The Rule of Law. A Lake.

I'm visiting my parents this week in Michigan. Here's what I'm looking at whilst typing this:  

There is really no way to express the contrast between the water in Brighton Beach (cloudy, salty, thick, full of jellyfish and other biological chunks, but still nice in its awkward way) and the water here (clear, blue, fresh, crisp, clear, 20 feet of visibility, chunk-free, and clear). Hell, you probably wouldn't even need to tow water on your swim since you could just sip the lake when you got thirsty and be fine.

A thing I can never get over is the ability to be in a physical place that has nothing to do with what's going on in one's head. When I was 10 years old and romping around with my little friends on the deck where I'm sitting in back of my parents' house, it would be inconceivable that I'd be back on a visit from New York and sitting here thinking about the rule of law and governance as applied to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals – yet that's exactly what I'm doing.

Which brings me to the talk I want to write about. At the NYC Bar a week or two ago, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson discussed the rule of law and governance with respect to development. His presentation was well laid out, but I found it significant and appropriate and unfortunate that one of the aesthetically nicest elements was both unintentional and highlighted the UN's shortcomings twice over. This particular flourish also didn't help the UN's image as an organization that overlooks involvement by its stakeholders in crafting solutions toward its goals – even after invoking the Sustainable Development Goals, which include stakeholder engagement as a key platform – but more on that later.

His Excellency first described some of the hurdles confronting the rule of law. In Eliasson's formulation, these include identification with basic, more “primitive” elements of a society, like the religious and ethnic identities which have emerged in the wake of disillusionment with national governments and resulting loss of identification on the basis of nation-state. But the question then becomes: Aren't the challenges presented by these shifting identifications the same ones that the rule of law should obviate to begin with?  At any rate, he continued to describe how the rule of law benefits each of the three UN pillars of peace, development, and human rights.

What Eliasson did not address is how, if at all, UN officials were considering the role of on-the-ground justice efforts and attempts to secure the rule of law, and what the official vision for the rule of law is. Does it start from scratch and bulldoze existing justice mechanisms, or does it see a benefit to incorporating existing justice mechanisms such as truth-telling commissions or local councils? If it starts de novo then why, and how does it justify the eradication of the existing system of keeping order? And if it incorporates existing mechanisms, then is that a blanket policy or will the UN retain some systems and jettison others, and how will that distinction be drawn, and on what basis? And what is the opinion of the people who will be subjected to this rule – has the UN tried to find out? 

In the Q&A afterward, Eliasson didn't have a substantive response to how the UN should address the Haitian cholera epidemic likely caused by UN workers. His inability (bona fide, I guess) to comment on the legal aspects of institutional responsibility limited him to noting that the UN has spent time advocating for the fighting of cholera (evidently without actually engaging in the fight itself), and citing the “UN-backed” work of the Haitian government in a national sanitation campaign. Evidently there is also a “high-level committee” for distributing health resources. All these efforts, it seems, add up to the UN “doing what [it] can to improve the situation."

The symmetry of Eliasson's first and last statements was only noticeable with hindsight. His Excellency opened by informing his audience of the ceasefire between Israel and Palestine that was to commence the following morning, and we all dutifully applauded. But as we know that ceasefire was broken within hours of its initiation. Then the talk ended with the non-responsive response about the UN's own responsibilities under the rule of law. So, if we can't have reliably self-governing and effective international institutions, we can at least appreciate the elegant rhetorical devices that arise from this gap.