International Law

  • Russia’s fortunes lie ahead of itself

    The Russia of today is meaningfully a different place to the one that it was before in the Soviet Union, but it’s still got a long way to go if it’s to understand itself and to change its own ways.

    This is clear in its current trajectory, which is a futile, shameful conflict that doesn’t make sense to international observers and can’t be if it’s the means of a decline of a legitimate European democracy.

    Its ideas need working on, and this notion is coming through in its familiar refrain that still heats up discussions, leading to tensions.

    It believes it can return to old lands. It can resume old ways. It isn’t practical, but it’s a temptation to do more than is required of itself.

    It’s believed that Russia previously toyed with an idea of pushing back with a counter-invasion against Hitler in the Second World War.

    This is not the unfolding of it as it was, but it’s a completely separate idea to the one that’s in our school history textbooks.

    It was apparently based off a concept called “Popular Will”, or a study in the way people welcome particular outcomes if their leaders look familiar, or have ways and modes similar to theirs.

    This isn’t the truth, but it’s thought to be a problem in Russian trains of thought. It comes up – often by surprise – because it’s more of a feeling than a reality.

    The update to Russian thinking is to realise that it has limits to its acceptability elsewhere. It isn’t pride that’s a problem, but a restraint on its endeavour to move outward.

  • Human rights are not in fashion

    The “fashion” argument doesn’t transcend everything, so says the agent of change who sees human rights as valuable and an important part of human life.

    There’s not much that can be denied about “rights”, as they are termed, but perhaps the guarantor of these rights is not as easy to contact as Amazon, for example.

    The United Nations has not opened a phone line as it were, and so ‘getting through’ isn’t so easy at the moment. It takes more than a phone call to get that problem sorted.

    The issue of rights isn’t new, but it’s novel to have to talk about them in such clear terms as every day life.

    They don’t fit in with how we’ve seen things before, between us, so it’s new to have to factor in the inalienable rights of another person as we figure out who they are, and how to treat them.

    This isn’t in Jane Austen’s works, for example, and neither is it in some of the older textbooks that pertain to former times.

    There wasn’t a legal obligation in those days for what we discuss today. There was simply a “yes” or a “no”, or a perceived “right” or a perceived “wrong”.

    Today, we’re more certain.

    We’re so certain in fact that many people have a deep need for and appreciation of what human rights doctrine says in international law.

    After all, this is where they’re guaranteed in law. It’s not a national legislature that decides these things, or has the last say, but it’s from our roots as a common species these things come from and are decided by.

    It’s not up to us as individuals, but we’re more protected – and our wellbeing is more guaranteed – than we were previously led to understand, or believe.