GENEVA Former President George W. Bush has canceled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday. Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say. Leftist groups had also called for a protest on the day of his visit next Saturday, leading Keren Hayesod's organizers to announce that they were cancelling Bush's participation on security grounds -- not because of the criminal complaints. Swiss officials countered that, as a former head of state, Bush would be protected with a level of diplomatic immunity, and Keren Hayesod, the group that had invited Bush, said the court actions against the former president did not play into the decision to go forward with the dinner without him. Dominique Baettig, a member of the Swiss parliament from the right-wing People's Party, wrote to the Swiss federal government last week calling for the arrest of Bush for alleged war crimes if he came to the neutral country.
– A visit by George W. Bush to Switzerland later this month has been called off because the host charity says it feared leftist protests would get out of hand. Human rights groups, meanwhile, say the real reason is because they planned to lodge a criminal complaint against Bush accusing him of sanctioning torture, reports Reuters. Bush had been scheduled to speak to a Jewish group Feb. 12 in Geneva, and an attorney for the group says the potential legal action played no role in the decision to cancel, notes the Hill. "We didn't want to put people and property in Geneva at risk," he said, citing plans by protesters to arrive en masse. A spokesman for Human Rights Watch had a different take: "He's avoiding the handcuffs." Noting that Bush acknowledged in his memoir that he approved waterboarding, "authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite" him, said the spokesman.