Senator Douglas Roche addressed the recent International Conference in Edmonton - "Universal Rights and Human Values, a Blueprint for Peace, Justice and Freedom". An excerpt of his speech reprinted from the Edmonton Journal follows.
"We are about to leave the bloodiest century in the history of humanity. What can provide a basis of hope that the world community can move beyond war in the new millennium?
More than 100 million people - 90 per cent civilians - have been killed in 170 wars since the end of the Second World War. Thirty wars are now taking place, most inside national boundaries. In addition to the tragic loss of life and limb, these conflicts breed international terrorism, and they have huge economic costs. World military expenditures this year - almost a decade after the end of the Cold War - are still at an incredibly high level of $780 billion. The development, deployment and maintenance of nuclear weapons from their inception has cost $8 trillion, of which the U.S. share alone was $5.5 trillion.
Government spending priorities for the prosecution of war and cleaning up its aftermath are gargantuan. But the priorities for the prevention of war are lilliputian. Governments spend billions of dollars on economic rehabilitation of war-ravaged areas, humanitarian aid, refugee relief and peacekeeping forces. But they invest little in the prevention of war.
At this remarkable international conference on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, we should shift our focus upward to concentrate on a new right that is coming into view: the human right to peace. I am greatly encourage by the findings of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, which recently reported:
First, deadly conflict is not inevitable. Violence on the scale of what we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere does not emerge inexorably from human interaction.
Second, the need to prevent deadly conflict is
increasingly urgent. The rapid compression of the world through breathtaking
population growth, technological advancement and economic interdependence, combined with
the readily available supply of deadly weapons and easily transmitted contagion
of hatred and incitement to violence, make it essential and urgent to find ways to prevent
disputes from turning massively violent.
Third, preventing deadly conflict is possible. The problem is not that we do not know about incipient and large-scale violence, it is often that we do not act. Examples from "hot spots" around the world illustrate that the potential for violence can be defused through the early, skilful and integrated application of political, diplomatic, economic and military measures.
It can be seen that a culture of peace is a process of individual, collective and institutional transformation. It grows out of beliefs and actions of the people themselves and develops in each country within its specific historical, sociocultural and economic context. A key is the transformation of violent competition into co-operation based on sharing of values and goals. In particular, it requires that conflicting parties work together to achieve objectives of common interests at all levels, including the development process.
Reciprocity can be a moral value with universal application. As Confucius taught: "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others." ...In the new age of interdependence, this means that governments should take as a starting point in the formulation of their policies the impact of those policies on other states. As the nuclear deterrence doctrine so pointedly illustrates, one nation's security can cause another's insecurity. Mountains of U.N. global strategies could be categorized by the simple dictums: States should treat others as they wish to be treated in return.
If we need reminding of the oneness of the world and the integrity of all life, look again at the photo of the planet sent back by the astronauts. Beautiful, fragile, one. In previous centuries, we did not even know one another, let alone care. Now technology has united us, at least in our knowledge of one another.
Through the United Nations and its systems, we possess, for the first time in the history of the world, a catalogue of information about how our planet works, and treaties to protect the rights of individuals and the environment itself. Both people and governments are learning that they must co-operate for many purposes: to maintain peace and order; expand economic activity, tackle pollution, halt or minimize climate change, combat disease, curb the proliferation of weapons, prevent desertification, preserve genetic and species diversity, deter terrorists, ward off famines.
... All this has prepared us for the foundation of a new global ethic, which can be essentially expressed as a new attitude of discharging our responsibilities for caring for ourselves and for the earth. The abolition of nuclear weapons becomes a part of this
A peace consciousness does not appear overnight. It is evident that constructing a culture of peace requires comprehensive education, social and civic action. It addresses people of all ages. An open-minded, global strategy is required to make a culture of peace take root in people's hearts and minds.
... Mobilizing public opinion and developing new education programs, at all levels, are essential to permeating society's rejection of war. The recent series of Roundtables for community leaders conducted across Canada by Project Ploughshares came to the same conclusion: education programs in schools must be strengthened because children today learn little about the culture of peace. The school system is the perfect place to develop this culture. Past campaigns for environmental protection and non-smoking first gained hold in schools and then permeated society.
The new delineation of the right to peace has particular relevance in the current nuclear weapons controversy. The protection of the right to life and bodily security are at the heart of the Universal Declaration. It is argued by some that the right to life is not an absolute right and that the taking of life in armed hostilities is a necessary exception of this principle.
However, when a weapon has the potential to kill between one million and one billion people, as the World Health Organization informed the International Court of Justice, human life becomes reduced to a level of worthlessness that totally belies human dignity as understood in any culture. No weapon invented in the long history of warfare has so negated the dignity and worth of the human person as has the nuclear bomb. This recognition has led the U.N. Human Rights Committee to advocate that the use of nuclear weapons be categorized as a crime against humanity.
The famous Advisory Opinion on Nuclear Weapons of the International Court of Justice did not go this far, but did uphold the cardinal principles of humanitarian law. These are the following: In order to protect the civilian population, states must never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets. Also, it is prohibited to cause unnecessary suffering to combatants, and hence states do not have unlimited freedom of choice of weapons.
The President of the Court, Mohammed Bedjaoui, in his personal statement, gave a stinging indictment of nuclear weapons: "The very nature of this blood weapon... has a destabilizing effect on humanitarian law which regulates discernment in the type of weapons used. Nuclear weapons, the ultimate evil, destabilizes humanitarian law..."
Through this international conference we must gather our strength anew. For the sake of our children and grandchildren and the future of life on the planet, we dare not relax our commitment to life.
When we fully understand our own potential to make a culture of peace the ruling norm in society, nuclear weapons will then be discarded into the ashbins of history.