BUILDING A COHESIVE SOCIETY

HE BAHÁ’Í Institute for Social Cohesion has convened its second Parliamentary seminar to study models of justice.

The seminar met at the House of Commons on April 3 to hear the views of two senior legal figures on different justice paradigms.

Human rights lawyer Martyn Day spoke on the role of retributive justice in helping victims overcome the pain of a great injustice.

Mr Day represented British survivors of Japanese labour camps during the second World War, and has worked to win compensation and a meaningful apology to survivors from the Japanese government.

ACKNOWLEDGING PAST HURTS

“It is important for people who have been hugely damaged to feel that their hurt has been acknowledged,” he told the seminar’s audience.

“The recognition of that pain is a very important part of our legal system.”

The seminar then heard from Payam Akhavan, a visiting Professor at Leiden University. Professor Akhavan addressed the notion of transformative justice from his background as a legal advisor to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

He suggested that ideas such as retributive and transformative justice pre-supposed the notion that individuals have a choice between good and evil, and suggested that such moral choices  were not always possible in the case of mass crimes.

“How does one apply these concepts to say Rwanda in which a million people were killed in four months or in Bosnia where the ethnic cleansing campaign affected virtually the entire population?” he said.

RECOGNITION OF UNITY “VITAL”

“How does one apply the notion of moral choice to a culture which has been saturated by fear, hatred and racist mythology?”

Professor Akhavan said high profile war crimes trials should not act as “a figleaf” to exonerate the international community for a failure to act when crimes of mass violence are committed. He stressed the vital importance of the recognition of the unity of humanity as a prerequisite to fully comprehending the role of international law in the world today.

In concluding, MP Lembit Opik noted the build up of anger that can accrue when people feel they are treated unjustly, noting the anger that built up in Germany over the Versailles Peace Settlement prior to the outbreak of World War Two, and said examples such as this are a reminder of the importance of justice being done.

DW