iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 28/08/2026

The UN Commission’s recognition of age based persecution of Palestinian children is a breakthrough but mostly it brings partial light fromsaltintears.com/the-time-to-... #arcjustice

The UN Independent International
Commission of Inquiry's report on Israel's deliberate targeting of Palestinian children mirrors the bias in our reflective consciousness. Like international law and practice more generally, the crime is present more than saidin its findings. Its recognition of Israel's age based persecution of Palestininian children is a breakthrough but mostly it
brings partial light. It overlooks its systemic form, limits its finding to its most obvious manifestation (direct child targeting) and leaves out its most effective manifestation (indirect child targeting).

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 27/08/2026

Oh Rima, thank you so much for seeing it. So few people do. I was thinking of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the Ghost Crime I link to it (‘disremembered and unaccounted for’). But also Ingrid Jonker’s The Child ‘present at all assemblies [with a bullet through his brain]’ So many child Ghosts/erasures

It's a Ghost then not only
of Treblinka and Hiroshima but of the
'disremembered and unaccounted for' colonial crimes targeting children in which they were proved.

From http://fromsaltintears.com/the-time-to-choose/the-ghost-crime-against-humanity-waiting-to-be-seen

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at
Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville nor at the police station at Philippi where he lies with a bullet through his brain
...
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings...
The reprise of South African place names at the heart of Ingrid Jonker's poem, a poem recited by Oliver Tambo at the beginning of the end of apartheid, and then Nelson Mandela at its end, continues to play out.
Years later the infants, children and teens targeted and the sites of the atrocities are different but the crime is the same.
From https://fromsaltintears.com/the-time-to-choose/the-child-is-not-dead-ingrid-jonkers-poem-and-the-atrocity-crime-without-a-name & https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-child-is-not-dead-ingrid-jonkers-poem-and-the-atrocity-crime-without-a-name/

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 27/08/2026

Respect Not Sentiment! My response to the UN Special Envoy on Global Education, Gordon Brown’s, opinion piece in The Guardian of March 12 calling for a specialised international criminal court to try crimes against children fromsaltintears.com/the-time-to-... #arcjustice #walkhope

Over 100 years ago Janusz Korczak reproved the 1924 Geneva Declaration on Child Rights for failing to assure children's right to respect. His reproof is still resonant in international law and practice. When justice is pursued for children it's partial. Too often respect is substituted for sentiment.
Emotion matters. The 'upheavals of thought' we feel as we bear (digital) witness to unlawfully killed children carry pre-reflective
'intelligence' that rouse our reflective consciousness and shape reason, as Martha C Nussbaum's scholarship supports. But colouring reason with sentiment partialises children's claims to transformative and remedial justice and attenuates their claim to possess rights.
Read More

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 27/08/2026

The ceremony of innocence prevails limiting international justice for children fromsaltintears.com/the-time-to-... in my examples Iranian and Palestinian children

Innocence as W B Yeats suggested in The Second Coming is a ceremony. In this instance it prevails recreating the fiction that the most serious threat to children is incidental child killing or injury; or in extremity wilful child killing or injury by a supposed modern-day Grendel or Captain of Evil, Think for example Hamas or Iran.
The ceremony is difficult to resist because it creates an appearance of justice. The way it displaces and replaces the principles of non-discrimination and universality, influencing which severe breaches of children's fundamental rights we privilege, which children we pursue justice for and which perpetrators we demand are held to account is mostly unseen.

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 27/08/2026

Quite a list pgwrk-websitemedia.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/production/p...

The European Network of Councils for the Judiciary, ACA-Europe, the International Association of Judges and the Network of Presidents of the Supreme Judicial Courts of the European Union reaffirm our support for the independence of the International Criminal Court, including its judges, prosecutors and staff.
We are united in our condemnation of this most recent initiative by the US Government against the International
Criminal Court.
ENCJ President
RR
Brian O Moore
ACA-Europe President
IAJ President
NPSJCEU President
Donal o sonnels
Michail Pikramenos
Walter Barone
Donal O'Donnell
Chief Justice

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 15/08/2026

Light working off darkness fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/...

Though public international law's
Universal Yes to humanity offers proof that nothing is beyond our statist-representatives, that they may reach for Justice herself, its proving darkness offers proof of the very opposite: that nothing is beneath them, that they may yield to gross injustice
OUR CLAIM TO POSSESS RIGHTS I FROM SALT IN TEARS
snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 12/08/2026

What’s the most fundamental of rights? fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/... #arcjustice #walkhope

We became aware of its existence, Hannah Arendt explains, 'only when millions of people lost no longer possessed] it and could not regain it.' When millions were denied not just a claim to possess rights but its fundament: standing or status as a person (an individual human being).
Now as then, its denial as François de Menthon argued at Nürnberg is a 'crime against human status' and 'the spring for crimes against existence itself.
OUR CLAIM TO POSSESS RIGHTS | FROM SALT IN TEARS
sippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 12/08/2026

‘Can the subaltern speak?’ fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/... #arcjustice #walkhope

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks 'can the subaltern speak?' To this question my answer is the subaltern speaks in silence through the music of what happens. Like Earthsea's Creation of Ea, this version of Fionn Mac Cumhaill's music is the oldest. In its harmonic, it plays out the 'upheavals of thought that call us to freedom and move us to resist injustice. To invoke even in defiance of law transcendent justice to refute needless suffering — pain, distress, privation and harm.
FROM THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIENCE I| FROM SALT IN TEARS
snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 09/08/2026

Snap! from Knockaphuca, Goleen

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 09/08/2026

Why I blend public international law’s Yes to humanity with storytelling fromsaltintears.com/the-art #arcjustice

Unlike art, law has effective power; it makes things happen. Even public international law by its purpose and nature, and through its reasoning mode of thought, conduces things to happen.
Poetry' however as W H Auden quipped
'makes nothing happen. Yet its power to affect 'upheavals of thought' influences the music of what happens. It's the reason Plato banned poets from his Republic. The reason W B Yeats feared 'Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?' The reason Uyghur poets Cry Wind from their jail cells...
THE ART | FROM SALT IN TEARS
snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 09/08/2026

Who has human status? fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/2-proofs-of-injustice-who-has-human-status #arcjustice

Who belongs to this earth? Even before the remembered and accounted for international crimes of the mid 20th-century, the deprivation of meaning and the value of existence itself had begun.
With each iteration of colonialism's supporting logicality (where / the rift is, the break is), its effective and affective power grew, until the threat of having a claim but being unclaimed, racialised and rationalised, came home to Europe, in its most totalising form. Like its proving darkness, it is not a story to pass on.
WHO HAS HUMAN STATUS? |I FROM SALT IN TEARS snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 06/08/2026

I think Rachel Carson might concur

From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)

wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.
There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 06/08/2026

fromsaltintears.com/the-journey

Rather than rising in one bright wave in the mid 20th-century, then, public international law's Yes to humanity rose up from many bright waves, a steady succession of sources, carried along by the music of what happens. Each source emanating from a quivering of the republic of conscience and revealing what Edith Wharton calls a republic of spirit.
FROM THE REPUBLIC OF CONS CIENCE I|
-ROM SALI IN TEARS
snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 05/08/2026

fromsaltintears.com/the-journey

Like disremembered earlier sources, public international law's iteration of our claim to possess rights, its Universal Yes to humanity, is proved from salt in tears. The salt in tears we weep when it becomes clear our solitude might be endless reveals its essential elements. 'Something we hadn't seen revealed. / Only the meaning lits radical intent and inherent limits! wasn't revealed. Though upheld as unwritten law (custom), authorised as written law (treaty law), it is still unspeakably fragile...
FROM THE REPUBLIC OF CONS CIENCE I|
FROMSALTIN rAppels

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 04/08/2026

Derry Soweto Gwangjo Daraa Yangon Jenin and Gaza City El Fasher… Proper nouns or common nouns for young age directed child killing? fromsaltintears.com/the-time-to-...

becomes the now. When a time and place in which human cruelty and dignity existed in extreme parallel is referred to as Gwangju, that name ceases to be a proper noun unique to one city and instead becomes a common noun, as l learned in writing this book. It comes to us-again and again across time and space, and always in the present tense. Even now. From Han Kang's Light and Thread

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 24/07/2026

fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/...

Is there a fissure in the human soul which is
'not constructed to belong / entirely to life? To regard its worth? Up from its breach comes the question: who belongs to this earth? So many know its faulting-lines and the threat they carry.
When 'the dark god bore Persephone away to the underworld, did she have a claim to belong? When the slave catcher dismounted at 124, did Toni Morrison's Beloved?
WHERE / THE RIFT IS, THE BREAK IS | FROM SALT IN TEARS snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 18/07/2026

fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/...

Suffered injustice in its totalising form, therefore, seen and accounted for, brought a core group of states back to 'our beginnings / in which we have an origin like water. To crystallising in treaty law everyone everywhere's emerging customary claim to possess rights. To accepting the state's artifice and yielding its power to say Yes to humanity: the individual and Universal. '
WHERE / THE RIFT IS, THE BREAK IS | FROM SALT IN TEARS snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 17/07/2026

fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/...

Unlike Pain, our susceptibility to needless suffering carries an added pain. A pain that emanates from our sensibility to injustice and consciousness of justice. A pain that is suffered first in the body as rage and only later grief. A pain that again and again reveals what François de Menthon called at Nürnberg the dignity or intrinsic worth of
'each and all' and with it the intelligence of emotions
WHERE / THE RIFT IS, THE BREAK IS | FROM SALT IN TEARS snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 17/07/2026

Kilkilleen this morning, so still and barely a soul at high tide

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 16/07/2026

fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/...

You will not be spared, warns Louise Glück at the Roman portal to the underworld, 'nor will what you love. Our susceptibility to Pain, Martha Nussbaum explains in The Fragility of Goodness, is immanent not only within the temporality of our existence but in the contingency and mutability of everything close to our hearts. The awe we hold for the earth that holds us. The tenderness we feel for a sleeping child.
WHERE / THE RIFT IS, THE BREAK IS | FROM SALT IN TEARS snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 15/07/2026

fromsaltintears.com/the-journey/...

How many love stories come to this threshold? To the point of international human rights law's 'merciless inventory?
In its bones, as the jurist Hersch Lauterpacht suggests citing Sophocles's Antigone, international human rights law holds a story that has been retold again and again over millennia. Each story is unique, its details vary but its fabula or bones remain the same.
WHERE / THE RIFT IS, THE BREAK IS | FROM SALT IN TEARS snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 24/06/2026

From the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul... #agepersecution of Palestinian children (at last…)

274. The Commission finds that the conduct of the Israeli security forces is part of a wider attack that falls under article 7 of the Rome Statute, the chapeau elements of which the Commission has already established (see para. 266). Based on this, the Commission has reasonable grounds to conclude that the crime against humanity of persecution has been perpetrated based on age intersecting with gender, nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion.330 These acts manifested in two distinct manners: (i) deliberate killing by sniper, drone and quadcopter of Palestinian children, from newborns to adolescents, targeted by head and upper body shots, across different areas of Gazal; and ii) arbitrary arrests 32 of adolescent boys systematically labelled as "terrorists", "suspects" or "fighters", even after age-verifying identity cards were presented.

336. The Commission finds that the Israeli security forces perpetrated age-based persecution against Palestinian children, particularly against boys, intersecting with gender, nationality, ethnicity, culture and religion under Rome Statute Article 7 (see paras. 273-274).
This is evidenced by deliberate targeting through (i) precision shootings knowingly aimed at children; and (i) arrests, detention and mistreatment of boys falsely and presumptively labelled as 'terrorists' or 'fighters' despite age-verifying identity cards. 443 These acts have been part of a widespread, systematic attack constituting the crime against humanity of persecution. In relation to the direct targeting of children where Israeli security forces shot and killed or harmed Palestinian children, such conduct is also part of a strategy or plan to destroy the biological continuity of the Palestinians in Gaza (see further sub-section. III.
Genocide).

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 24/06/2026

fromsaltintears.com/the-art

Read the Slavery Convention (1926) and you acquire knowledge, but read Toni Morrison's Beloved and you will feel its radical or root meaning. A roaming that will not stop until it is seen and heard. A roaming that resonates before it's apprehended and lingers long after, urging us when the time comes to choose to arc the music of what happens towards radical (root) justice.
THE ART FROM SALT, IN TEARS snippets

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 23/06/2026

Midsummer delights on Knockaphuca, Goleen

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 20/06/2026

Name the crime against humanity fromsaltintears.com/the-time-to-choose/the-ghost-crime-against-humanity-waiting-to-be-seen #agepersecution

Let us be clear about what this means.
These children were not killed in a warzone. They were killed in their homes. In their schools. Playing football. Fishing. They were shot, bombed, and struck by quadcopters.

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 20/04/2026

The Ghost crime against humanity, felt more than known, present more than said (revised) fromsaltintears.com/the-time-to-choose/the-ghost-crime-against-humanity-waiting-to-be-seen The example: Israel’s persecution of Palestinian children #anychildismychild #internationallaw #childrights #spéirgorm

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 12/04/2026

And that’s the meaning I intend when I call for radical justice for children ✨ fromsaltintears.com/radical-justice-4-kids

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 07/04/2026

From Annie Shiel and Priyanka Motaparthy’s In the U.S. Strike on an Iranian School, What a Serious Military Investigation Should Look Like www.justsecurity.org/134898/iran-...

In the case of the Minab school strike, it is appropriate and expected that the Pentagon has announced a formal investigation.
However, it is also important to consider the command environment created by senior military leaders. Secretary of Defense Hegseth has famously denounced "stupid rules of engagement." He has spoken of giving "no quarter" in Iran, an approach that is specifically prohibited under international humanitarian law. In the context of the Minab strike, he has repeatedly made comments stressing that the United States does not target civilians. However, deliberately targeting civilians should not be the threshold for serious concern and inquiry into civilian harm events, nor is it required for an incident to constitute a violation of IHL or war crime. Recklessly doing so, or killing civilians through gross negligence, could also rise to that level.

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 05/04/2026

The North Atlantic roar post-storm

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 04/04/2026

From Letter of Over 100 *US* Based International Law Experts: U.S. Strikes on Iran Violate UN Charter and May Be War Crimes www.justsecurity.org/135423/profe...

The strike on Minab primary school is particularly concerning. On February 28, Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, Iran, was struck, resulting in the deaths of at least 175 people, many of them children, according to Iranian officials. Based on easily accessible online information and commercially available satellite imagery, it appears the building had been used as a school for a decade. President Trump denied U.S. responsibility, falsely stating that
"It was done by Iran." However, a preliminary investigation by the Department of Defense reportedly determined that the U.S. conducted the strike, and the targeting had been based on outdated intelligence. The strike likely violates international humanitarian law, and if evidence is found that those responsible were reckless, it could also be a war crime.
The strike is among the deadliest single attacks by the U.S. military on civilians in recent decades.

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 29/03/2026

How many emigrant children have suffered this injustice quietly? Feeling it more than understanding?

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sarah field @fromsaltintears.com · 25/03/2026

Why? Surely Daniel O’Connell will come back to haunt Ireland? #spéirgorm

From Patrick Geoghegan’s Liberator Daniel O’Connell

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