Peace and Security: The Challenge and the Promise[dagger]
2006; Routledge; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0163-7479
AutoresSurakiart Sathirathai, Kumar Percy, Karen Engle,
Tópico(s)International Law and Human Rights
ResumoI. INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE Good afternoon. It is a pleasure to be here in Austin at University of Texas-one of world's leading institutions for research and teaching. Being here brings me back to my own time as an academic-as a doctoral student here in United States, and then as a law professor and law school dean at Chulalongkorn University back home in Thailand. I am grateful to Provost Ekland-Olson for his warm introduction and welcome, to School of Law and LBJ Library for making fora available for me to speak and interact with Texans on this trip, to many institutes and centers on campus who sponsored this conference and address, and to Texas International Law Journal for agreeing to publish this talk. I am particularly grateful to Professor Karen Engle, here at law school, and to Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, whose mission of fostering critical discussion and policy analysis of human rights law could hardly be more timely. It is in that spirit of critical inquiry that I would like to reflect on challenges facing our multilateral regime in field of peace and security. It is altogether reasonable to ask, as many have in recent years, whether our multilateral legal and institutional framework, assembled in years after second World War, is up to challenges now facing our increasingly globalized world. The United Nations' many contributions in other fields are easy to affirm. We rely on United Nations to coordinate work of hundreds of independent national public and private agencies responding to humanitarian emergencies-I saw this first hand as my own country responded to tsunami disaster last Christmas. We rely on United Nations to arrange and monitor elections-and sometimes-as in East Timor-for nation building. Every day we rely on steady background work of many U.N. specialized agencies and programs in spheres of human rights protection, health, education, transportation, humanitarian relief, and much more. But should we rely on United Nations for peace and security? States have not found it possible to avoid what U.N. Charter so rightly terms the scourge of war.1 There remains deep disagreement-between states, and within states-about what it means to ensure, as Charter put it, that armed force shall not be used, save in interest.2 Just when does common interest require resort to force? This is not a legal question-it is a political judgment. Can we rely on legal and institutional machinery of United Nations to ensure that it is made wisely? The Charter promised a Council able to decide this question-yet repeatedly over history of United Nations, Council has not acted, even in face of grave threats to peace, acts of aggression, and violations of human rights. To what extent may, should, must-individual nations, regional alliances or ad hoc coalitions determine for themselves that common interest demands their resort to military action? In short, can Charter's promise of collective security still be redeemed? At same time, having served as finance minister, I am well aware that economic vulnerability can be as profound a threat to as use of force. As United Nations was founded sixty years ago, global economy was shattered. The Bretton Woods arrangements were only just being established. Almost every nation maintained extensive controls over their economy-tariff walls, exchange controls, national macroeconomic planning and management. With greater economic openness has come great prosperity-and new threats to our security. Threats from transnational crime, from globalized epidemics, and, perhaps most disturbingly, from growing economic and social dualism that has come with globalization. Poverty alleviation, along with social and economic inclusion, must now be part of any global strategy. …
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