This week, the notion that common decency and legality bear more importance than the rule of the mob, the precept that the rule of law holds more sway than the law of the jungle, were all dealt a deadly blow by a handful of nations which in a moment of madness, swept away centuries of progress towards building an international community based upon a global state of law.
Since Classical times, Mankind has striven to find a common identity based upon love for his neighbours, based upon the principle of brotherly relations, based upon common understanding and mutual trust. This quest visited a living nightmare upon generations of human beings throughout the centuries, centuries when it seemed that Good was a small island in a sea of evil, when the deeds of the Devil were far easier to see than the word of God.
These dark times took Mankind on a voyage through the Dark Ages, fraught with mass migrations and wholesale massacres of entire peoples, ethnic cleansing and genocide on an unimaginable scale, through to the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, while Mankind tried to find a way towards what was right and just.
The evils of the Inquisition, the years of religious intolerance, gave way to a realisation that new principles had to be found and adhered to, principles nearer to the teachings of God and his prophets, to the gradual realisation that Governance should be based on accountability and responsibility.
Throughout these centuries, peace treaties followed wars instead of massacres and in 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia laid the foundations of modern Europe, establishing a generalised recognition of the freedom to worship, thereby implementing for the first time an acceptance that Mankind could be different, but equal under the same set of human rights.
Other treaties, leading to the League of Nations and later, the UNO, being set up, reinforced this philosophy and the UN Charter (1945) laid clear rules for the practice of international diplomacy. Thirty years later, the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, signed in Helsinki, recognised the postwar frontiers in Europe as inviolable.
It took Mankind almost two thousand years to reach a state in which a brotherhood of nations had been created, where clear and fundamental rules had been laid down proclaiming that all human beings were equal and all societies and peoples had the birthright to live in their homes in peace.
Finally, a universal State of Law had been created; finally, the noble precepts set forth in the writings of the world’s great religions had become practice. The rule of law, and the word of God, had won the day. God’s law, God’s principles, in God’s world.
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