Democracy and International Criminal Justice in the Fragile World of the Rule of Law - Howard Morrison

[Breathing] Please join me in welcoming Sahawad Morrison. [Applause] Thank you. [Applause] Well, first of all, thank you all for coming. Secondly, thank you for the organizers, for grazing, for the treasureer and the under-trasurer. And one quick correction, I'm no longer the president of the Court of Appeal of the International Criminal Court. That will stop three years ago. And while I thought that means I stopped working, that's just an illusion, as any of you who try to retire will find. Now, it may be a few decades later than predicted. But 1984, I think, is knocking quite loudly at our door. We are seeing the word dystopian in the media, rather more worryingly frequent than in the past. And I recall reading that a Russian general remark to Euro-2 back, "Do not attribute your freedoms to your successes, but rather to our failures." A slightly chilling remark, but I think pretty accurate. Now, we all understand that democratic ideals are founded on the rule of law, the separation of the executive and judiciary and free and independent courts, both domestic and international. And authoritarians thrive by uniting people against scapegoats, vulnerable communities become targets. The purpose is to consolidate power and wealth under the guise of protecting the state. This is something that we've seen happen throughout history. For most of us, the obvious advantage of democracy are, one, he gives a platform to resolve different views and conflicts peacefully. To its a vehicle for respect for human dignity, parallel that with human rights. It allows or should allow freedom to act speak and think independently, as long as it doesn't stop others from doing the same. To provide a safe, secure community, one of the first duties of a democratic government is to protect the citizens. To ensure equality before the law and last the rule of law, and to help prevent or at least discourage autocracy. Even a cursory study of history shows us that democratic states are the least likely to wage war on each other or on other states. But the practical disadvantage of a democratic system is the relatively short term parliaments and presidences. It doesn't make long term consistent planning easy. Perhaps the model needs review. But at least democracies do not need to imprison or murder their political opponents. Now the usual causes of democratic backslide include economic inequality, culture wars or hostilities, irreconcilable religious differences, hard right and hard left reactions to societal changes or established values, populist and narcissistic policies, and allowing interference from great political powers usually, but by no means exclusively from autocratic governments. The greatest fear of dictators is generally not from democratic states, although they will make noises about them. But from their own oppressed citizens over which they exercise a very high degree of control and propaganda, more often than not control predicated on a well-founded fear of reprisals. Now Vainley springs to mind as does Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl was the young German student who was distributing anti-Nazi leaflets for which she was guillotine. It's just so shocking it doesn't really bear her thinking about. Dictators of paranoid and insecure by and large rely upon fake news, internal propaganda, keeping the population to have a very limited access to information such as the internet, I mean try tuning in to South Korean television if you're a North Korean citizen, see what happens. Although it is a concept that some major democracies actually are purported, the operator have difficulty understanding. The rule of international law is no different from the rule of domestic law. And if you honor the rule of law in domestic situations, you're more likely to honor it in international and the converse is true. There are very few states that honor the rule of law domestically and then go on to observe it in an international setting. And history has repeatedly taught us that if you have a system that doesn't allow for the unsullied rule of law domestically, the prospects of such a state working well with other states domestically, so internationally in terms of democratic states or even other autocratic states is very limited. They don't do it. And we know that the cause for real concern as to how hard some people find it to learn the lessons of history. We see things happen time and time again that we think should not have happened. And it happens yet again. And I always reminded of that on the anniversary of D-Day, when so many young men storm those beaches into the face of machine gun fire and died. And then all the struggles that went on afterwards. And if any of them must look at the world now, if they could be resurrected, I think they would be deeply disappointed at what they found. Elections are legally regulated. We will understand if they're not fair, then they're not democratic. Political parties of all shades can only derive true power and legitimacy in pursuit of the policies through the application of the rule of law. And we all recognize rigged elections when we see them. And again, history has taught us that they're far from uncommon in certain states. When the dear leader gets 97% of the popular vote, you know it's a fraud. But what did Stalin say? It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes. Now if that was the only problem, we could probably continue to accommodate it as we have done with rogue states for decades, if not centuries. It's the pragmatism of the application of real politic, often another name for appeasement. But when I see a new story these days, particularly in the recent past, I ask myself how this is playing out in Beijing or Moscow. Their long term objective is undoubtedly the destruction of the Western liberal order. And they're going about it in a fairly consistent and now more obvious way. So the contagion is, I think, spreading. And we have to be very aware that some nations we relied upon to be like-minded in the application of the rule of law and respect for customary international law and treated base rules can no longer be relied upon, certainly in part and perhaps at all. And if we look at what Putin does, it's divide and rule, he's so's division, asymmetric warfare, whether it's cyber attacks, cutting cables, localised arson. This is warfare, it's just not the sort of classic warfare that we normally expect to see. It's an undeclared war. And seeing some states for what they are in contradistinction to what we want them to be is increasingly a necessary ingredient in both diplomacy and the practice and application of international law. A personal experience. Shortly after I was appointed as the independent adviser to the Ukrainian prosecutor general, the really fancy title, isn't it? I like that one. By and large, we haven't been to Ukraine, we get the chance to go. Go. It's an amazing country. Very resilient people. But I was at a meeting in London shortly after the February 2022 invasion. People around the table, there was above my pay grade that those people, the names would be very well known to you. And for the most part, I sat and listened. And then one person whose name would be very well known to you said to me, "Howard, you've not said anything much, is anything you want to say?" And I looked around the room and I said, "You're all too young." There was a silence. And then the well-known person said rather, "Archely, what do you mean?" I thought to myself, "Well, I've done it now. Best I can hope for is to be sent off for some more diversity training." What I did say was this, if you don't have a personal or institutional memory of the Cold War. You do not understand the Kremlin, and therefore you do not understand Putin. Just thinking that Russia is, or was, an ambitious faux-democracy since 1991, with the McDonald's in a stock exchange, is a half-truth. Kremlin hasn't changed since 1945, perhaps earlier, in spite of the radical political changes that the Soviet Union had and was forced upon it. And PUTM was, and is, a KGB empire, built a through and through. As he famously said, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. And if that doesn't say it all, it says most of it. There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. Problems more uncomfortable for me than anyone else. Then, bless a young but senior representative of a significant intelligence community said, how are you quite right? I don't think we have anyone on the Ukraine desk older than 40. Well, nothing wrong with that in itself. It doesn't mean you have to be 60 plus. A qualifying age I've reached and passed some time ago. But it does help to have that memory when you are trying to explain to younger people where it could all end. People don't remember the Cold War. They don't remember now the division of Germany into Eastern West Germany. They don't remember how difficult it was for the people in the Eastern European States to express any form of independent opinion. It collapsed rather suddenly. But PUTM has been trying to rebuild it. And with a measure of success. I am personally convinced that a strong unified reaction to career to Crimea in 2014 would have demonstrated the strength that was necessary for Western democracy to show. And that the invasion of February 2022 would probably have been negated. And we would not have seen the horrors that we've seen. And I'll still say that followed on from that, in which it was absorbed be considerably. Illusions or perhaps delusions led to the most shameless inactivity and respect of a crime, because it was a crime in 2014. And Western politicians didn't by and large even begin to see the real and apparent dangers that the invasion illustrated. The Ukrainians did, of course, but had precious little support at a time with the International Rule of Law. And thereby democratic principles has suffered a body blow. But what of international community humanitarian law and its rule over the art, between despotism? You know trouble is coming when despoits of any flavor start talking about the motherland or the fatherland. You know, they're going to be relying upon that to get away with anything they can. Well, in terms of the fragility of the rule of law and the primacy of peace over conflict, just look at what we've endured in the last 120 years. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Congo, Central Africa, Republic. And those may be just the conflicts that writ large in the public memory. People seem not to even know about the atrocities that are going on, as I speak, into our fore and Myanmar. We have overt dictatorships by the other name-- North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Russia, with many other places qualifying or almost qualifying for that title. And so you might think it's a miracle that the democratic model and democratic ideals still prevails in so many states where it does. Don't get me started on Iraq. I've been going there over the last 20 years. And in the last three years in particular, have been heavily engaged in training counterterrorism judges, prosecutors, investigators, and even defense counsel. Just leaving aside the legality of the invasion, and I do, there was no coherent strategy for what was going to happen after Saddam Hussein was removed. The Iraqi army and police were disbanded, which meant that everybody and their grandmother took their clashnikovs home. And the bath party was prescribed. By prescribing the bath party, it meant that the new administration had no experienced administrators, because they weren't allowed to work. Now, you had to be a member of the bath party in Saddam's Iraq, in the same way you had to be a member of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Didn't mean to say that you were an out and out bathist or an out and out communist. It was a matter of reality. But Iraq has suffered. And the last time I was in Iraq, and to my surprise, a very senior Iraqi judge, who I've known for 20 years, said to me, how would we were better off under Saddam? I said, why? And he said, 24 hours of electricity, 24 hours of water. No street crime in Baghdad. He wouldn't tolerate radical Islam. And he kept Iran in check. Look at us now. And it was very hard to answer that with anything but a quiet agreement that indeed things were not good. They're lovely people. Baghdad is a fascinating city. I first went there in 2005 with Doug Wilson, who sits there. When Doug was the legal advisor of the British Embassy in Baghdad, where I was living at the time. And I went there to teach and mentor the judges of the Saddam Hussein trial. Now I've got to tell you my Saddam Hussein story, because I don't get many chances. End of a court day, Saddam was the last of the defendants to be taken downstairs. He was sitting there being guarded by a US Marshal. As I was walking past him, a young Iraqi boy would came with a tray of tea for the judges. I'd just left a meeting of them. Saddam looked at the tea. He looked at me. He looked back at the tea again. And it was quite obvious. So I said to the US Marshal, can he have a glass of tea? The guy said, where's it from? And I said, well, it's perfectly good tea. It's for the judges. OK. So I took a glass of tea and I'll give it to Saddam. Drank the tea and he-- US CIA. I said, no, I'm not CIA. I'm not even an American. Now he said, I know CIA. US CIA. Right. He then ran out of fluent English. Although his English, I think, was better than he let on. And I got my translator in Termitor as a lovely girl, Tania, who was fluent in Kurdish, Iraqi, Arabic, and English. And she came over and translated. But it didn't last for long because Saddam had to be taken down stairs. And I turned to say thank you to Tania. And she was catatonic. She was just standing there. And I said, well, it's wrong. She was only tiny. She buried her head in my stomach. First it to tears was inconsolable. I led her over to a satir in the corner and sat it down. And I said, Tania was wrong. And she looked at me and said, I've been speaking to the devil. She was from Helugia, where the gas attacks to replace. I thought to myself, what an idiot. I should have thought about that. And I apologized to her profusely. And she said, no. She said, now I have something really good to tell my grandchildren. Sive relief. I have to say I managed to get her into a master's degree course in the States. So she's gone to better things. Well, mankind has resorted to war ever since home of sapiens became societal. And we fought wars for all sorts of reasons. Some good, some bad, some indifferent, some pure greed, some just pure nastiness. But we all know. And there are going to be a wars for reasons that we perhaps wouldn't have predicted. There's going to be water wars. There'll be environmental wars. These things are, I'm afraid, coming. But recognizing that, how have we in relatively modern times attempted to establish the rule of law, the international rule of law, that is, and correlated accountability for breach of the rule of law, particularly the respect of those operating at a high level in the military or politics? Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with all of the international course and tribunals have been set up since 1945, but the list is quite comprehensive. and I'll go through them quickly. But the common theme that runs through all courts and tribunals domestically and internationally is individual criminal responsibility, i.e. making people accountable for the damage which they have done. There's no defense of superior orders. There are no immunities in the international courts and a very limited defense of GRS. Now, individual criminal responsibility has to deal with legal concepts of personal and functional immunities. And there isn't time for me to deal with that or anything like it. But it's my experience that tribunals in courts dealing with international crimes are only effective and can only be effective if we set aside all immunities. Oddly, that's not a view universally accepted by presidents, prime ministers, and generals, but there we are. What are we tried to do? Well, we started off at Duramburg in Tokyo in recent times, subject to criticisms, victors justice, lack of a really solid appellate system, the death penalty. But what it led to was this concept of accountability, personal accountability for what you have done, either directly or by conspiracy, complicity, aiding in a betting or any other means. And the trials were fairer than a lot of people anticipated there were acquittals. Not everyone was convicted was given the death penalty. Some were given relatively short periods in prison. But it established the principle that you can't get away with committing, affect the sort of offenses that the Nazis committed, particularly the Holocaust. Apart from the main and well publicized trials, people perhaps don't realize just how many trials there were in Germany at the end of the Second World War by the International Military Courts and Commissions. There were a great many of them, and they were reading about, if you're a lawyer. And some of them ensuing judgments from 80 years ago, you can still find in the footnotes in judgments from the Yugoslav tribunal, the Roranda tribunal, when even the International Criminal Court. So there was some very good law. But after Nuremberg in Tokyo, there was a complete lull in the practice of international law. There were conventions were passed, the genocide convention, the convention against torture, the very important Geneva conventions, and a lot of academic work was done. But it wasn't put into practice, and it wasn't put into practice until the early 1990s, when the Yugoslav tribunal and the Roranda tribunal was set up. Now, I defended in both of those tribunals, the Yugoslav tribunal in the Hague and the Roranda tribunal in Russia in Tanzania. I have a dubious distinction. Well, I have many dubious distinctions. But what of them is this? I'm the only lawyer who's both defended and tried a genocide case. I suppose that means I want to know something about it, and I think I do. I've now spent some 25 years staring literally, or at least metaphorically, into mass graves. I suppose I should be in the rubber room at the funny farm, but I've managed to keep out of it so far. Watch this space. But then we went on. We've had the courts for East Timor, the special court for Sierra Leone, the extraordinary chambers for Cambodia better late than never. The special tribunal for Lebanon and more recently the Kosovo special court and the court for the Central African Republic. But what we mustn't forget that it's incumbent upon domestic courts, especially those who are members of the Assembly of State Party, I.E., have ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, that those crimes have to be incorporated into the domestic law, their domestic law, and therefore they can and ought to be trying them. The other thing which is important, because it seems to be breached fairly regularly, is article 27 of the Vienna Convention on Treaties. What does that say? It sets out that absent relevant reservations, the signatory state cannot invoke domestic law in order to circumvent treaty obligations. So if you sign a treaty, stick to it. Do what you've promised to do. There's also been the very useful concept of universal jurisdiction, which in recent years has been actively pursued in Germany, Spain, Belgium, and Sweden, and is open to all any determined mature legal system could use it. I have a very good friend, Natalie von Wistinghausen, who was a German lawyer, who's done some very serious universal jurisdiction cases in Germany, resulting from the horrors that were visited upon the ZED people. And these are seriously good trials. I have to say, I've read the transcripts in translation. I hasten to read. But all of those are dealt with individual criminal responsibility and invoke the protections contained in Fair trial rights. Need to be very cautious about how they approach their personal duties. There's a lot of lip service paid to international law and international obligations, which isn't followed through in practice. Now, I mentioned the international court of justice. That's not a criminal court, of course. Amazing how any journalist who ring me up and say, oh, is Russia going to be tried at the ICJ? I said, no. Do you mean our Russians are going to be tried at the international criminal court? Oh, yeah, yeah. What's the difference? Yeah. Sad. Sad, but true. We have the international tribunal of the law of the sea, the International Law Commission, United Nations Treaties and Resolutions. But I note the very significant limit placed upon the United Nations Security Council is engendered by the power of veto of any one of the five permanent members. That's worth noting at this stage, although the five permanent members, only two are members of the International Criminal Court, the UK and France, Russia, China, and the United States are not. This is a question I ask of students frequently, and it's interesting to get the results. I'm going to ask you to view and I want to hands up how many of you would say that the right of veto by just one country in the United Nations Security Council is passed itself by date. Yeah. I certainly think so. I think a much better system would be that if in any one given situation, the members for the time being of the Security Council should vote, and there would only be a veto if there was a majority in favor of the veto. Otherwise, the situation, the amendment, whatever it is, would be passed. I mean, it is frankly, I think, ridiculous that you can have some really important ideas which would go to benefit, oppress people, and that one country with a partisan interest, or how's a friend with a partisan interest, can stop it happening. But we then come on to the overarching and possibly most controversial creation in international law in the last two decades. And that's the international criminal court. Been in effect since 2002, and it's a treaty court. It's not a court that was set up by the United Nations as was the Yugoslav and Roranda tribunals. And the important point there is because it's not a UN court. It doesn't have United Nations Treaty chapter 7 powers. Now, what that means, chapter 7 powers, is that the court can require any country that's a member of the General Assembly of the United Nations to do what it asks, or more bluntly, to do what it tells them to do. And when I was a judge in the Radavan carriage case in the Yugoslav tribunal, we frequently ask countries under the chapter 7 powers to cooperate with the court. And they all did every time. Even Russia cooperated with the court, and it wasn't a friend of the Yugoslav tribunal. But that was a very important power. And it enabled those courts to get information and evidence in it otherwise not able to get. Now, the ICC doesn't have chapter 7 powers. It relies entirely upon mature state cooperation from member states, which it does not always get. And there are two outstanding examples that President Bashir who was on under an arrest warrant went off to South Africa. It was a member state of the ICC and he was not arrested. Puted went off to Mongolia, which curiously is a member state of the ICC and he wasn't arrested. We weren't actually expecting him to be, but he wasn't. But it just indicates the difficulty the ICC has. There's no police force. It can't rely upon UN troops or NATO troops to support it. It might get support from the local police or militia or military in the country where the situation is, but you can't guarantee it. And so the ICC struggles every time. It's an expensive business, an international criminal court. Now the building, if you've been there, I'll see the pictures of it. The ICC has a big building, but it's a small court. It only has three courtrooms. Think about a major London Crown Court Center that maybe have 20 courtrooms. The ICC has but three. It has but 18 judges. Five of them like me were on the appeals chamber, which leaves 13 judges to deal with all the pre-trial and trial cases. And you require a panel of three judges in each of those. So the obvious capacity limitations are there. It also has a funding problem and will always have one, I think. Every year there is a meeting of the Assembly of State Parties in every year, almost without exception. They ask for a zero-growth budget. Well, what do you get if you have a zero-growth budget? Zero-growth. And so you can't expect the court to do more than it does. And the Office of the Prosecutor takes up 40% of the budget, but it has to. The burden of proving the cases upon them and the investigations are upon them. And it's very expensive and difficult and sometimes extremely dangerous for the prosecuting investigators to go off to countries and try their best. I remember when I was at the ICC, the German judge came to me and we were talking about finances and he said, "Oh, how do you realize that the budget of the ICC "is the same as the annual budget of the Berlin Fabricate?" I thought, right, okay. Now, the Berlin Fabricate is an august body of men and women who do really important work, but it's not the international criminal court. And one fifth generation fighter aircraft costs about $150 million. Well, that's the annual budget of the ICC. So you get what you pay for, or my mother used to say, and I think more accurately, you get what you don't pay for. I don't know what the future of the ICC is going to be. It's the well-publicized difficulties at the moment. Students sometimes say to me, "Well, there's really politics in international law." There's really alcohol in whiskey. And I say, of course there is, virtually every situation that gets to the court has a political background to it, of some degree, of some nature. But the important thing is that the politics should stop at the court door and that the trials and situations should only be examined on the basis as in any other court, in any other country, on the evidence and the applicable law. And if the judges can't stop the politics getting in the court room, then they should seek all turns of employment. I've got another pet irritatingly. I've got another pet issue about the selection of judges for the ICC. Now that may sound a bit mean-minded, bearing mind. I was selected by the ICC, largely as a result of the efforts of Doug Wilson there who smooched his way around the diplomatic circuit with immense success. But the judges of the ICC are chosen by the assembly of state parties at grueling elections in New York. I think I had 123 interviews in space for a couple of weeks in English and very English in French. And half the people there said, "Oh, we'll vote for you." And most of them are lying to you. And there was a great deal of horse trading behind the scenes. We know it goes on. You vote for our judge for the International Commission of this or that and we'll vote for your candidate for the ICC. It goes on. But the thing that really worries me the most and I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, is that you don't have to have been a judge to be a judge at the ICC. Now before I became an ICC judge, I've been a lawyer for a long time. I've been a judge in and out of part time and full time for 20 years. And I've had 10 years of call-faced international criminal in your monetary and law. But I was sitting with some people who had come either they've been prosecutors or they've been diplomats with a law degree. And sometimes they were just people who were lucky or the people that perhaps the country wanted to give some form of bonus to. I don't know. I won't name names, but the short answer is that unless you have the most senior international criminal court in the world, staffed by judges who are experienced criminal law judges and preferably international criminal law judges, you're going to have a struggle and you're going to have a struggle getting unanimity in judgments and virtually every case there are dissenting opinions, sometimes several dissenting opinions. And it's difficult and it's unproductive. But we don't have a better system yet. So let's try and improve what we've got. The ASP is not going to let go of selecting judges, that's for sure. It was never contemplated, I suspect, when the ICC was set up. That would, there would be situations in respect of individuals in commanding roles within major powers. Because the assumption would be that such individuals would respect international criminal and humanitarian law and therefore be unlikely to put themselves at risk of being accused of genocide other crimes against humanity or war crimes. Even less would it have been contemplated that such individuals might have been from the United Nations Security Council. Well, so much of adherence to the UN Charter. I'm not being critical, I'm being factual. That's the way it is and it's not the way it should be. So what are the future? Bearing in mind all the things that are going on and being going on in the last few days in particular. But I hope there's going to be more universal jurisdiction. I hope more states will step up to the mark and say that behaviour is unacceptable and we're going to try somebody for it. Even though he's not a citizen of this country and even though the offences were committed in another country, it's sustained on the reputation of humanity and we're going to deal with it. More people to support international courts and tribunals. And I would make every politician, as soon as they were elected for any political office in any country, sit there and read the international covenant on civil and political rights. Then I test them on it afterwards. It's a wonderful document and if you've not read it, do so. It's replicated in the statutes of virtually every one of the courts I've talked about. But if we continue down the path of tolerating blatant breaches of international criminal and humanitarian law and the debasement of the rule of law in general and judicial independence, the darkness that will follow will be due to our silence and with that our complicity. Governments have a duty, citizens have a duty. And the old adage is that all that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing is transparently true. Democracy is not self-sustaining. It survives only when we choose it over and over again. But we can and must resist falling into the mindset that all is lost. Rather we need to understand that all is to be fought for. And the vast majority of Ukrainians will understand that. We beat a vicious dictatorship in 1945. And if it has to be done, we can do it again. After 1990, in 1991, within three decades, Russia had reconstituted itself as a great power, with the ability to do something that the Soviets had never managed. That is to understand and exploit the principle social divisions of its rivals, particularly the USA and the UK and beyond, with significant political and strategic effect, and we can see it to this day. Whether it's interfering with elections or referendums or using London, for instance, as one of the laundromats for washing ill-gotten gains, and it was happening on a large scale, this was all of great moment to the Russians who realized that they were growing in power and influence in a way that they never had done in the Soviet era. I don't know if any of you have read the book "Putin's People", really worth reading, so all a bit chilling. All countries change, all empires change and most of them come to an end. In working systematically through the potential courses of the worst outcome imaginable, we can get smarter about the power altering choices we need to make. Those will make politics more responsible to social change and receptive, and one's country more worthy of its time on the historical stage. Those power altering choices, for instance, a significant increase in defence spending, will never be easy, but we need to be more skilled in the art of self-inquiry. The antidote to hopelessness is not hope, it's planning. As the elderly lady said to her doctor, "Getting old is hard work and not much fun to which he replied, 'It's a great deal better than the alternative.' His over 60 will understand what I'm saying." It's true. Group from Texas, pick hands up please if you're from Texas. The lone star state, "Whoa, yeah, I've never actually got to Texas, but I worked very hard at the ICTY with a very good Texas lawyer too, in fact, very good." I hope this is not controversial, but I have a note to President Trump. In Mar-Gratten, which is the town in the Netherlands, there's a cemetery with 8,301 graves of American soldiers from World War II. The land was gifted to the USA by the Dutch at the end of the Second World War so that they could say that those troops were buried in American soil. Each of those graves has been adopted by a local family. They visit the graves and they care for them. I've been there. They are immaculate. There is currently a 300 family waiting list amongst the Dutch population to adopt the grave of a fall of American soldier. Please tell President Trump that we're not his enemies in Europe. We're here, they're colleagues. The last thing I want to do, I'm trying to keep hard to time and I haven't done very well, it's two things. First of all, those of you who read the newspapers, there are better things to do, but I'm sure some of you do it. Well, remember that very recently the Attorney General, Lord Hamer, was giving a speech to the Royal United Services Institute, some of which the things he said he was criticised for. I'm not dealing with those. But those who read his lecture will instead find an explicit attempt to depolarise the debate. He criticises as romantic idealists, who treat international law as the reign of Universal moral principle and who have haught all concession to nation-state interests. That has to be right. He also denounced the pseudo-realists who argue amid the current unraveling of the post-1945 order that nation-state interests can now take precedence over law. They can't, they shouldn't, it's wrong. But I've got to finish on something else. How many have you read the House of Pooh Corner by A.A. Mell? Show of hands? Remember it? Okay. I'm going to ask you to draw a mind picture. The mind picture is this. Imagine Christopher Robin and we do the poo sitting back to back on a grassy knoll on the outskirts of the Hundred Acre wood. Christopher Robin is leaning against poo because it is the support because he's putting his Wellington boots on. Pooh, promise me you won't forget about me, not even when I'm a hundred. Pooh thought for a little. How old will I be then? Ninety-nine. Pooh nodded. I promise, he said. Still with his eyes on the world, Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh's poor. Pooh said Christopher Robin earnestly. If I, if I'm not quite, he stopped and tried again. Pooh, whatever happens, he will understand, won't you? Understand what? Oh, nothing. He laughed and jumped to his feet. Come on. Where said Pooh? Anywhere, said Christopher Robin. Thank you. [Applause]