Fostering greater transparency and accountability of government and multinational corporate leaders is fundamental to protecting the rule of law, former Irish president Mary Robinson said yesterday, a day after attending a ceremony to receive the Tang Prize in Rule of Law.
“We now face a moment in which the legitimacy of the rules-based international order that has been so carefully built up over more than 75 years could be on the verge of a complete unraveling,” Robinson said in her Tang Prize lecture in Taipei.
The Tang Prize Selection Committee on June 21 named Robinson as the winner of the prize this year for demonstrating “an effective combination of legal acumen and practical solutions” in her “powerful advocacy” for climate justice, human rights, gender equality and poverty alleviation.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Governments and corporate actors should be held accountable under laws that are clear, publicized, stable and applied evenly, she said in her talk, in which she highlighted the “severe erosion” of the rule of law and human rights around the world in the past few years.
More than 6 billion people live in countries where the rule of law has weakened over the previous year, she said, citing the 2023 Rule of Law Index published by the World Justice Project, an international nonprofit headquartered in Washington.
The index also showed that in less than a decade, key human rights indicators, including civic participation, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, have declined at an alarming rate, she said.
Robinson said that the US government’s actions following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks were the onset of the “disturbing global trend.”
She was referring to Washington’s withdrawal in 2002 from the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq without the authorization of the UN Security Council.
“In the years since, the lack of any real accountability for those decisions has severely undermined faith in the international rule-based order,” Robinson said.
Russia’s “unwarranted” and “brutal” invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and “the disproportionate response by the Israeli government in Gaza to the unspeakable Hamas terrorist attack” in October last year indicated that the situation was “even more precarious,” she said.
Robinson also said that the response of Western governments to recent regional conflicts exposed a “double standard,” saying they had been “even more damaging” to the world order, which required “the fair and consistent implementation of international law.”
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