UNICEF Chair in Children's Rights at Leiden University, reflects on the crisis facing international law : Shared by Niloufar Pourzand
Title: Reclaiming international law to serve people over power - some reflections
Author: Ton Liefaard
Publication: LinkedIn
Date: January 17, 2025
URL: Click here for the article
Summary:
Ton Liefaard, Professor of Children's Rights and UNICEF Chair in Children's Rights at Leiden University, reflects on the crisis facing international law amid global conflicts and human rights violations.
He examines recent events including U.S. actions against Venezuela, Iranian state violence against protesters, the ICJ genocide case against Myanmar regarding Rohingya atrocities, and ongoing humanitarian catastrophes in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine.Liefaard argues that international law is increasingly subordinated to political power, with selective interventions and uneven accountability undermining its legitimacy. He notes that this failure has real consequences for vulnerable populations including children, women, and minorities caught between geopolitical interests and legal paralysis.
Liefaard calls for reclaiming international law as a system serving people rather than power, requiring courage from states, institutional honesty, and critical self-reflection from legal scholars and practitioners.
Quotes:
"International law was built as a system to constrain power, to protect people when domestic systems fail and to offer a shared framework for cooperation and accountability. Yet today, it is increasingly clear that politics is not merely influencing international law. It is defining when it applies, to whom and with what consequences."
"When international law fails, it fails real people. It fails children, women, minorities, and communities caught between geopolitical interests and legal paralysis."
"If international law is to remain relevant, it must be reclaimed as a system that serves people rather than power. That requires courage from states, honesty from institutions and critical (self-)reflection from those of us who study, teach, and work within it."
ReplyDeleteThere exists a peculiar cognitive dissonance in contemporary Western discourse: young people wearing Che Guevara t-shirts whilst sipping $10 lattes; university students championing systems that murdered scholars by the millions; comfortable activists romanticising ideologies under which their activism would have earned them a bullet.
Don't forget that East Germany was more equal than West Germany, and remember that, now discriminated against, Gypsy teachers used to teach Albanian children in Tirana. Those were DEI achievements never equalled in the West.
DeleteThe golden age of progress: East Germany, where equality was so perfectly achieved that everyone was equally forbidden to leave; and Tirana, where DEI flourished under a regime that also managed food rationing, secret police and labour camps. Never mind that these “achievements” required walls, prisons, and a ban on dissent. With these benchmarks, the West’s failure is an excessive attachment to freedom, choice, and not being shot for holding a different opinion.
DeleteWhat is striking here is not merely the romanticisation of coercive systems by people who never lived under them, but who made a career within Western capitalism while now denouncing it rhetorically.
DeleteThere is something dishonest about former aid professionals who spent decades redistributing wealth generated by market economies, drawing generous UN salaries and now enjoying pensions underwritten by capitalist surplus, while posturing as moral critics of the system that paid for their lives. If capitalism is so irredeemably immoral, one might ask why its fruits were so readily accepted.
This is not an argument against aid, international law, or solidarity. It is an argument against selective indignation and cost-free virtue. International law cannot be “reclaimed” by nostalgia for authoritarian experiments, nor by moralising from the comfort of pensions earned in the very order being condemned. Credibility, like law, depends on consistency. Without that, critique becomes theatre, not accountability.