[Dean's World] Mary Madigan: Dismal record

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Posted by Mary Madigan:
Dismal record
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1144252003.shtml


   "International law aspires to be - and many would argue is - law. For
   it to be respected and observed as law, however, it and the system of
   which it is a part need to be more than a piety. Think of a national
   legal system that just regularly presided over - by which I mean
   countenanced and did not intervene to prevent - large-scale massacres
   of whole sections of its population. Would the fact that it was, in
   some sense, a set of laws, and backed by a putative authority,
   demonstrate its adequacy as a legal system? Of course not. The dismal
   record of the international system in preventing genocide and
   large-scale atrocity does not speak in its favour, and those friendly
   to the idea of an effective and properly legitimate regime of
   international law have no reason to be tactful about the existing
   defects."

   - Norm Geras, from his post [1]Presiding over genocide

References

   1. http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/04/presiding_over_.html