Impunity and Models of Global Order: A Bahá’i Perspective

Remarks made by Daniel Wheatley, Senior Diplomatic Officer at the UK Bahá'i Office of Public Affairs, at the Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the United Nations UDHR. Organised by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Freedom of Religion or Belief in December 2023.

The Bahá’i Faith is a religion with a vision and set of principles for institutions charged with the responsibility of upholding international order; Bahá’is believe this system would be sufficient to guarantee peace and protection of human rights. These ideas, enshrined in the sacred texts of the Bahá’i Faith from the mid-19th century, address the exigencies of this age, including conflict and the persecution of communities.

Let me first define the term impunity: exemption from punishment or freedom from the injurious consequences of an action. The charity Medecins Sans Frontieres notes how impunity relates to international law as follows:

“In international law, impunity most often results from the absence of judicial mechanisms that are capable of judging a failure to comply with established rules.”

The Bahá'i Faith envisages global peace as inevitable, viewing peace as a two-stage process. There is a vision of a ‘Most Great Peace’, characterised not just by the end of war, but the drivers of conflict will have lost their power to catalyse hatred and violence. That seems remote from the world we live in now.

But the Bahá’i Faith also envisages a 'Lesser Peace’ which the Bahá’i scholar Rod Rastan defined as “a minimalist first step towards world order…a federal world governance system, built upon and sustained by a universal spiritual foundation.” This state of affairs would also include the absence of international armed conflict and the deterrence or punishment of mass violations of human rights by institutions expressing the collective will of humanity. I believe that this evolution in global affairs is attainable in the decades ahead. I do not say it will happen, but I believe that it can.

In 2011, Professor Steven Pinker published a bold thesis in his work “The Better Angels of Our Nature” wherein he claimed that violence had declined massively as a feature of human affairs. There was much trenchant criticism of his work.

Pinker published data, dry facts rather than emotive human stories, that substantiated his case. Using a measurement of the number of battle-deaths per 100,000 of the human population, he showed that whereas 25 lives per 100,000 were lost in 1945, 16 per 100,000 in the 1970s, this declined to 7 per 100,000 by the early 21st century.

The view of peace as ‘inevitable’ is a harder view to convince people of than it was in 2011. Sadly, figures released in June this year by the Peace Research Institute of Oslo shows conflict-related deaths are at the highest of the past 28 years, including battle casualties but also deaths of civilians, which may arguably include actions constituting the problem of impunity.

It was clear in 2011 that these trends were not permanent and could be reversed, and catastrophically so.

Whether we agree or disagree with the thesis of what the historian John Lewis Gaddis defines as “the Long Peace”, those scholars who measure peace and conflict (including Pinker and Gaddis) identify several components of what they argue contributes to lower levels of war, and lower levels of genocide and crimes against humanity. Two of these relate directly to visions of the Bahá’i Faith of a practical pathway to a more peaceful world and to end impunity for mass violations of rights.

Firstly, The Humanitarian Revolution: ideas that proposed the abolition of slavery and votes for women, the erosion of the moral acceptance of torture, the growing consensus that banned or decreased practices such as duelling, child cruelty from corporal punishment and cruelty to animals.

Secondly, The Rights Revolution: the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the proliferation of international covenants and mechanisms of human rights we have seen in recent history.

We may rightly regard them as insufficient to the violence and suffering of our world, but as the Red Cross and Red Crescent has some access to relieve human suffering in Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, Ethiopia and other conflicts, we may contrast this with a far greater level of impunity and suffering that was to be found on every battlefield in the world before Henry Dunant’s 1862 “Memory of Solferino” and the creation of the Geneva Conventions. My mother was born in a prisoner of war camp after my grandparents were interned by the regime of Adolf Hitler. Red Cross food and medicine kept her alive. I would not be here today without the advances in humanity the Red Cross brought.

If we read the pages of Memoir of Solferino, an account of a single battle of the wars of Italian unification, published in 1862 by Dunant, we read of soldiers bleeding to death in agony on the battlefield, prisoners being bayonetted, criminal gangs looting the bodies of the dead. Dunant’s work was the foundation for the International Committees of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, and even in the most terrible conflicts in our world today, that agency seeks to protect civilians, and the Geneva Conventions seek to provide some humanitarian principles in times of war.

Global Governance

For Bahá’is, the path towards ending impunity for mass crimes against humanity, for ending conflict, are part of a process that proceeds in synergy with another: that of the collective maturation of the human race. Humanity stands at the threshold of collective maturity. The period immediately before adulthood is adolescence, characterised by episodes of turbulence, poor decision-making and conflict. Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the Founder of the Bahá’i Faith, writes that humanity “must now become imbued with new virtues and powers, new moral standards, new capacities…”. New ethical standards and new capacities must necessarily flow into the laws and institutions of the world we wish to build.

The hard reality is that not long after the launch of the UDHR and the Genocide Convention 75 years ago, proposals for better mechanisms for peace and human rights were frozen in the ether of the Cold War.

The period of comparative springtime in international relations after 1989 cooled severely in 2014 and since 2022, it is winter again. But just as summer ends, so does winter. We must look to a new spring time in human affairs.

The Bahá’i Writings offer a vision for both more effective global institutions, but also the processes and values that can lead humanity to a world where impunity for genocide and war crimes can finally be curtailed.  

One of the Prosecutors at Nuremberg was a young American lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz. He maintained the belief in a permanent court for mass crimes and in 1998 as a veteran professor of law, he lived to see the creation of the International Criminal Court. So there is a court in the Hague, and many will rightly ask why actions of mass violence and persecution are not investigated by the Prosecutor in the Hague.

It was in this hopeful period in the 1990s that the Bahá’i International Community published “Turning Point for All Nations”, including a series of recommendations for better institutions of global governance. Since the creation of the ICC, progress has stalled. Yet, the correct response to inertia is effort. In 2018 three Bahá’i thinkers and activists, Augusto Claros-Lopes, Arthur and Dahl and Maja Groff were the recipients of the New Shape Prize for their proposal on “Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century.” Bahá’is continue to think, reflect, consult and act in support of better global governance.

UDHR and Genocide Convention at 75

The Bahá’i Writings affirm that “Justice is the Best Beloved” in the sight of God and that “the well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.”

Our social media feed and news digests, filled with daily proof of human suffering and continuing violence, may impel us to believe the world is as bad, or even worse than it has ever been. However, after investing the time to review the scholarship and the data, there is a strong case to argue that humanity had made meaningful progress in reducing the levels of violence and human rights abuse over a century, but that this hopeful trend may now be regressing towards revanchist claims and renewed war and suffering.

Yes, we need international treaties, we need courts, we need economic and strategic resources to enable the maintenance of peace and justice in our world, but more than all, we need to recognise our common humanity in each other and redouble our efforts to the hard incremental collective task of building an international system that will replace the law of force with the force of law.