A talk given by Leonard Angel, Philosophy Instructor Douglas College New Westminster BC, & President WFC-VB. It was given on May 15 2003 to the public sponsored by World Federalists of Canada, Vancouver Branch.

1. Some ancient beginnings of international awareness.

To start with, here’s something written a few years ago. It says:

"If it’s firmly rooted, you can’t pull it out.

If you hug onto it tightly, it won’t drop.

The offerings of our offspring will always be given.

Cultivate this in the individual,

And the individual’s virtue will be true.

Cultivate this in the family,

And the virtue spreads.

Cultivate this in the village,

And the virtue lasts.

Cultivate this in the nation,

And the virtue overflows.

Cultivate this everywhere under the heavens

And the virtue is universal.

Therefore take individuality to observe individuality,

Take the family to observe the family,

Take the village to observe the village,

Take the nation to observe the nation,

Take all things under heaven to observe all things under heaven.

How?

Use This."

I really like the last line. "Use This." I think ‘This’ means This, right here, right now! All this! The text is from The Way and its Power, or the Tao Te Ching, compiled sometime between 2300 to 2600 years ago. It was a long time ago, but look at what the author was talking about: the individual, the family, the village, the nation, and the universal condition. We all want to fill our virtue at these levels of existence. And what’s fascinating about the passage is it doesn’t stop at the nation. It goes right through to universality for all things under heaven.

Diogenes the Greek philosopher, from about the same time period, was officially a slave. He had no citizenship, he was captured while at sea. In slavery he is supposed to have said, "Sell me to that man. He needs a master." In one of his most famous remarks, he said, "I am a cosmopolitan," meaning, "I am a citizen of the cosmos." Today, to say somebody is a cosmopolitan sounds like saying the person is comfortable living in many cities, but the original proper meaning of cosmopolitan is a bit stronger than that.

I think the biggest social change that’s taken place in the last few thousand years is that whereas, then, few people, almost no one, saw themselves as cosmopolitans, citizens of the universe, today, we are all cosmopolitans. We are all citizens of the world, in addition to being citizens of our states. And we’re learning how to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world. It’s not an easy task. How can we be individuals, family members, community members, nation members, and global citizens as well? How do we join in a crucial building task, helping to make the complex world a better place? How can everyone here participate in the building of international law?

The first thing we want to do is remember something that’s very hard to name, but it’s important. It’s so hard to name that it’s called by too many names, and I want to add to the profusion of names, and create a new name for it, the practice of completeness. Many people will say, I want to be a global citizen, but I’m not quite sure how. I think this already shows the practice of completeness.

Why do we have this difference between now and ancient times? Why is it that there is so much global consciousness now, whereas before there was very little?

The answer is simple. It has to do with the degree of interconnectedness in the world.

2. The degree of interconnectedness in the world

In ancient times there was interconnectedness around the globe, but the links themselves were sporadic and infrequent if they occurred at all. Over tens of thousands of years, people travelled from Africa throughout Europe and Asia, beyond to Australia and into the Pacific islands, and also over the connection from Siberia to Alaska, down into the Americas. Over the thousands of prehistoric years, we were interconnected, in a weak way, by travel. Later as city building and written history came into being, we interconnected in some of the routes by trade for goods as well. Goods travelled between China, India, the Middle East and Europe, and also between Africa and Europe and Asia too. And there was trade within the Americas.

In the 15^th and 16^th centuries there began a larger trade and migration connection between Europe and the Americas. And for the last few hundred years the trade and migration interconnections around the world have been increasing dramatically. Many areas may previously have had a universalistic global element in the ideology, but the ideologies were still highly distinct and different from each other, and without real awareness of the cultural differences. The actual human contacts before the 16^th century were still limited in scope, that there were real absences in the interconnection state of the world.

With the trade interconnections all around the world beginning in the late 16^th century came a lot of other substantial connections, and a lot of substantial problems, too. Because there were huge differences between the cultures, the attitudes of the groups toward each other were full of suspicion, distance, hostility, and exploitation. As we all know, the exploitation by the Europeans of the American and other societies was enormous and horrendous. So, too, the exploitation by various groups within Europe, within Asia, within Africa, and within the Americas, too, was problematic. There have been real problems all around the globe, and the more interconnections, the more opportunities there have been both for cultural exchange, improvement and enlightenment, and exploitation and abuse.

Let’s look now at the various dimensions of interconnections we have in our own time around the globe.

I don’t think there’s much to disagree about here, but it’s useful to notice it, and expand some features of the way it’s usually presented, too.

Economics: the world is amazingly interconnected economically. Just take a look at the products in any store to see the range of where they’re from. And consider the mining, the key steel factors, the oil factors, the other means of production factors. These goods trade all around the world. The world is deeply economically interconnected.

Ecology: There’s a border between Canada and the US, but it crosses over the Great Lakes. The air pollutants and water pollutants produced in Canada aren’t kept away from the US, nor are those pollutants produced in the US kept from Canada. And this is, of course, symptomatic of the ecological interconnectedness all around the globe.

Culture: Many of the societies in the world are multicultural, and it’s wonderful that Canada is as highly multicultural as it is. But even in the less multicultural societies, the cultural influences from elsewhere are enormous. I was in Japan in 1977 in quiet villages in Shikoku Island. When I walked down the street, wherever I went, there were about twenty kids who would gather, hover around me, pointing and giggling in a warm, friendly way, "Gaijin, gaijin," or "foreigner, foreigner". For many of the kids, I was the first gaijin they had ever seen. Of course having me there made a cultural mix for them. And we all know the real cultural mix is a lot stronger than that. The way the western cultures operate has come to influence Japanese understandings in interesting ways.

For example, I study philosophy, and I was struck with the fact that in Japan one key aspect of the study of philosophy in the universities was doing what was called ‘Dekansho’. Dekansho sounds like some authentic Japanese notion, but the phrase is an acronym, and De-Kan-Sho stands for ‘Descartes, Kant, and Schopenhaur’. The name is a Nipponization of the cultural mix. On the other side there is an equally strong Nipponization of understanding in western transpersonal psychology, but we’ll posptpone that discussion for another occasion.

Resources: We’re all dependent on key resources. And yet the resources of the world system are subject to pressures from states other than the states in which the resources lie. For example, the use of water in state A can affect the way water flows or doesn’t flow from state A to state B. And some of our resources are not resources within any state at all. The resources of the open seas, for example, are resources not in any state at all. And, although this is hardly news, air moves. As it moves, so too moves any radiation the air might have from atomic explosions or accidental releases, and so forth, and this affects all states into which the air moves.

Information: The world is informationally amazingly connected. The world wide web system is only a few years old, and yet it’s already having such strong effects on levels of interconnection. A few months ago I needed to talk to an expert in statistical analysis and code-breaking methods. Within a day I had a real conversation with an expert in probabilities and code work who lives in Australia. I researched who he is, found him, wrote him my question, received an answer, and so on, all on the web and email within about one day. That saved me about a month or two of waiting including what would have been extra hours of hard work.

Through ordinary journals as well as the e-journals, scientific contributions in one part of the world are quickly known all around the scientific world. And for all the natural sciences, and for most of the social sciences, it is but a single scientific world. The DNA maps in Canada are maps of the same DNA that is mapped anywhere else in the world.

Politics: There are political systems all over the world, but for a few hundred years we’ve witnessed the emergence of global political institutions. In the last century we had the League of States, and that failed to create circumstances for peace, and the United Nations came into existence after WWII. Whether the UN is failing we’ll come back to a little later. Whether it’s failing or not, the organizations are partial, incomplete. But for now we want to notice that the existence of a global political institution is an important development. The United Nations system has so many branches, and however inadequately, the branches do function in important ways.

Law: Law is inseparable from the political reality, but for our purposes the growth of global law is crucial. And it will become our focus. Here we just want to mention the existence of global customary law, regional, global, and other forms of treaty law, global governance through the UN, economic law within widely binding, though problematic institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To say that these bodies function as international legal systems is not to say that they’re doing good things, nor bad things. In noticing what’s happening globally we have to include all the global institutions with strong legal effects, whether we disagree with the laws or not. Of course we have to also mention that some of the new global laws are focussed on cooperative use of unowned parts of the planet, others on regulation of international affairs. We’ll return to the formations of international law and our prospects, tasks, and needs soon.

Morality: Morality is not usually included in a list like this, but I think it’s vital to understand how there is the emergence of a new global moral understanding. This is an important and pivotal point. It used to be thought that there is a moral plurality around the world. But that sense is quickly disappearing, and I think this is extremely important to recognize, and to applaud. One quick way to see how the perception of a moral plurality is disappearing fast is to look at what happened a hundred and ten years ago, and then what happened ten years ago. A hundred and ten years ago, in 1893, there was a first parliament of world religions in Chicago. It was a great meeting of all the world religions at a time when plurality including plurality in ethics was a sort of assumption. In 1993 there was a one hundred year anniversary parliament of the world religions, and with it came an interesting idea: to express common moral and ethical understanding among all the world religions as part of the conference. "A common moral and ethical understanding among all the world religions"? Sounds odd, or would have sounded odd a hundred and ten years ago, but it didn’t sound odd in 1993. And they worked at it. The result is a fascinating and inspiring work. It’s called A Global Ethic, The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. (And the declaration of the Parliament was published in book form by Continuum in NY 1993). The declaration shows a common moral understanding through the great world religions and the less well known ones too, and I think it also includes fundamental and common moral and ethical understanding for secular humanists. This most definitely doesn’t mean that all religious exponents are supposed to have the same views of the universe, but it does mean that there is a global understanding of human ethical needs and demands. It signals a common moral understanding, and this is vital for our enterprise.

So let’s look at the ethical needs and consider the sort of social law that accompanies it. Wherever interconnectedness reaches a certain level, then, due to a natural pressure of the complexity, and moral factors that ride along with it, a legal system evolves with the purpose of enabling the interconnections to be predictable, orderly, grounded in basic respect, and, most importantly, to enable resolution of disputes to take place. Of course I’m not saying that respect, order, prediction, and dispute resolution works well. It’s just that as interconnection develops, so does the need for a new level system of organization. And a new legal system at the higher level develops. What are levels here? Individual, family, village, nation-state, and the globe.

It’s our job to participate as droplets of water in the ocean of the world, in the creation of good systems of international organization.

To do this we need to understand the big picture and the long term process. We don’t look long term into the past and medium term into the future as much as we need to. Let’s ponder how big the political changes have already been in the last few thousand and few hundred years. We’re not just talking about travels and degrees of interconnection now. Now we’re focussing on political structures and how they’ve changed in crucial and significant ways over the long term past.

In the book of Deuteronomy (16: 20), we find "justice, justice shalt thou pursue." People have commented on the double justice for centuries. Why double justice? However one answers the question one says it’s because there are many demands on justice.

3. The importance of the transition from vengeance systems to public justice systems

In what we can call the tribal period, there was a mix of vengeance and judgement. The tribal chief might sometimes issue a judgement, but oftentimes the task would fall to the victim’s family to institute punishment on the perpetrator or the family of the perpetrator of the crime. The uneasy relation between the vengeance system and the judgement system became transformed when the judgement system became a system in which people who were trained to be impartial judges took over from the chief or other such authorities. Also there was a complication in the relation between the king system, a system with a standing army, and the justice system. But nonetheless, in my opinion, one of the great developments of the human community was the creation of a system that replaced vengeance as a method of dealing with crime.

Vengeance was replaced by a public justice system. One of the key virtues of a public justice system is the requirement by both the disputants in a dispute—whether it’s civil or criminal—that they stand as equals before a judge who is looking at the matter under the law. Also crucial, and hidden in what I just said, is the expression of the victim’s perspective through the public itself. That’s why, one way or another, we have the state versus the defendant rather than the victim or victim’s family versus the defendant. That’s a huge transformation from the perspective of the victim versus the defendant to the perspective of the public versus the defendant.

And we want to notice one other crucial feature of this transformation. Both love and vengeance are what can be regarded as one-to-one systems. In love, one person looks at another, and values the other person. I love you. Of course there is intimate sexual love, and there is intimate but not sexual love. There is love of children for parents and parents for children, there is love among family members, there is affectionate love among friends, there is comradeship in work, and there is the respectful love of fellow citizens. So although there can be a love relationship between on citizen and all other citizens, nonetheless, this love is structurally the sum of all the one-to-one love and respect relationships.

Similarly, the vengeance relationship is a one-to-one relationship. A did something bad to B, so B will take vengeance, and do something harmful, as punishment, to A. Even if someone in A’s family murders a member of B’s family, B can still act for the victim and punish the members of A’s family in vengeance for what happened to the victim. The relationship of vengeance is a one-to-one relation, like that of love.

But public justice in which the perspective of the victim is taken on by the public, and the dispute is then between the public representing the victim, and the defendant accused of the crime. But this dispute requires that there be a third party. The third party is also an appointee of the public, namely, the judge. And the judge has been schooled as much as possible in impartiality in determining whether the defendant is guilty of the charge.

So what we have is the transformation of a one-to-one emotional relationship into a three way emotional relationship. And in this three way emotional relationship there is essentially, the taking of the loving respectfulness of citizens, and the use of that love so as to establish as much equality before the law and the judge as we can. The three way relationship of justice transforms the two way love and respect of citizens into a three way relationship, and although feelings of vengeance will remain in the victim and the victim’s family, these feelings are no longer the agents in determining guilt and administering punishment.

So this is the first step in the evolution of a deep system of respect and justice—the creation of a public justice system in which the victim’s perspective is expressed by the public itself.

But this is only the first step in the entire process. The transformation whereby people gave up the vengeance system was enormous, and it’s almost impossible for us now to feel the huge differences in ways of approaching crime comparing the pre public justice system with the public justice system. We take for granted the public justice system. We no longer the difficulty in the transition three thousand years ago or so when, spot by spot, in different parts of the world, the switch from vengeance to public justice emerged.

And we’re going through an equally profound transformation now. We’re moving from a system in which public justice tends to be restricted to the players within a state, to a system in which justice is not only justice for the players within a state, but also justice for the cosmopolitans, justice for the citizens of the world. We’re at the very beginnings of a global justice movement, which has had some important accomplishments.

4. The second part of the transition from vengeance systems to systems of public justice

Psychologically, many people around the world are only part way there. States are often thought of as having, one by one, an ultimate or complete sovereignty. But there’s something wrong, and incomplete, about that picture. It’s not that there is no sovereignty within a state. Of course there is. But increasingly, the sovereignty within a state is merely jurisdictional sovereignty, the sovereign right to pass laws, within standards of human decency, within its own territory. The way a state relates to other states, at any of the dimensions, can only be within a broader jurisdictional authority to make law.

Unfortunately, the United Nations’ Charter still regards the states as being the primary agents, and a sum of states, with special states having special powers, as the complete picture. I think this is a sort of takeover from the way we think of the individual. We think of ourselves as having a kind of absolute sovereignty. However, I’d say that a more proper view is that we individuals only share in distributed sovereignty. Similarly, although we think of states as having absolute sovereignty, really, states with highly complex interconnectedness such as we just saw, share in an overall distributed sovereignty. This distributed sovereignty needs to emerge in a clearer way, and it needs to be expressed in a public justice manner.

Also, the Security Council of the UN gives special status for victors after World War Two. There are five veto power states on the Security Council, and only the Security Council has the authority to impose military settlements anywhere in the world. The UN charter allows the Security Council, and only the Security Council to apply military resolutions of threats to peace and order, and the military resolutions requires consent by a majority in the Security Council including the consent of the veto powers. The only exceptions to this are acts of immediate self-defense, which can be taken by any state. So there is a sort of internal confusion in the very Charter of the UN on issues of where sovereignty lies. The states are supposed to be sovereign. The Security Council has military authority over any region in the world. And anyway, the Security Council has an internal structure limited by the conditions that created it in the 1940’s.

In any case, even ignoring the internal confusion in the Charter of the UN, what if there is disagreement between states? And what if the disagreement is over important matters for so many of the citizens of the world? Then the states—if they’re powerful enough—also sometimes think they have the authority within their supposedly absolute sovereignty to do what they think is necessary. From this we have been getting war after war, just as for centuries we had slavery. We just had a war to obtain regime change in Iraq started by a powerful country acting against the international laws at many levels. Nonetheless there are already the germs of law, and established law, too, in fact, to remove tyrannical regimes by international law. We’ll come back to this soon enough.

For now, it’s the evolution of international law we’re focussing on.

Let’s sum up our situation. In the early period we had the three ‘p’s’: princes, priests, and plebians. The princes, and the priests, religious authorities if they’re separate, made laws, where a law is a rule that binds the conduct of the members of a community.

In the 18^th century, there was advocacy of human rights and the public realm, so in many parts of the world parliaments and legislatures replaced the powers of the princes and the priests. For the last few hundred years we live in either monarchies, usually where almost all legislative power is in the parliaments, or in republics (without a monarch)—some democratic, some non-democratic, although that’s a very slippery term—or in a theocracy in which a religious system conveys the ultimate legal authority. It’s within this context that we can wonder about the relations between these three types of states, and about whether there is a need for international laws between them.

States engaged in wars. Naturally, there arose customs concerning the wars: customs to protect diplomats when they were engaged in negotiation, customs in regard to the armies, and so on. These customs became sufficiently widespread that they were regarded as lawful rules. So that gave us customary international law. It’s an important beginning, but it’s hardly the end of the story. After all, a lot of customary international law covers customs during warfare. And warfare is itself so horrendous!

In fact, and this is the important point here, warfare is a preservation of the vengeance system of conflict resolution into the international arena. Where vengeance was replaced within the state by the public justice system, the international system still sees dispute cycles, including vengeance cycles, getting deeper and more vicious until war after war breaks out. Our key problem now is that we’re trying to figure out how to complete the process of transition from one-to-one dispute resolution systems into three way justice systems.

And there are many other problems between states as well. For example, there are border difficulties between states, there are trade law difficulties, including cartel problems, and suchlike, there are immigration law difficulties, and there are prosecution arrangements between states that need to be made for cross-country crimes or citizens, and humanitarian crises through disease spread like AIDs, and natural disasters, requiring more than single state action.

These sorts of problems have given rise to international laws through written contracts between states as to how such difficulties are to be dealt with. The laws governing both international customs and contracts were themselves customary, but recently, they too became a matter for treaty. In 1969 the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties was signed; and in 1980 it became effective.

And most importantly, there was also internal abuse problems. Let’s look at internal abuse problems for a moment. It used to be the case, and, from the practical point of view, in some locales, it still is the case, that politicians acting explicitly as law-abiding politicians are effectively exempt from prosecution. No one from state B could put a politician from state A on trial, whatever that politician did. And if the politician was acting as a politician within the statutory law of the land, then they were following the laws. So there wouldn’t be any vehicle inside the state to put an abusive politician, yet one following the statutory laws of the land, on trial.

But this had to end. For example, the tyranny of Hitler, and the tyranny of those who followed his instructions, all of which were within the statutory laws of the Third Reich, had to be brought to trial for what they did. So a prosecution of the leaders of the defeated powers of WWII took place. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials marked an extremely important transition in human history. Although it was the trial by the victors of the defeated’s leaders, nevertheless, it enunciated crucial notions. There had to be recognized international laws to prevent gross abuses from being committed. There were plain ordinary indecent actions and indecent, abusive policies, and indecent abusive laws, and there came a recognition that the world needs to have a form of recourse for those who would be targeted by such laws and practices.

So the Nuremberg laws, preventing racial killings and genocide, came to be enunciated as international laws. This was an amazing transition in which politicians themselves, creating and following the statutory laws of their own states could nonetheless be held accountable to a deeper and stronger international law of human decency. Something amazingly significant was happening.

And the UN, formed in mid 1945, established the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 10 1948. This was a morally compelling document, although it didn’t have enforcement teeth. So we can see the multi-levelled functioning of international law, where the levels include moral power without teeth, all the way to moral power with teeth. And I think we have to keep in mind the multi-leveled way in which international laws come into being. There will be mere beginnings of international laws, and these beginnings are definitely incomplete, but the beginnings are essential toward make the law complete.

Confucius said that there is the rectification of names. Language has great power, just as it often has no power. And, sometimes, over time, what was merely enunciated without teeth will grow some teeth. And first come the front teeth, then come the side teeth. Right now we’re at a fantastic turning point. The International Criminal Court was created in 1998, and began to come into effect in July 1 2002, after enough ratifications of the treaty took place. That gave its participants a lot of teeth, even if not all of the teeth. This is the first permanent international criminal court. And it’s highly significant. It has an opportunity to work for a hundred nations, and there will be more, too—a permanent court to engender a good sort of fear in politicians. If they commit crimes of war, crimes of genocide, or crimes against humanity, the elements for each having been spelled out in detail, the politicians of members of the Assembly or politicians who commit crimes on citizens of members of the Assembly, or politicians committing crimes within the borders of members of the Assembly, will be brought to trial.

So what’s emerging from all this is that international law is crucial. It’s required given the level of complexity, the level of interconnection that we have. And it is emerging. Now we want to look at how each of us can participate in creating new international law.

5. How each of us can participate in creating new international law: first part on the NGOs

As citizens of a state and as citizens of the world, we are all parts of this process of the emerging international legal system. Now we want to understand our specific roles in continuing to do what needs to be done to help make the world a better place.

Let’s get down to some details. There are two main points I want to make now. The first is the crucial role that NGO’s are playing. The formation of hundreds of non-governmental organizations involved in the creation of international law around the world is an important part of the current process. NGO’s are vital in so many international levels. We all know of many environmental groups, resource groups, and human rights groups too, like Amnesty, and peace groups. However, we should also be aware of the key steps some NGO’s are playing in the formation of international law.

The formation of the laws against landmines, for example, was pioneered by, engineered by, led by, and supported by NGO’s. Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), founded in 1991, won the Nobel Peace prize in 1997 for their work. What an amazing job was done by ordinary non-politicians getting together to nudge the politicians to create this important international law.

The law of the High Seas of 1958, effective 1962, and superceded by UN Convention on the Sea of 1982, effective 1994, was pioneered by novelist Thomas Mann’s daughter, Elizabeth Mann Borgese. Incidentally, she moved from Switzerland to Santa Barbara, and from there moved to Halifax to become adjunct Scholar and Chair of the International Oceans Institute at Dalhousie University. Sadly, she passed away about a year ago. Her work was closely connected with the World Federalist Movement.

And there is also the creation of the International Criminal Court. In the early days of World Federalism, about fifty years ago, people were talking about the need for a permanent criminal court—no longer special tribunals—to prosecute politicians grossly violating human rights. But this permanent court was regarded as a little bit too visionary or utopian for practical implementation. In the early 1990’s there were world federalists again urging the need for such a court. And by the late 1990’s the World Federalist Movement was a crucial NGO in this project, working with other NGO’s and urging the politicians of the various governments to actually go ahead and create the International Criminal Court Treaty. In many countries there are World Federalist NGO’s. Canada, of course, has the World Federalists of Canada, with branches in major cities. And the NGO’s do what needs to be done. They urge their politicians to get involved, to put their energy into the project, and to try to get it to happen.

In Victoria a few years ago, Lloyd Axworthy commented on how important was a brief visit to him from Fergus Watt, the Executive Director of the World Federalists of Canada. At the time, Lloyd Axworthy was in Prime Minister Chretien’s Cabinet as Minister for Foreign Affairs. Fergus Watt went to Lloyd Axworthy to ask him to carry the ball for Canada and the world, in negotiating for the establishment of the International Criminal Court treaty. And Lloyd Axworthy accepted the challenge, and, said it was Fergus’s visit that was crucial in getting him committed to the project. We hear from those who know that Axworthy did a lot during the negotiations to get the International Criminal Court agreement of 1998 to have what it needs.

So the first message is, if you want to participate in creating meaningful international law, such as the creation of the law of the seas, the landmine treaty, the creation of the international criminal court, please get involved with the NGO’s that are moving the politicians to accomplish these tasks.

What does getting involved mean? Obviously, the simplest way is to indicate support for the projects. Joining an NGO, for example, is deeply meaningful. We are small droplets in big oceans, but the oceans are nothing but the droplets. And of course, for those who have time, and I think all of us have a little bit of time, there are letter writing campaigns to politicians. And for those who have a touch more time, though that won’t be everyone, there is discussion of key priorities of focus, and so on within the NGO’s. The varied support for the NGO, so the NGO can have an Executive Director, and, other professionals, and so there are letter writing campaigns, and so that there are voices from the public on explicit issues of the setting up of adequate international law—all this is vital.

As we’ll see, the NGO’s like the World Federalists of Canada have too many tasks to accomplish for just one Executive Director with merely a touch of administrative support, which is, unfortunately, all that the WFC has in a working way. The rest of us are volunteers. We need to participate, all of us, in doing what we can to enable the organizations to grow in the way they do their jobs—to create international law. Some might understatingly say it’s ‘a modest project’ but, however you look at it, I think it’s a crucial one for us to participate in.

Now let’s look at the many tasks our NGO, the WFC, is engaged in.

First, the support of the creation of the International Criminal Court has been and is continuing to be demanding. In participation in treaty law, a state must sign the treaty, and then it must ratify the treaty. The ratification of a treaty like the ICC requires that implementation of the treaty be accomplishable within the state’s laws. This means different sort of processes for different states, depending on their legal systems. Monarchies are different from republics, and so on. Yet all politicians have to be subject to the laws, and prosecution can be internal to the state. The World Federalists of Canada has been vital in advising states in the process of ratification as to how they may do so in specific terms, and WFC has concretely assisted in the process, together, for example, with the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform at UBC, and three other Canadian groups. Now that the ICC has begun to operate, the WFC has been involved in monitoring the election of judges, court prosecutor and registrar, and the adoption of rules and procedures for the Assembly of States in the ICC. Also, the WFC, together with many partners, is involved in the response to states that are trying to undermine the functioning of the ICC system. The work of WFC and other world federalist organizations for ICC has been extremely significant, and properly described as a tremendous achievement. But the real functioning of the ICC will demand lots more work including assistance from NGO groups like the WFC. This is a very demanding, and very meaningful task.

Another big project the WFC has been working on is the creation of a World Trade Organization (WTO) Parliamentary Assembly. This is an assembly of elected parliamentarians empowered to oversee, advise, and report on, the WTO. As we all know the WTO has been infuriatingly secretive in its operations. Even Parliamentarians in Canada have no access to what goes on there, although Canada is of course a member. But WFC is trying hard to at the very least get access to the information and Parliamentary overseeing. Our Executive Director, Fergus Watt, for example, has participated in many meetings to create the Assembly, has presented progress reports to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and in other ways has been important in the process.

A third big project for the WFC is participation in environmental governance. We have been making contributions in fundamental Environmental Summits, we gave proposed a new integrated global system for environmental governance, and we have tried to get the formation of a new World Environment Organization. These are large and significant tasks.

A fourth big project the WFC has been working on is the establishment of a standing UN peacekeeping force able to respond rapidly to threats to international peace and security. We know that in Rwanda, the presence of just a few thousand peacemakers and peacekeepers would very highly probably have prevented the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people. The United States refused to send anyone. And now the US has the affrontery to point to the Rwanda failure as a demonstration of UN impotence. Of course the UN didn’t then, and still doesn’t, have a group ready to do what needs to be done in such a situation. So the United States’ refusal to do anything, and then to say that this shows UN impotence, would be comical if the facts weren’t genuinely and deeply tragic. The WFC is doing important work to change the picture. Governance of the force is of course a crucial issue, and so there is real room for visionary activity among the states that might be able to find a way around the Security Council itself through a separate treaty.

We need a major transformation in world affairs. Whether it will happen, or won’t happen no one can say. But participation in the effort to get better things to happen recommends itself to all of us, and so here we are participating in the process.

I want to finish my part in today’s introduction to our roles in making the world a better place by helping to create international law with a minor remark, and the second of the two larger points, of which the first was the importance of getting involved in an NGO like WFC. The minor comment is on what happened in the UN in regard to Iraq. The concluding main point is about a crucial new step we need to take in aiding the transformation of the global economic arrangements.

6. Digression: Let’s not be distracted by the US versus France/Russia dispute over Iraq

Given the time, I’ll be really brief about the US, the UN and Iraq. The UN is in need of dramatic reform, and reform means substantial improvement in justice implementation. The Security Council holds all the de jure, or theoretical legal, powers, but it’s an assembly of states, and the states are oddly composed, with the veto states dating back to a fifty eight year old world situation, and the non-veto states being oddly selected, and without proper populational figuring. The structure of the Security Council does not embody elementary justice. And the International Court of Justice is only an arbitrator between pre-agreeing disputing states, yet we need a judicial system to resolve international disputes. But even in the UN structure as it now stands, the US claims and the responses from France and Russia were, effectively, a charade. The US did not propose the special tribunal approach to try Saddam Hussein for his well documented, over the decade and a half and more, crimes against humanity, crimes of war, and genocide. This failure to propose that method, given the Milosevic trial, etc., was obviously deliberate. And there was a kind of journalistic and political decision prior to the war not to mention the special tribunal approach. So in short, there is already a way to get a regime change when a tyrant has behaved as badly as Saddam Hussein did. But the major states, United States, and Russia, for example, and, possibly, France, too, wouldn’t use it. It would be to accept the key principles of the ICC. Neither the US nor Russia has entered the ICC. And the US is trying to undermine the ICC. So the US’s charade has masked the inevitability of the penetration of the understanding of global human rights around the world.

Let’s not allow ourselves to become distracted by the false mask charade of United States and, probably, Russia, and possibly, France too. Let’s focus on the building of the ICC and the expanding of it. Now there are states all the way from Canada and Britain to states like Afghanistan and Sierra Leona—states beset by the destruction brought by small arms sales through their countries—in the ICC. And soon, let’s hope, also Russia, and the United States will have to join in the fundamental global understanding of human rights, with judges making decisions, rather than self-interested heads of state, as well.

7. How To Create International Law: the need for an economic vision of international debt relief law etc.