case.
The first case, by the way, has no connection to the Wuhan wet market. Those who believe in the zoonotic theory of transmission point to the wet market as the place of transmission.
Americans do not need to wait any longer, though, to make a determination of Beijing’s culpability. Even if the coronavirus did not start out as a biological weapon, the world now has enough information to conclude that China’s regime turned it into one.
Beijing first publicly admitted that COVID-19 was transmissible from one human to another on Jan. 20 of last year. Yet doctors in Wuhan certainly knew by the second week of the preceding December that human-to-human transmissions were occurring at a fast pace. So Beijing knew or had to know a few days later.
To make matters worse, Chinese ruler Xi Jinping pressured countries not to impose travel restrictions on arrivals from China while he was locking down, among other places, Wuhan and the surrounding areas of his own country. By locking down China, he was obviously thinking he was stopping the spread of disease. By leaning on other countries not to impose travel restrictions, he knew or had to know that he was spreading the disease. The passengers leaving China turned an epidemic that should have been confined to central China into a global pandemic.
“Governments whose decisions knowingly lead to death and suffering of millions of innocents and massive economic dislocation and destruction must be held fully responsible—morally, legally, and financially,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told Gatestone.
The path to holding China responsible, at least legally and financially, is not an easy one, unfortunately.
As John Houghtaling of Gauthier Murphy & Houghtaling, a leading class-action law firm, told Gatestone, there are “three big hurdles” to recovery: the doctrine of sovereign immunity, the burden of proof, and the collection of judgments.
The first barrier stops a lawsuit in its tracks. U.S. legislation, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, blocks most actions against foreign governments.
Indeed, foreign policy analysts of all stripes are against dropping sovereign immunity, arguing that the issue is one of “reciprocity,” that other governments bar suits against America because America bars suits against them. They argue that U.S. officials would be subject to endless harassment if Washington stripped other governments of this protection.
Proponents of sovereign immunity make valid points, but there are overriding factors. Crimes against humanity are so heinous that no one should be barred from seeking compensation.
The Communist Party is asset-rich. Not only does it control China’s central government—and therefore has access to its assets—the People’s Liberation Army reports directly to the Party’s Central Military Commission, not the state. That potentially makes the Chinese military subject to seizure pursuant to a court judgment.
Punishing China, by seizing its assets, for example, would send a powerful message to Beijing that Washington will not tolerate the killing of Americans. It is absolutely essential that the Biden administration disabuse Chinese leaders of the notion that they can spread the next pathogen, or whatever else they are planning, without cost.
Let us remember what is at stake. In China’s laboratories, researchers are now cooking up far more deadly pathogens than SARS-CoV-2, including those that would leave the Chinese immune but sicken or kill everyone else. The next disease from China, therefore, could leave China as the world’s only viable society. Call it a “civilization-killer.”
America, therefore, must #MakeChinaPay.