Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 3, Episode 11: Dr. Alfred de Zayas, Building a Just World Order

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Season 3, Episode 11: Dr. Alfred de Zayas, Building a Just World Order · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm absolutely thrilled and really delighted to have as our author today Alfred Desaias, who is one of the world's leading authorities on international law, on human rights, on the United Nations, on our hope, and this is the title of the book we'll discuss today: our hope for building a just world order.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Alfred, thank you so much for joining.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's really a great pleasure and especially a privilege to have a chance to discuss your important work and for people all over the world to understand what's at stake when we talk about human rights, when we talk about international law, when we talk about the United Nations, and when we talk about the concept of building a just world order.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this book, which is a really, really important book, so I recommend that everybody get a copy and study it.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that you have to study at length and in depth, is a compendium of your remarkable work over many, many years, but especially during a period in which you were the UN independent expert for the Human Rights Council on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if I may say, Alfred, that's quite an assignment.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: You were given an assignment by the UN system to give a charter on how to promote or how to create a democratic and equitable international order.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if anyone ever before you actually had that assignment.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: The philosopher Immanuel Kant took on that assignment in a way, maybe the first one to do so systematically in 1795.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know if anyone ever had your assignment to produce this remarkable compendium of ideas and discussions that range from peace, uh, military expenditures, the right of self-determination, the right to truth, many things that we'll talk about.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: So can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: How did you come to get such an incredible assignment?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I was the third on the short list.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's actually the US's fault that I got it.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: All right, how did that happen?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: There was such a campaign against the first two that it, president of the council, Lauder Dupuis, said, No, who's next?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Zayez.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I got it.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And imagine it was such a surprise to me because I had been in the uh council the day before.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there we are, 23rd of March, 2012.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so sure that I'm not getting it that I accepted an invitation from RT to give an interview on Iran and the nuclear program.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Would never have done that if I thought I had a prayer, and I come into the human rights council in the afternoon, and everybody smiles at me, and I say, What the hell's going on?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: I have just been appointed.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, uh, as the case may be, I took the ball and I ran with it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's no more beautiful mandate.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's like being named Secretary General, but without the responsibilities of the Secretary General and being able to brainstorm, being able to talk to everybody, including yourself and uh and John Merzheimer and all of these greats whom I've always admired.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I'm also a professor of international law and professor of history.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I did my law at Harvard.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I also did history at Harvard at the graduate school, but I got my doctorate in history from Göttingen in Germany.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I've taught both international law and history at various universities.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh one of the books that I always give to my students is Jeff's The End of Poverty.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is John Merzheimer's The Great Delusion, and the third one is uh Jimmy Carter's Palestine Peace, not apartheid.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Three excellent books.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, in any event, when I got the mandate in 2012, I had to present a report already in September 2012.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: So my preliminary report basically was laying down the framework.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I intend to do.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't do much of it in the first report.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: But Alfred, before we get to that, let me uh uh ask you to explain to everybody listening in what is the Human Rights Council, how does it work, and why would they appoint an independent expert on a theme like this?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we have a system, what's called special procedures of the Human Rights Council, and that goes back actually to Theo van Boven and Kurt Herndl, the earlier directors of the Division of Human Rights and the Center for Human Rights, which preceded the Human Rights Council.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Myself, I was hired by Theo van Boven in 1980, and I became the chief drafter for the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which is an expert body, 18 experts, most of them lawyers or judges, who administer the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: That, however, is not the Human Rights Council.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: The Human Rights Council is the successor of the Commission on Human Rights.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: You may remember the first president of the uh Commission on Human Rights was Eleanor Roosevelt, and the chief of the secretariat at the time was the great professor John Humphrey from McGill University in Canada.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: I love that man, he was fantastic.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: As the case may be, I had the honor to come in rather early into the system and made a career as a lawyer drafting for the Human Rights Committee, for the Committee Against Torture, for the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discriminations, because they all had a petitions function.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: That is, as an individual, you could, after exhausting domestic remedies, go to the Human Rights Committee, and the committee would issue a judgment.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that, of course, is a juridical process to be differentiated from the Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Council, which are largely political.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: So if I could uh just to clarify for myself, to understand the history, Eleanor Roosevelt, of course, remarkably led a commission to uh draft and have adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that, if I understand correctly, is really the basis of all that followed.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: It established the idea under the new United Nations, which had come into being in 1945, that human rights would be a core pillar of the United Nations and of international law.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Of civilization.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Of civilization, thank you.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: What I want to see is the 21st century rediscover the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: It is a very spiritual document.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's very solidly based on world religions and it's very solidly based on world philosophies.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, we've been moving further and further away from that spirit of 1948.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have seen retrogression in uh human rights, and I've seen retrogression in respect for international law and international order.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what I tried to explain in 14 reports that I did for the General Assembly and for the Human Rights Council, and in uh more than 100 press releases that I issued between 2012 and 2018.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: So is it right to say the Universal Declaration, 1948, gave rise to what became a growing body of law, in which you are certainly one of the world's great authorities and practitioners?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: You helped to implement that law during your period as a senior lawyer for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 2006, the Human Rights Commission, which Eleanor Roosevelt had been the first chair, became the Human Rights Council, an intergovernmental body of the United Nations to oversee human rights.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2012, in this surprise moment for you, you became the independent expert of the Human Rights Council.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: But with this incredible assignment, I mean, honestly, it uh is uh mouthwatering in how good it is, and and that's why your book is so good and important.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: You were asked to advise us on how the world should work to produce a democratic and equitable international order.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly did my level best, and already in 2013 I gave the General Assembly a taste of my ideas of reforming the United Nations as an organization, and also reforming the Security Council and phasing out step by step the veto power.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's Article 27.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to get to that specifically because you start out as one of your earliest reports, uh really a remarkable document.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I do compare it to Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay on perpetual peace, where the great German philosopher laid out the ideas of how an international system could work.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think, other than uh maybe the Hebrew prophets, the first one to have such a broad vision, but also yes, exactly, such a systematic vision that was based on the idea of international law, which barely existed after all.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it didn't even exist when Kant had the idea, but now you are writing about a system that is taking shape.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I I always feel, Alfred, and I'd like you know your view of it as you explain, we're in the early stages still of trying to make a system of international law.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: By my count, the formal attempt at a true international basis was the League of Nations, very flawed during the high imperial period.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a imperialism was the norm, not the uh discredited exception.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: But we're only a hundred years into this effort to create a true system of international law.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And what I loved is I think it must have been your second report, it's the second chapter of this book.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: You lay out the principles of an international order.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you could just take us through some of the main principles that you see as foundational for creating a decent world.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows that peace of Westphalia as being a foundation for the international law that developed after that, 1648.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Their motto was Pax Optima Redum.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Peace is the highest good.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: So just for everybody uh background, end of the Thirty Years' War, 1648, devastation of uh Europe uh in uh these bloody, often religious-based, sometimes not religious-based wars.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the war ends with a Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, and peace is after 30 years of mass bloodshed, the highest virtue.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Eight million deaths and eight million in uh the 17th century was a lot.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: As the case may be, the United Nations Charter, really the alpha and omega of the United Nations Charter is peace.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: We have three pillars.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: We have peace, development, and human rights.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: But peace is the enabler.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna have development without peace, you're not gonna have human rights without peace.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it's clear that the purposes and principles of the United Nations enunciated in Articles 1 and 2, focus on that and focus on prevention of conflict.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the most important articles, maybe more important than the prohibition of the use of force, is the article on dialogue.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Article 2, paragraph 3, the obligation to settle all disputes by peaceful means.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the United Nations provides a forum.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a young man in Chicago, I was in high school in Chicago, October 1962, I had the, shall we say, the very great learning experience of watching Adlai Stevenson, Adley Stevenson III debating Valentine Zorin uh on television.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: The Soviet ambassador of the television.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: We're so close to Apocalypse in 1962, and thank God for the existence of this forum known as the United Nations, and also the fact that we had a rational man in the White House.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: We had John F.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy in the White House.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: He was not going to destroy the world over American hegemony or over the idea of uh we don't allow anyone to put uh missiles close to our border.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he realized that he had a responsibility vis-a-vis the entire world.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not only.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was not a matter just between the United States and the Soviet Union.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody was involved, and that is the same situation we're facing today again.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, I am a member of the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, and we do a lot of brainstorming on peace matters, and we send them to our Swiss president.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm, by the way, I'm an American, but I'm also Swiss.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: To um Viola Amhert, the president of Switzerland, to Ignacio Kassis, the foreign minister, etc., etc.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've drafted a um blueprint for peace in Ukraine, which is based very much on the United Nations Charter and on the, shall we say, the supremacy clause of the UN Charter, which is Article 103.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the UN Charter trumps all other treaties, including the Treaty of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: So NATO's activities must conform to the United Nations Charter.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So back to the 25 principles, I consider principle 10 to be very important, which is the principle that the realization of self-determination is a conflict prevention strategy.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have early warning, you have to listen to grievances before they fester, before they uh develop into a uh violent outbreak.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why self-determination for the Palestinians, self-determination for the Kurds, self-determination for the Russians of Crimea, for the Russians of the Donboss, all of that could and should have been uh the subject of referenda organized by the United Nations, monitored by the United Nations so that they would have legitimacy and credibility.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: But when, after the coup d'etat in uh Maina in uh 2014, when the new put government started adopting uh really rapidly rusophobic legislation, anti-Russian uh legislation.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Again, that's why uh self-determination for me.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: The dispute in uh Ukraine has two sources.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: One is, of course, national security.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: You need an architecture for all countries in Europe and in the world, and secondly, the self-determination of the people of Crimea on Ottomba.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Only they should decide their fate.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's not for us to tell them that they belong here or there.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Another principle, principle 15, which is the principle of the right to your homeland, the right to your heritage, your history, your right to memory.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Then, of course, I have an article on Fakta Sun Servanda, the obligation to observe treaties.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, you will recall the Trump years, and we're likely to get another set of Trump years, but in any event, uh you may recall how he just simply stepped out of all sorts of treaties.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the international order can only function if everybody plays for the games, and one of the rules is Pacta Sun Servanda, Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: But going back to my 25 principles, it's a compendium, which uh the then president of the General Assembly, uh Maria Fernanda Espinosa called a Magna Carta for the 21st century.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: As the case may be, uh I'm not reinventing the wheel.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I am basing my principles on the UN Charter, on Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, on um the treaties that have emerged since then.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the uh United Nations, the International Law Commission have done a phenomenal job of standard setting in all fields of human activity.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Also, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Human Rights Council, I mean, out of this Roosevelt Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have 10 core treaties that emerge uh from that, besides all of the uh declarations and all of the uh um uh resolutions adopted, which are soft law, they're not treaties yet, but uh they will be coming before the uh general assembly for adoption in treaty form.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's several of these uh declarations are now before the General Assembly, and there's uh one declaration that I particularly like, which was drafted at the time by Virginia Dan from the Philippines.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: She was the rapporteur on international solidarity, the right to international solidarity that has been worked by uh her successors and is now ready, actually, for adoption.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the new special rapporteur on international solidarity, Cecilia Berray, uh from Argentina, she has uh sent it on to the General Assembly.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: So there's things moving.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, I must say, even though there are problems with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, problems of double standards, problems of selectivity, there are problems with the Human Rights Council.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very happy that we have them both.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: If we didn't have them, we would have to invent them.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they are essential, but we want to strengthen them.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: We want to make sure that there is transparency and accountability.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that is not always the case.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to come back to your principles first, really to underscore 25 principles that you built up on the basis of international law, the UN Charter treaties.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: So these are not your inventions, they are the guideposts that actually, in our better moments, the world's governments have said should guide us, and uh have been adopted in many ways uh in UN General Assembly resolutions or embodied in the UN Charter or part of international legal judgments and so on.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: One, for example, uh very important one that I want to come back to, uh your point 18, the principle of non intervention, that it is a duty of countries not to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, like overthrowing their governments or doing other things to uh uh to destabilize other countries.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And as you've already discussed, uh your point 17, states.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Have a positive duty to negotiate.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: So when we see a failure of negotiation right now, that's not only bad behavior that leads to war, it's a violation of international law.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's a violation of the responsibility of governments.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's a violation of the UN charter.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I think these 25 normative points are extremely important.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so happy to hear the praise that former Secretary General Maria Fernandez Espinoza gave to them.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: She's wonderful, and so her praise is extremely important.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: But uh calling them the Magna Carta for the international system is a wonderful point.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Alfred, all through your book, as you elaborate on these points, you raise the questions of obstacles.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: We are not living in this system.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: We are not seeing the U.S.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: negotiate with Russia, even though we're at a brink of even nuclear war between the countries.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: We are not seeing Israel negotiate with the Palestinian people, exactly the opposite.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: There are obstacles everywhere.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: You have been in this system of trying not only to design what should be done, but actually put it into application.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: To use law not only as a normative statement of what a just world would be, but actually as an instrument to make behavior conform with these principles.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, obstacles.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Why are we in the midst of war?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Why is the UN system so difficult to actually implement and enforce its own charter?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Why, to put it in the most dire and awful way, are we even watching a genocide unfold before our eyes, have UN Security Council resolutions adopted for immediate ceasefires and so on?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: And yet it seems, to put it harshly, like a sideshow to what the real powers do.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so you've been observing this uh for many decades, very close up.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: What can you tell us about these obstacles?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: We are indeed witnessing a rebellion against the United Nations Charter, a rebellion against international law, and the rebellion is being led by the United States and by NATO countries.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: It is really, for me as an American, for me as a European, it hurts to see this happen because I want to believe, and I want my students to believe in the system.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And when the system betrays you, when the system does not do what it must do to save life, people lose trust in the institutions, and we need the institutions.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote an article for the American Journal of Economics and Sociology under the title Quis custodiat ipsus custodis, the famous question of Juvenalis in his satires, sixth satire, verses 347 and 348, uh, which is who will guard over the guardians when the guardians betray you?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, only you yourself.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: You must take the responsibility yourself because the institutions are not doing what they were made to do.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Why are they not doing it?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, there are tremendous economic interests.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: There is a war industry, it's the only people who are making a profit these days if you have invested in Raytheon or in Lockheed Martin or in Boeing and so forth.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, incidentally, you may not have seen it, but just in the days in which we're talking, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is one of the crassest politicians in America, made a statement that we must continue the war in Ukraine because there are trillions of dollars of mineral resources there that otherwise will fall into the hands of the Russians and the Chinese.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is about money.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: Who will control these resources?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Rather shocking statement.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, uh, he's a firebrand.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: He's always been a firebrand.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: I know him for the nonsense that comes out of his mouth.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not surprised that Lindsay Graham is capable of saying something that obscene, that vulgar.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, we did the same thing in um Iraq.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: We destroyed Iraq because of the oil, we destroyed Libya because of the oil.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we wanted to control.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't want to have Saddam Hussein who did his own thing, or we didn't have Muammar Gaddafi who did his thing.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: He had to take orders from Washington.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if he didn't, you know, we destroy him.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh ultimately it is money.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, and money, of course, is power.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And uh going back to the obstacles, the major obstacle that I see today is the information war, or rather, the disinformation war.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the vast majority of the American people, they're not for war.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want any of this.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: They want better schools, they want better uh health care, they want better infrastructure or bridges that don't fall into the Mississippi.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: They don't want to spend seven, eight trillion dollars for useless wars.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Totally useless, and that money is needed elsewhere.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if you are subjected to brainwashing non-stop by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Wall Street Journal, uh, and of course, all of the smaller newspapers throughout the country pick up their news from Reuters and AP.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I myself had had bad experiences uh with Reuters, giving interviews to Reuters and then seeing my statements, uh, shall we say, doctored.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: And uh if that's the only source of information that you have, you are being manipulated badly.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And not everybody has the time.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're married, you have kids.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: You you can't be just surfing the internet and trying to hear the real news network or Amy Goodman or uh Max Blumenthal or Aaron Mate.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have the time for that.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: I do, but uh the masses don't.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: So in a democratic system, democracy breaks down, it's dysfunctional because the population uh has been misinformed.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh obviously, knee-jerk reaction, Putin bad, he bad.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we have a culture of hatred, I would even say.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: We must have an enemy, we must focus all of our hatred against the Russians or against the Chinese or against somebody else, uh, against the Venezuelans, against Maduro, against uh Diaz Canel, against Daniel Ortega.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: We must have enemies and people just regurgitate what they hear.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: As I say, what is freedom of expression?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: Freedom of expression is meaningless if all that that means is that you can echo whatever nonsense you heard last night in CNN.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, freedom of expression presupposes access to all the information, the opportunity to make up your own mind, and then that is the opinion whose expression is protected in Article 19 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, there again, there's what I call an epistemological trap.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that is already built in the system.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody, every professor of human rights tells you that human rights are divided into rights of the first generation, rights of the second generation, rights of the third uh generation, meaning civil and political, first generation, all those are the only important ones.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Economic, social, and cultural.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, these are secondary rights, maybe someday.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh right to peace, a right for the environment or something like that, that's uh just delusional.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: That is third generation rights.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you see that it's already built in with a prejudice in favor, say, of the right to property, uh, the right to control.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in building a just world order in the last chapter, I formulate an alternative functional paradigm of human rights.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's very interesting, by the way, what you're saying.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think uh some perspective from an American point of view is really useful.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: You say that the U.S.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: is rebelling against the UN, and I agree completely.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is the great disaster and great irony of an institution that largely was created by the United States, by Franklin Roosevelt and by Eleanor Roosevelt.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: So Franklin Roosevelt conceived the idea of the United Nations already in the middle of World War II, put his uh team and the international system to work to build a United Nations.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of credit to the U.S.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: under Roosevelt in 1945 and to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948 for putting in the fundamental pillars.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: But now the U.S.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: does not abide by the UN system, does not respect the UN General Assembly votes, uses its unilateral veto repeatedly against what is clearly the will of the international system.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you're emphasizing another very uh important point, which is that under Roosevelt, he had the idea, perhaps unique among American presidents, that economic rights were as core to human rights as political and civil rights.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1944, he proposed an economic bill of rights for the American people.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: This was very radical for a country that was founded on private property and wealth as the uh highest calling, not on fairness and justice.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: But Roosevelt wanted to recognize economic rights as fundamental.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: And what's important for people to understand is if you go back, and I encourage everyone as you read Alfred Desias's remarkable book, Building a Just World Order, have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at your side because the economic rights are not subsidiary, they're absolutely core.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: They're not something that comes later or a nice thing to have or a second dimension.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: The right to social protection, to education, to health care, to a decent life is completely embedded in this.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the U.S.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: then, even already in the 1960s, rebelled against that idea by not adopting the covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, it's shocking because after such a great beginning, and after the inspiration that went into uh the creation of the United Nations, uh, the United Nations Charter, and then the uh Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and this fantastic body of legislation that was adopted in those uh years, unfortunately, we believe really in exceptionalism, that we are essentially above international law.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: We determine international law, and that is what Anthony Blinken is reminding us with his famous rules-based international order.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I've already said, look, Tony, for heaven's sake, we already have a rules-based international order, and that's a United Nations Charter.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, stick to it.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: And um there's so many things, there's so many good people in the United States, so many good academics, so many good professors throughout the country.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that you, Jeffrey Sachs, are not our Secretary of State?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, why don't we have someone with vision?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as I said, my worry, and it's your worry, and we share this admiration for uh John F.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy, and I think for your listeners, they've probably heard it from your mouth many times, but it's so important and it's so acute today that I will read from Kennedy's 10 June speech: while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: To adopt that kind of a course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy or of a collective death wish for the world.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: No one has said it better than that.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it just uh it's important.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: Every student should uh read that commencement speech of 10 uh June uh 1963, six months before he was murdered.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: As the case may be, packs op optima reum.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: We have to do everything for facilitating negotiation in the Ukraine and facilitating negotiation in Gaza.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: For that, of course, you need good faith, you need good will, political will, which unfortunately is missing in Washington and is missing in uh Israel.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I find that disregarding not one but three orders of the International Court of Justice in uh the case South Africa against Israel, that is pretty shocking.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And disregarding them in total impunity is even more shocking.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: What can you do against it?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: I have written to various politicians and ambassadors and said, you know, I cannot do that in the General Assembly, but you can.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can propose to do what the General Assembly did in 1974, take away the vote from uh Israel, disregard their uh credentials, adopt a resolution, as in the case of apartheid, that South Africa cannot speak in the General Assembly.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: That would be such a diplomatic blow against Israel, and then if that's followed up by states terminating their commercial relations uh with Israel.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying two or three states, I'm talking about 50 or 100 states that say we are witnessing genocide, we will not tolerate this, and we will not do business with you.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, there are practical things that should follow up after the International Court of Justice has made several rulings and then they are disregarded by Israel.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Something can be done about it.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: With the complicity of the United States, with the complicity of the United States.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: We presented on the 25th of May, two weeks ago, in The Hague, a legal brief, 29 pages, against Ursula von der Leyen for the crime of complicity, complicity in providing military, economic, political, financial, propagandistic support uh to Israel, and making it, shall we say, palatable, making it plausible that genocide uh can continue.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh this is the first case of complicity being uh submitted to the ICC.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: A case of complicity under Article 3e of the Genocide Convention was presented by Nicaragua against Germany, and the International Court of Justice coped out, did not issue the order of interim measures of protection that had been requested.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the uh court was wrong in not doing it.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: The court had an obligation to issue an order to tell Germany, out of the question, you cannot cooperate militarily with Israel, number one, and number two, the weapons that you delivered to Israel before, make sure that those weapons are not used for genocide or you are yourself complicit in this genocide.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: The court didn't say that the case is still pending, huh?
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the decision on complicity pursuant to Article 3e of the um genocide convention will still be decided upon, but you needed immediate help, and this immediate help uh was not provided.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, just to bring us, especially for people listening in, one thing I would like them to understand in all of this context is that there's a tremendous amount of machinery of law, the International Court of Justice, the UN Charter, the treaties, and so forth that give a framework for action.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: There is the UN Security Council and its resolutions.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: But what we are seeing in many cases is not that these institutions don't exist or that countries are abusing gaps in the law, but rather the failure to enforce mechanisms that have been put in place, that are in place, that judgments are made, that ceasefires are demanded, or other kinds of actions demanded to be in compliance with the 1948 Genocide Convention so that Israel stops the mass killings.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: But these then are not enforced by the great powers.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: And to come back to your charter, your magna carta for the world, you've explained peace above all, duty to negotiate the uh non-interference doctrine that major countries or countries are not to interfere in the internal affairs of uh other countries, that they are to abide by the spirit of the law that they have set themselves.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you have explained that we are living in a period of impunity, perhaps led, I agree with you, by the country that perhaps did most 75 years ago to get things started, the United States.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: But now, because of its idea of exceptionalism or its unwillingness to be constrained by international law, runs roughshod over all of this.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: Now we are heading to an important summit at the UN in September.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: We hope it's important.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it will be a summit of the future, a very unusual meeting, called first by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and then supported by the UN General Assembly, and now in the midst of negotiation.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea is that roughly three-quarters of a century since the start of international law under the UN Charter, and roughly three-quarters of a century remaining in the 21st century, where are we going with this multilateralism?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get it back on track?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: How do we stop the drift towards complete disaster or collapse of international institutions because of the impunity of one or a few big powers?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, since you are our guide, what is the answer, Alfred?
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get back on track?
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: And uh of your charter and your extremely important and cogent recommendations throughout, how would you like to see us proceed to bring all of the major powers back under the authority of international law and to make the UN itself more effective for the balance of this century, the three quarters of the 21st century ahead of us?
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we need more people like you, Jeff, and we need more people like John Merzheimer and more people like Richard Falk.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you were running the uh politics uh of the State Department, we would not be.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: In this mess today.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh my concern is, as you said it, the credibility of the institutions, the credibility of uh international law.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: We cannot afford to slip down into the so-called law of the jungle.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: We must have rules that everybody accepts, and the only rules that everybody accepted at one point or another was the United Nations Charter.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that remains our world constitution, but a world constitution without enforcement mechanisms.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we have to work, developing enforcement mechanisms and also expanding and strengthening the international courts and tribunals.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: I very much believe in the importance of having an Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a European Court of Human Rights, an African Court of Human and People's Rights.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: It is crucial to channel everything into law.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, we have the legislation, and uh countries must come to understand that uh for local, regional, and international peace, you have to play by the rules.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_00: We, however, in the West have a culture of cheating.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote in counterpunch, one of my essays was on the culture of cheating.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what we did in Minsk.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: We wouldn't have the war in Ukraine if Angela Merkel from Germany and Francois Hollande from France had entered into this Minsk agreements in good faith, intending to ensure its uh implementation.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: Just an interjection.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, after the coup d'etat in Ukraine in 2014, in which unfortunately the US and Europe participated, perhaps led, and a war broke out in Ukraine already 10 years ago, agreements were reached to end the war, Minsk I and Minsk II.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: And in particular, the Minsk II agreement was uh backed by the UN Security Council, and the guarantors were to be France and Germany.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: And Alfred is referring to the fact that not only were they not guarantors, they treated the agreement that they were to guarantee with a kind of cynicism and contempt we learned afterwards.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: Even Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview after the fact that, oh yes, that was just a holding pattern for Ukraine to gain its military strength.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of enforcing a law, it was a kind of prevarication.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: So this is what you're referring to.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not the only time that uh we have cheated.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: Put yourself in uh the position of Putin, or for that matter, any Russian president, had it been Medievit, had it been anybody else in the Kremlin, if you enter into a treaty like that, and then you participate during eight long years in all sorts of dialogues, the so-called Normandy format and uh the OSCD and the EU format.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many conferences in which Putin participated trying to have implementation of the Minsk agreements.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in the end, Putin felt that he'd been taken for a ride.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think in international affairs, it is very, very counterproductive to take a major adversary for a ride because he's not going to forgive you.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's actually going to act against your interests.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a huge mistake, as George F.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: Kennan wrote on the 5th of February, 1997, in his uh famous article in the uh New York Times.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fatal error.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fatal miscalculation to have NATO expand eastwards, contrary to the assurances given by George H.W.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Bush and James Baker to Gorbachev at the time.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, another part of the culture of cheating.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: To do what you can get away with or think you can get away with.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: The mass of the American people are unaware of that.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when you or Merzheimer or Richard Falk or myself say something like that, then uh we are Putin's puppets.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: We are disseminating Russian propaganda.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: For heaven's sake, read it.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: And read also the treaties that Lavrov, the uh Russian foreign minister, put on the table in December of 2021, two months before the outbreak of the war.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: These two treaties between Russia and NATO and Russia and the United States could have avoided all of it.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: Are so eminently well grounded on international law, on uh the United Nations Charter, on principles of general security for all countries.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the fact that they were dismissed even with contempt by uh Jen Stoltenberg, I mean, he bears a huge responsibility for this war.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we were uh running towards the end of our hours, sad to say, because we could uh talk about all of these themes uh for many hours indeed.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: You have emphasized a duty to negotiate, which we are not fulfilling.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: You've emphasized the need for enforcement mechanisms, which uh are plainly still lacking.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you've emphasized and underscored the need for courts and juridical processes to be present uh and to be venues for enforcement of international law.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: You've emphasized uh overcoming the culture of cheating.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's one more recommendation I just want very briefly to discuss, and that's your call early on a decade ago for a UN parliamentary assembly.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you would just say a word about that, I would be grateful.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the parliamentary assembly is a very good idea.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's been around for more than 40 years, been endorsed by uh Secretary General Boutros Boutros Gali by many, many very intelligent people.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the idea to have a far more representative assembly, which would not have, at least not at the beginning, would not have legislative powers.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: It would be an advisory body that could advise the General Assembly, be parallel to the uh General Assembly.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: I know all the uh leaders of this movement, I mean also the world federalists, are very much behind uh this idea of a World Parliamentary Assembly, or some people call it United Nations Parliamentary Assembly.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: But what this idea encompasses is a democratic commitment to listen to people.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because I find myself in the United States totally disenfranchised.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, whether I vote democratic or republican, I am gonna get exactly the same thing.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna get a warmonger, I'm gonna get someone for the military-industrial complex, someone for Wall Street and not for Main Street, someone uh who just wants to make the rich richer and forget the mass of the population.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: I see myself maybe voting for Cornell West or voting for uh Jill Stein.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: I have quite a bit of sympathy for Jill Stein, and I have a lot of sympathy for Robert F.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy Jr., except that he doesn't share my analysis of the problem in Gaza.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, Gaza didn't start on the 7th of October 2023.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: Gaza started with the NACBA, with the ethnic cleansing in 1974.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the assembly would be the place uh to hear these voices worldwide.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think they would have a much greater hearing, and then we need the media, we need true journalists like Julian Assange, we need journalists who are not going to be the uh attack dog of the Pentagon or the attack dog of the State Department, who are going to be the watchdog of our rights.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: As you have said, the human right to truth.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: My uh second book countering uh mainstream narratives.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: I dedicated it to Julian Assange and to Edward Snowden.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the third book in the trilogy, which came out last year, The Human Rights Industry, I dedicated it to 30 other whistleblowers because I consider whistleblowers to be eminent, really eminent human rights defenders.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: One more word that I wanted to have, because uh, you know, I'm a practicing Catholic, and um I had several masses read for the soul of Aaron Bushnell.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, few things have uh shocked me, moved me, saddened me as much as seeing a 25-year old man, young man, US airman self-immolate himself in front of the uh Israeli embassy.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: And his words saying, I know that the pain will be excruciating, but what the Palestinians are suffering is so much worse that this might actually open some people's eyes to the suffering of the Palestinians.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the Israelis have suffered a great deal, but what we need is an immediate ceasefire, an immediate ceasefire, an end of this just slaughter, and then sit down and try to reach a modus vivendi.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: I had the privilege of knowing Jimmy Carter, and I love this book of Jimmy Carter.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: We can have peace in the holy land, and I also love this other book of his, Palestine Peace, not apartheid.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, peace is possible.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: Alfred, I want to say not only is peace possible, you're opening our eyes on the ways to achieve it.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: We have run out of our precious uh time together.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think all listeners can know that we touched on the first book of a trilogy, the first book, Building a Just World Order.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's a remarkable book.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's the uh collection of wisdom of Alfred Desias in his role as the UN independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: We've heard it described as the Magna Carta for our time of how the international order can function.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: We are on our way shortly in September 22, 23 to the summit of the future.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: You have given us crucial ideas for how we can upgrade a system we depend on for our survival, the UN-based system and the UN Charter, the Constitution of our time.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: We're absolutely grateful to you, Alfred DeSaias, for all of your ongoing, magnificent contributions and for spending the hour with us together on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks to everybody for listening in, and again, thank you to Alfred Desias.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks to you, Jeff.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.