Your Excellencies,
Honoured Guests,
This conference in Palermo marks an important threshold in the development of international instruments to combat transnational organized crime. And as we cross this threshold, I want to take this opportunity to raise our eyes and look towards the horizon. It is an opportunity for us to consider some of the larger ideals towards which the convention and protocols are detailed contributions. It is an opportunity for us to consider our over-arching goals and in what direction we wish to travel.
These matters are important, indeed essential, to consider. They are not merely of academic interest. To retain and continually renew our motivation we have to know from where our impetus comes. In order to know how to proceed we must have a vision about where our desired destination lies. In order to deal with specific problems and dilemmas, we must develop a philosophical route map. One which helps us to make sense of our operational challenges.
I suggest that, in the signing of the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its predecessors, our point of departure is the notion of human security. What it is and how best one can promote it. And how one can safeguard it from its enemies.
At the dawn of human society, it was the need for security that initially brought families together into larger communities. Pastoral nomads reasoned that defence from attack and safety from economic disaster could best be served by bonding together. From this principle of basic human security, stronger, more effective social units were created. Developing side by side with the need for security, was the need for justice within the group. The increase in population dictated a greater need for internal regulatory mechanisms.
As human activity became more sophisticated and the source of wealth more reliable, these communities, through a meandering process of war, alliance, and economic necessity, eventually evolved into states. The conception on which the original idea of the state was based means that it is worth nothing if it does not deliver two things. First, security from outside threats; second, an internal system of regulation through law.
For the classic Westphalian state, of course, security from external threats was considered co-terminus with defence from outside attack. Today, though, this traditional notion of external security is fast being eroded. In much of the industrialised western states what Deutsch called 'security communities' now exist. (1) In Europe, North America and Australasia, states have effectively relinquished military instruments as a means to settle disputes with their immediate, democratic neighbours. Meanwhile, in the developing world, it is conflicts within states, what the Canadian-based academic Kalevi Holsti has called 'wars of the third kind', rather than inter-state wars, that are the greatest source of strife. (2)
Such changes do not, however, mean that external security threats have passed. Regrettably, the contrary is true. Outside threats have not only changed in nature, but have multiplied. It is such challenges as: the trafficking in illegal drugs and weapons; international terrorism; environmental degradation; the spread of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis; and transnational organised crime that are the successors to conventional war in threatening human security from without.
What we have also learned from the past decade is that individual states, no matter how powerful, cannot face down these threats alone. Many states have learned this lesson. They have been persuaded of the utility of collaborative supra-state cooperation against these common ills. They have seen that sovereignty and universality can be complementary ideas. The strengthening of both the nation-state and multilateral institutions can contribute towards the strengthening of human security as a whole. Without this commitment to what international relations theorists refer to as a 'liberal, institutionalist approach' to cooperation, we would not be celebrating the new convention and its protocols today.
Having talked about external threats, we need to give due attention to internal regulation. This is for two reasons. First, the need to regulate complex and diverse human activities within society. Second, the need to regulate complex and diverse activities within the world, that is to say among states in international society. In the latter case domestic law offers us an analogy for organising the wider world in which we live.
Of course, the provision of a codified legal system, routinised and known, though important, is not sufficient. After all, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had their laws and legal system. Like democratic practice, the formalities of law count for much less if they do not apply within a culture of law and a lively and independent civil society. People who live in states therefore need to know that the legal system is neutral and non-partisan. They need to know that laws are applied comprehensively and evenly. They need to know that their judges are independent from special interests and from interference from other branches of the state. They need to know that their legal system is vigorous and strong, and does not exist only at the indulgence of the military or the ruling party. In short, there is a point at which mere laws have to become the rule of law.
The rule of law, in a strong and healthy society, strikes a balance between the rights and freedoms of the individual on the one hand, and the interests of society as a whole on the other. It enshrines the principle of 'one law for all - with nobody standing above the law'. It is in this balance that we see the principles of democracy walking hand in hand with the principles of justice. It is in such a context that the conditions for human security are optimised. As the eighteenth century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, has suggested freedom is the substance for which moral law provides the form. (3)
If a state is governed by the rule of law and if that state is capable of responding flexibly and imaginatively to the new external security challenges without compromising its democratic orientation, then we can pronounce that state a strong state. Strong, that is, in the sense that it has and is constantly renewing the moral authority on which its claim to preside on behalf of its citizens is based. As the Egyptian political scientist Nazih Ayubi has shown, coercive force (the 'fierce state'), and bureaucratic capacity (the 'hard state'), alone do not equate with state strength. (4) A world of nation-states comprised of a set of genuinely strong states is indeed something to be embraced. And we are relying on the strong states in the world to take up the challenge of our infant convention and protocols.
Unfortunately, not all states have been created or have evolved according to the democratic ideal. In many states, dictatorship and authoritarian politics has subverted the rule of law or has suppressed it before it could properly take root. Partisan and exclusive regimes, and institutions like the military, have been used to persecute and expropriate vulnerable parts of society. In many parts of the world today, there are people living in an atmosphere of deep and enduring insecurity. Under these circumstances the state has little utility, let alone legitimacy.
In other contexts, states have 'failed' or have 'collapsed', thereby leaving a security vacuum behind. This situation is arguably even worse than in the case of dictatorship. People are left even without the hope that a Hobbesian Leviathan might impose order, even if that order is not democratic. (5) In extremis one is left with the appalling suffering of genocide in Rwanda or civil war in Sierra Leone.
In both authoritarian and failed states, society is especially vulnerable to the spread of organised crime. Such criminal organisations invariably search for weak links to exploit wherever they exist, both among states and within states. Such groups bring their organisation and their access to capital, and deploy it in a way that is destructive for the cause of human security. They can establish alliances with authoritarian regimes. They can make weak regimes dependent on them for support. They can precipitate the collapse of weak but clean regimes. Once established, criminal networks become an additional bundle of vested interests standing in the way of reform. In so doing, they make the process of building up the rule of law or extending democratic practice that much harder.
Looking at the world today, a mixed picture begins to emerge. We have states that are morally strong, states that are fierce and hard, and states that are faltering on the brink of collapse. Our mission at the domestic level is clear. Encourage genuinely strong states to maintain and redouble their commitment to human security, and give support to states in transition. Extend to the fierce and hard states the rule of law and its associated values of democracy, constitutionalism, human rights and justice. And stabilise and build capacity among the faltering states, with the hope that over the long term such a lead will become habit forming.
At an external level our mission is equally clear. We need to involve all states in a collective enterprise based on the rule of law. This enterprise should be aimed at eliminating external threats to all, wherever they may lie. Its specific aims should be to create greater harmonisation of state laws in order to facilitate effective international cooperation. Also, to articulate international standards and disseminate examples of best practice.
In pursuing such activities, a growing role has been played by a cluster of multilateral organisations motivated by these higher goals. Many of these institutions are active at a regional level, including the Council of Europe and the Organisation of American States. These bodies operate a regional commission and a regional court on human rights, which have become a judicial beacon for constituent states. Leading the field has been the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In addition to an extensive programme of assistance to member states, the OSCE has produced a detailed definition of the institutional and procedural elements of the rule of law, the most rigorous ever to be adopted by an international organisation. In order to be part of that body, states have to commit themselves to such standards.
At ODCCP we have been trying to play our part in such a cause. Our specific activities have included the provision of a range of technical cooperation programmes. These have included giving help to universities and specialist institutions in order to foster legal education. They have also encompassed a range of ways to ensure greater access to the law for ordinary citizens.
We have also been proud to play such an important role in the emergence of the convention and protocols, to which this conference is dedicated. We look forward to playing a continuing role in conjunction with states in the future. First, in facilitating the implementation of these new instruments. Second, in aiding the development of new international instruments. With an agenda as potentially diverse as the smuggling of firearms and stolen vehicles, and computer and environmental crime, all of which share in common the erosion of human security, we have much more to do.
Your excellencies, honoured guests. I began this speech by suggesting that it is the goal of human security that should motivate our actions, both within states and collectively as states, through the operation of international organisations. The United Nations has for fifty years worked to strengthen collective security, and in this respect it has been remarkably successful. There are now very few inter-state wars.
The challenge now is to achieve for the rule of law and human security within states what has been achieved for collective security between states. This symposium offers us the opportunity to identify concepts and tools which will bring this about.
1. Karl W. Deutsch, Political Community at the International Level: Problems of Definition and Measurement (Doubleday, Garden City, 1954).
2. Kalevi J. Holsti, The State, War and the State of War (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996) p36.
3. Cited in Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law and Happiness (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000) p8.
4. Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State, Politics and Society in the Middle East (Tauris, London, 1995) p449.
5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Penguin, London, 1978).