Depleted Uranium Friendly Fire
So the world is suddenly agog when a British soldier gets killed by depleted uranium friendly fire. It bears repeating: there’s nothing remotely friendly about dirty bullets made of poisonous uranium. The US complains that Iraq may be storying proscribed chemical weapons while ther Pentagon continues using radiological weapons for as long as it can.
Efforts by the US/UK to keep depleted uranium off the agenda of the UN Sub-Commission on Protection and Promotion of Human Rights failed this August (2002) as the Sub-Commission clearly decided that depleted uranuim weaponry qualify as weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and authorized a prominent member, Justice Y. Sik Yuen (Mauritius) to prepare a study on the topic.
Laws which are breached by the use of DU shells include: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which expressly forbid employing ‘poison or poisoned weapons’ and ‘arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering’.
Earlier here.